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VZLA is the abbreviation Venezuelans use

Maybe a better source, linked in the article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/12/15/oliver-sacks-p...

The smart kids might be happy to work on model interpretability research at Anthropic. But 90% of AI companies are ChatGPT wrappers which don't sound particularly fun.

Hikaru is also notable for quickly accusing players baselessly

How does one find a good psychiatrist/psychologist? My experiences have ranged from "very bad" to "OK at best" and I think finding someone a bit more invested into figuring things out might help a lot.

Are you an ICPC World Finals medalist? Because winning an IOI bronze medal is _way_ easier than even qualifying for the ICPC WF, and less than 10% of the teams at the WF get medals.

I'd go as far as saying that gold at the IOI is probably easier than getting an ICPC medal. (One is individual and the other is in teams, but my point stands).

The ICPC has plenty of elite competitive programmers. It's an activity that "peaks" in importance around college, and not many keep training a lot after participating.

Every year there are multiple "Legendary Grandmasters" in the competition. That's >3000 Elo in Codeforces. I'd estimate it takes a similar level of skill/effort as becoming a Chess Grandmaster.

And even those that aren't at that level are very competent at it. The average ICPC participant is likely "smarter" than the average MIT/Harvard CS student for some reasonable measure of "smarter".

My personal experience: I don't think anyone is naturally smarter than anyone else. Math skill is mostly determined by how much practice/study you put into it.

The cases where a person seems more naturally apt than another can be explained by past math experience or by how well they've figured out how to learn/think properly (which is also very much done by practice).

The "Diamond Sponsors" of the event are Huawei and OpenAI. I found the welcome note from OpenAI [1] quite curious:

"[...] Eventually, AI will be able to solve even the hardest contest problems that we’ve seen yet. It will work alongside us and help drive the discovery of new knowledge. What you take from this week - the sense of being stuck, the thrill of progress, and the practice of building together - will remain critical as you shape your community and the future you build. [...]"

By Chief Scientist of OpenAI, Jakub Pachocki. Who happens to be an incredibly accomplished Competitive Programmer (2nd in ICPC World Finals, Winner of Code Jam, 2nd in Hacker Cup).

[1] https://icpc.global/community/history/brochures/world-finals...

This reminds me of the Optiver internship selection process.

> I know they will before that

I'm curious in what demographic/location context you're in to say that. As a teen I wasn't aware of anyone in my social circles experimenting with drugs and would estimate usage to be <10% and from very particular kinds of people.

It's not clear what your point is exactly. It's still possible that Asians, despite being overrepresented, receive some sort of penalty in admissions.

I feel I have a slightly "time-warped" memory. I often can't tell whether something was two months or over a year ago, for instance.

I believe this to be caused by depression, as I've seen many similar reports online. Life assumes a sort of "flow" state, as you don't care enough to pay attention to things. It affects my memory in general as well.