I try to get 20k steps/day (10 miles). The jump from 10k to 20k steps/day was a big improvement: better sleep and clearer thinking. Most of those steps are from walking. It helped sprinkling in some hard efforts (running/basketball) that push breathing from ~18 to ~40 breaths/min. Feels ancestral: lots of walking, punctuated by occasional all-out bursts.
Credit where it’s due: doing live demos is hard. Yesterday didn’t feel staged—it looked like the classic “last-minute tweak, unexpected break.” Most builders have been there. I certainly have (I once spent 6 hours at a hackathon and broke the Flask server keying in a last minute change on the steps of the stage before going on).
Here is the prompt I just gave to GPT-5 Pro - its chugging on it. Not sure if it will succeed. Let's see what happens. I did think about converting the PDF to markdown, but figured this prompt is more fair.
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You are a gold level math olympiad competitor participating in the ICPC 2025 Baku competition. You will be given a competitive programming problem to solve completely.
Here is the problem you need to solve and only solve this problem:
<problem>
Problem B located on Page 3 of the PDF that starts with this text - but has other text so ensure you go to the PDF and look at all of page 3
To help her elementary school students understand the concept of prime factorization, Aisha has invented a game for them to play on the blackboard. The rules of the game are as follows.
The game is played by two players who alternate their moves. Initially, the integers from 1 to n are
written on the blackboard. To start, the first player may choose any even number and circle it. On every subsequent move, the current player must choose a number that is either the circled number multiplied by some prime, or the circled number divided by some prime. That player then erases the circled number and circles the newly chosen number. When a player is unable to make a move, that player loses the game.
To help Aisha’s students, write a program that, given the integer n, decides whether it is better to move first or second, and if it is better to move first, figures out a winning first move.</problem>
Your task is to provide a complete solution that includes:
1. A thorough analysis and solution approach
2. Working code implementation
3. Unit test cases with random inputs
4. Performance optimization to run within 1 second
Use your scratchpad to think through the problem systematically before providing your final solution.
<scratchpad>
Think through the following steps:
1. Problem Understanding:
- What exactly is the problem asking for?
- What are the input constraints and output requirements?
- Are there any edge cases to consider?
2. Solution Strategy:
- What algorithm or mathematical approach should be used?
- What is the time complexity of your approach?
- What is the space complexity?
- Will this approach work within the given constraints?
3. Implementation Planning:
- What data structures will you need?
- How will you handle input/output?
- What are the key functions or components?
4. Testing Strategy:
- What types of test cases should you create?
- How will you generate random inputs within the problem constraints?
- What edge cases need specific testing?
5. Optimization Considerations:
- Are there any bottlenecks in your initial approach?
- Can you reduce time or space complexity?
- Are there language-specific optimizations to apply?
</scratchpad>
Now provide your complete solution with the following components:
<analysis>
Provide a detailed analysis of the problem, including:
- Problem interpretation and requirements
- Chosen algorithm/approach and why
- Time and space complexity analysis
- Key insights or mathematical observations
</analysis>
<solution>
Provide your complete, working code solution. Make sure it:
- Handles all input/output correctly
- Implements your chosen algorithm efficiently
- Includes proper error handling if needed
- Is well-commented for clarity
</solution>
<unit_tests>
Create comprehensive unit test cases that:
- Test normal cases with random inputs within constraints
- Test edge cases (minimum/maximum values, boundary conditions)
- Include at least 5-10 different test scenarios
- Show expected outputs for each test case
</unit_tests>
<optimization>
Explain any optimizations you made or could make:
- Performance improvements implemented
- Memory usage optimizations
- Language-specific optimizations
- Verification that solution runs within 1 second for maximum constraints
</optimization>
Take all the time you need to solve this problem thoroughly and correctly.
Here is the published 2025 ICPC World Finals problemset. The "Time limit: X seconds" printed on each ICPC World Finals problem is the maximum runtime your program is allowed. If any judged run of your program takes longer than that, the submission fails, even if other runs finish in time.
The impact of environment on mental spirals is underrated. I see it clearly in two pickup basketball groups I play with: one where people know your name, greet you warmly, and when you make a mistake they tell you how to improve in a way that makes you think "I can do better" not "I suck." The other is critical, lots of punching down and tense.
The key insight: when you're surrounded by people who genuinely create an atmosphere of belonging and want you to succeed, you know their feedback comes from good intentions. This creates a virtuous cycle. You want to take their advice, and once you improve you naturally want to give the same back to others.
SpaCy was my go to library for NER before GPT 3+. It was 10x better than regex (though you could also include regex within your pipelines.
Its annotation tooling was so far ahead. It is still crazy to me that so much of the value in the data annotation space went to Scale AI vs tools like SpaCy that enabled annotation at scale in the enterprise.
The bigger challenge here is that we already struggle with basic metadata integrity. Sites routinely manipulate creation dates for SEO - I regularly see 5-year-old content timestamped as "published yesterday" to game Google's freshness signals.
While this doesn't invalidate the proposal, it does suggest we'd see similar abuse patterns emerge, once this header becomes a ranking factor.