Codex49's blog

How people manage other things in life alongside cp?
By Codex49, history, 5 months ago, In English

I have been doing cp for almost 2 years. I am supposed to get a job for obvious reasons. But applying for jobs does not seem like very productive use of time. Even a lot of jobs does not look like productive use of time to me. But regardless I need to get a job anyway.

I am not asking for a job if anyone's wondering.

I just want to know how to control this endless grinding loop and focus on other things in life?

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5 months ago, # |
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I have been doing cp for almost 2 years.

Bro you've done only 8 contests. Don't say you've endlessly grinded.

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    5 months ago, # ^ |
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    Ah, Second Account sorry. It's too embarrassing to ask from original account. While 2 years may not be as long as others but still I have been consistently doing it for past 2 years. I have rarely skipped for a day or two.

    For reference I have given around 130 contests

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      5 months ago, # ^ |
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      become physically better, get faster in solving problems, what else can you do?

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        5 months ago, # ^ |
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        I don't get it how that's supposed to help?

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          5 months ago, # ^ |
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          literally, if you can solve a problem faster, you spend less time on it ._.????

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5 months ago, # |
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what's your rating?

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5 months ago, # |
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I just want to know how to control this endless grinding loop and focus on other things in life

In my experience, perhaps the easiest way to do this is to find something that looks more interesting. If you're doing a college degree, chances are that you regularly get exposed to topics that can be much more interesting than competitive programming if you go into them in detail, just like you might have done for competitive programming. Take any CS course, for example, and pick up any hard problem in that domain — you'll find that things are as interesting as (if not more interesting than) competitive programming. There's a saying in operations research and CS — almost all problems worth solving are NP hard.

This is not a very sustainable way to do things, though, even for the people who are privileged(?) enough to be able to dedicate their life to solving problems they want to solve. You will almost definitely face situations in life (for example, like right now where jobs don't seem interesting to you) where you have to do what needs to be done. The better way is to recognize/curb your dopamine addiction and be more disciplined about things you do. For example, getting into a schedule that allocates enough time to both useful and recreational activities generally helps. And it's better if you keep learning and diversifying your interests even after you graduate since that will help make life less monotonous.

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    5 months ago, # ^ |
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    • Find something more interesting than cp.
    • Reorganize my dopamine addiction.

    I think those are nice advice. Reorganizing my dopamine addiction I think I should do this. Though what is more interesting than cp? I have done development and it's not boring but it gets boring after some time. Either some projects are too hard for my level or too easy. It's hard to find right one.

    Thanks for your time I found those advice helpful.

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      5 months ago, # ^ |
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      I've observed that when people talk of development very broadly being boring, it generally (not always) means they haven't gone into CS in a lot of detail. For example, here's some of what I found very interesting in uni after going into them in enough detail and doing research/projects in them (in chronological order), and some of these are things that people would call "development" but is vastly different from stuff that most people encounter in real life SWE:

      • Formal logic and programming languages (functional/generic/logic programming)
      • Systems programming and compilers (optimization, low level languages like assembly/C/C++/Rust, compiler security)
      • Algorithms (graphs/graph-like structures, online algorithms [especially its intersection with optimal stopping], approximation algorithms, algorithms for mathematical optimization)
      • Automata and theory of computation
      • Theoretical ML (graph learning, learning theory, DL, RL) and advanced applied ML (developing architectures/algorithms for domain-specific problems, solving stochastic PDEs using ML and so on).

      I still follow most of these fields and it keeps things interesting for me, as well as helps me with ideas (having a broad overview of a lot of things in general makes you more receptive to great/crazy ideas). Maybe starting out with what you think sounds interesting from this list (or any other CS sub-field you want to pursue) would be good for you too.

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        5 months ago, # ^ |
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        Hmm, I think I'll go with ML. Sounds easy to shift interest in ml from cp.

        Thanks. Though just thinking that I am going to have less time for cp makes me feel like I'm betraying cp or being lazy.

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5 months ago, # |
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Well, I quit CP in order to begin my university life ¯_(ツ)_/¯

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    5 months ago, # ^ |
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    Wow and I started CP in university :)

    Did you lose skills coz you quit? You found something more interesting?

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      5 months ago, # ^ |
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      Studying is much more interesting for me than CP.

      I think I have definitely lost some skill, but it's hard to tell since I haven't written a single contest in the last 8-9 months)

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        5 months ago, # ^ |
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        Your comment made me realize that I never considered studying interesting. Well if somebody would have asked me I definitely would have not said interesting.

        I used to do only cp and development during my university days, well I still do.

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