Following this logic, you're precisely the age you should be to write a list like this :P

https://webcammictest.com/mic/

The album chart queries are also incredible. The site has a very detailed system of genres and descriptors so you can find exactly what you want.

Note that apps built from the SDK don't have access to the full history, only up to some cutoff. I tried a couple over the years and wrongly concluded Spotify deleted your history after some time.

The data download does contain everything, which was a very pleasant surprise. I didn't think I'd ever see the data from the couple years gap in my last.fm.

If you use Spotify, you can download your full listening history here: https://www.spotify.com/us/account/privacy/. You get it in a pretty convenient JSON format and with a little bit of code it's pretty easy to create some visualizations.

There are also websites for visualizing this data. I'm quite fond of this one: https://explorify.link/. It allows you to do some custom queries.

I came across it when reading Butterick's Practical Typography and it's possibly the lowest effort/clearest improvement guideline in the book.

Now I can't unsee websites that do it wrong.

The Regional Finals and World Finals are in a single venue with a very controlled environment. Just like the IOI and other major competitions.

National High School Olympiads have been dealing with bigger issues because there are too many participants in the first few phases, and usually the schools themselves host the exams. There has been rampant cheating. In my country I believe the organization has resorted to manually reviewing all submissions, but I can only see this getting increasingly less effective.

This year the Canadian Computing Competition didn't officially release the final results, which for me is the best solution:

> Normally, official results from the CCC would be released shortly after the contest. For this year’s contest, however, we will not be releasing official results. The reason for this is the significant number of students who violated the CCC Rules. In particular, it is clear that many students submitted code that they did not write themselves, relying instead on forbidden external help. As such, the reliability of “ranking” students would neither be equitable, fair, or accurate.

Available here: [PDF] https://cemc.uwaterloo.ca/sites/default/files/documents/2025...

Online competitions are just hopeless. AtCoder and Codeforces have rules against AI but no way to enforce them. A minimally competent cheater is impossible to detect. Meta Hacker Cup has a long history and is backed by a large company, but had its leaderboard crowded by cheaters this year.

There are a couple parts at the start and the end where a lady points her phone camera at stuff and asks an AI about what it sees. Must have been mind-blowing stuff when this section was recorded (2023), but now it's just the bare minimum people expect of their phones.

Crazy times we're living in.

In the IEEEXTREME university programming competition there are ~10k participating teams.

Our university has a quite strong Competitive Programming program and the best teams usually rank in the top 100. Last year a team ranked 30 and it's wasn't even our strongest team (which didn't participate)

This year none of our teams was able to get in the top 1000. I would estimate close to 99% of the teams in the Top 1000 were using LLMs.

Last year they didn't seem to help much, but this year they rendered the competition pointless.

I've read blogs/seen videos of people who got in the AOC global leaderboard last year without using LLMs, but I think this year it wouldn't be possible at all.

I don't know enough about the project to know if it makes any sense, but the Zig contributor seemed confused (at least about the title).

Hilarious how the offender on "exhibit A" [1] is the same one from the other post that made the frontpage a couple of days ago [2].

[1] https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/25974

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46039274

With nvim 0.12 (nightly) I've switched to vim.pack (built in plugin manager) and the only plugins I had to install are mini.nvim and lspconfig.

I really dislike the feeling that you need to be a bit careful with a tool. I want the peace of mind of being able to drop pens nib-first into the ground. They're also not great for writing on many types of paper and require some care and maintenance.

My experience getting into double-edge razors/nice shaving soaps was much better. They're not just small luxuries, but actually better-performant and more practical than the popular alternatives in almost every way.

(On the pen front, today I'm very satisfied with my "Kaweco LILIPUT Ball Pen Stainless Steel" - it's super compact, has a nice weight to it and just feels well-constructed and solid. I hope to use it for many years to come. (If you want to get one, beware the Aluminium version, which looks identical but is noticeably lighter))

About the performance of AI on competitions, I agree what's difficult for it is different from what's difficult for us.

Problems that are just applying a couple of obscure techniques may be easier for them. But some problems I've solved required a special kind of visualization/intuition which I can see being hard for AI. But I'd also say that of many Math Olympiad problems and they seem to be doing fine there.

I've almost accepted it's a matter of time before they become better than most/all of the best competitors.

For context, I'm a CF Grandmaster but haven't played much with newer models so maybe I'm underestimating their weaknesses.

Instead of the more traditional Leetcode-like problems, it's things like optimizing scheduling/clustering according to some loss function. Think simulated annealing or pruned searches.