chess has had engines 100x better than magnus carlsen for years and it's not dead. people who have fun giving these competitions will continue having fun, while people who don't will keep crying that they're useless or dead or whatever.
In chess it's very clear where to draw the line: no help allowed, you're on your own with your brain.
Where should one draw the line in Coding competitions?
No ChatGPT? I guess most people would agree.
No Copilot? Same as ChatGPT as the products seem to converge.
No Googling? That too will converge to something close to ChatGPT.
If you can't look up information during a contest anymore, it comes down to memorization instead of problem solving. I am afraid the concept of coding concepts is dead indeed.
There have, of course, already been coding competitions that didn't allow any sort of reference, ones that only allowed reference you brought with you, etc.
And, honestly, plenty of people do have enough memorized to do this stuff.
In-person competitions simply don't allow any Internet access, you have to use their own machines and you can't bring any data or printed material or electronic device.
yeah, it's being very slow for me too! I don't have monitoring on it as such, but there was an outage just today (https://status.openai.com/) so it's probably still unstable or something.
I tried again just now and it's much faster. This is extremely cool! I wonder if it would be practical to have GPT generate simple maps of environments and build a 2d component over it for something like this.
No, not really. Every option was either about my character extolling their love for him, or leading me down a path of attempting to confront him (because my character is apparently spiteful) and losing because, well, apparently Kalidasa is now a demi-God who's magical powers of poetry will defeat everyone he faces...
Which is what this was. So not seeing the "fun" aspect.
All roads in this seem to lead to some sort of victory to Kalidasa.
Perhaps this would have been better if you'd detailed just how you put this together.
GSoC basically changed my entire career. I'm glad that Google keeps this running, especially given that they got rid of other cool competitions like Codejam. Hopefully, they can continue finding the budget for these extremely valuable contributions to open-source.
I was a student in a no-name college with no real chance of landing an internship at the big tech companies, given my cv had neither the prestige of a good college name nor many impressive projects.
GSoC basically allowed me to jump into an open-source project (no credentials needed), prove that I'm skilled enough to contribute and gain meaningful experience solving real world problems. This then snowballed into larger career opportunities later down the line.
i'm not employed by google, nor have i ever been. GSoC is google paying people to work on open-source stuff, with little direct relation to their profits.
The way that I think about this is that anyone who's good at skill X has put in the hours. Putting in the hours is not a sufficient condition for "getting good" or "being successful", but it is a necessary one. Each and every successful person has been obsessively devoted to their craft
[0].
So, yeah, just write. If you want to write good stuff, there's a non-zero probability that you'll get there. But if you don't write, the probability drops to zero.
As a person who loves playing chess but will never be as good as an IM (let alone GMs or Magnus or engines), I've had to internalize this. It's a good feeling.
It's funny to hear this because if I were looking for a job one of the selling points for me would be if they used teams.
I'm on it all day, I present and run video meetings on it. I use it on different devices. It's not perfect by any means, but I'm confident that it will do what I need it to do.
My only guess is you're on a linux desktop and you don't use an enterprise deployment of teams and perhaps you're using the web version of the client. In that case, yes I feel for you.
I'm on an M1 macbook. Teams is extremely bad. I don't know how to describe it tersely other than everything kinda sucks. I work remotely and take a lot of meeting, so it's like my office in a way... an office that's cramped, leaky, ugly, uncomfortable, and cold.
I use Teams on a relatively modern Intel MacBook Pro. My chief complaint is that it murders my battery -- I barely get two hours when I'm on Teams video calls. But there are other issues.
For example, sometimes the window just disappears when it's in the background. When that happens I don't get any notifications, so unless I notice that Teams has bugged out I'll miss when someone tries to contact me. And recently, video has become weirdly bugged -- I see people twitch around like I'm watching a bad horror movie, and sometimes they flash red. No idea what that's about but I can't seem to fix it. It's not going to kill me but it's uncomfortable to watch.
More minor, but search is a mess, and notifications aren't great.
Oh, it also plays poorly with virtual desktops (or whatever the feature is called on MacOS). If I switch from the desktop with the Teams window to another desktop, then cmd-tab back to Teams, it will switch the active application to Teams but won't switch back to the desktop with the actual Teams window. This is infuriating.
It seems to have something to do with the fact that, when on a call, Teams is active in every desktop (with a stupid little video window). But it persists even when you're not on a call.
I use enterprise Teams on a Windows 10 laptop and it is the worst overall chat/conferencing experience for me in over 25 years of technical work.
About the only thing I can say in its favour is that I've rarely had trouble with video or audio quality.
It is an unbelievable performance hog. It launches something like 8-10 processes, one of which defaults to running at above normal priority. Despite this, frequently text chat messages will lag ~30 seconds between notification and appearing in the actual chat window. Even clicking on UI elements like buttons will often have a lag of 5-10 seconds. If I'm on a video call, it uses more CPU than any other process, including my browsers (~50 tabs open across ~10 windows) and a Kali Linux VM running in VMware Workstation.
The UX is awful. For example, there is no way to permanently reorder the list of channels you're in (not even sorted alphabetically). It's always the order you joined them every time you start up Teams. My list of channels is something like 50 long, so I basically just have to search for the one I want, because the alternative is to scroll through the list and read every line.
There are bizarre bugs. Sometimes I'll join a video call, but it will be a "ghost call" where I can hear the participants, but there's no window for me to interact with, so all I can do is close Teams entirely and start over. Sometimes I won't be able to unmute myself, so everyone will wonder why I'm not responding. Today I saw a new one where random members of the call had their video feeds replaced with empty black space (no profile photo/letter).
It's unbelievable to me that I could use IRC, MSN Messenger, and any number of other chat apps on a PC 20+ years ago and get a snappy response time, and yet Teams still feels like it's mired in a swamp running on hardware that's something like 100x faster and with 20-50x the amount of RAM.
Something like 15 years ago, I was troubleshooting a SharePoint issue and discovered that even though it was using a SQL Server database to store everything, instead of taking advantage of the power of a good database design and platform, all of the kind of object affected by the problem were stored as enormous XML blobs inside a single column, with SharePoint doing a SELECT * and then acting as its own terrible inner faux-database layer. I have to imagine that Teams is a similar "don't ask how the sausage is made" kind of situation, where MS basically shipped an early prototype instead of productionizing it.
I used it for two years next to WebEx and it is the worst of all. Not only UX is the worst (cannot have a normal channel, everything is a thread, you cannot change alignment of messages) also the rate of people complaining their Teams does not work was staggering.
If you think people good at things (like writing) get good at those things without producing an insane amount of low quality content, you need to update your model of the world.
The problem is not output quality per se; I understand that people don't get good at writing without writing. If somebody writes an article which doesn't sound good, or isn't perfect, that's life. I've written plenty of such articles.
But every time I put an article on my blog, at least I try doing some research and check that what I write is at least reasonably correct and can make sort of sense to the reader.
But, we should put more emphasis on "proper" writing. Not quantity above quality.
