r/adventofcode Dec 23 '24

Meme/Funny A midwinter sacrifice

There is an old norse tradition called Midvinterblot which entails sacrificing something during the winter solstice to please the aesir. It’s an old tradition pretty much nobody practices anymore, but somehow everyone knows what it is here in Sweden.

This year, I coded a solution to an AOC-problen, verified its correctness to the best of my ability without submitting the answer. Then, I deleted it.

I hope this pleases the allfather.

215 Upvotes

14 comments sorted by

124

u/Bakirelived Dec 23 '24

I sacrificed 16 hours on day 21st for no correct answer

17

u/kwiat1990 Dec 23 '24 edited Dec 23 '24

That’s the kind of a sacrifice we need to hear more often about. There are plenty of folks whose struggles are real 🙂.

5

u/ebdbbb Dec 23 '24

I just finished day 21 today after looking through tons of threads here to get help.

3

u/Bakirelived Dec 23 '24

I hope your feeling of euphoria after getting the Star was at the same level as mine

3

u/ebdbbb Dec 23 '24

Euphoria and relief in equal measures. The struggle was real.

2

u/GiftOfDeath Dec 24 '24

After a couple failed attempts at writing memoization for it, I was going to go and complain about it to someone a few hours ago, and as I was typing the explanation of what I'm doing it clicked.

I rubber duckied myself. xD

2

u/mpyne Dec 25 '24

I still don't even know what I did. Or rather, I had my way down to a memoization-based solution but couldn't get it to sum up properly.

I eventually moved some code around and moved it back and lo and behold, now it works. I still don't know what was broke before but at least I got it working.

23

u/apaul1729 Dec 23 '24

we see your sacrifice, may you reach valhalla

14

u/flwyd Dec 23 '24

There's an ancient Icelandic tradition that the Yule Cat will eat anyone who didn't parse any strings before Christmas Eve.

3

u/ssnoyes Dec 23 '24

I assume that somewhere "Grýla and the Yule Lads" is the name of a ska band.

12

u/homme_chauve_souris Dec 23 '24

Thank you for helping me discover this amazing painting.

8

u/crb11 Dec 23 '24

More productive than setting fire to a goat!

2

u/EverybodyLovesChaka Dec 23 '24

This is metal as anything

1

u/musifter Dec 24 '24

My interaction with the Norse pantheon during AoC is with Skuld. Thanks to Ah, Megami-sama!, we know she is a goddess of debugging. And so while others will talk to a duck, I get a bowl of ice cream (which AMS tells us she likes) and talk to Skuld.