Algorithms Memes

The evolution of developer laziness has reached its final form. In 2020, some poor soul manually hardcoded every single number check like they were writing the Ten Commandments of Boolean Logic. "If it's 0, false. If it's 1, true. If it's 2, false..." Someone really sat there and typed out the entire pattern instead of just using the modulo operator like num % 2 === 0 . Fast forward to 2025, and we've collectively given up on thinking altogether. Why bother understanding basic math operations when you can just ask an AI to solve it for you? Just yeet the problem at OpenAI and pray it doesn't hallucinate a response that breaks production. The best part? The AI probably returns the hardcoded version from 2020 anyway. We went from reinventing the wheel to not even knowing what a wheel is anymore. Progress! 🚀

Someone discovered the perfect naming convention and honestly, it's both genius and absolutely cursed. Binary digit → bit. Makes sense. Ternary digit → tit. Wait, hold on— The logic is flawless. Base-2 (binary) starts with 'b', add 'it', you get 'bit'. Base-3 (ternary) starts with 't', add 'it', you get... well, a term that's gonna make every code review extremely uncomfortable. Imagine explaining to your manager why your ternary computing documentation keeps getting flagged by HR. Fun fact: The actual term is "trit" (trinary digit), but where's the fun in being technically correct when you can watch Gru's face perfectly capture the exact moment this realization hits? Ternary computing is real though—it uses three states (0, 1, 2) instead of binary's two, and some Soviet computers actually used it. They probably had very interesting technical documentation.

When you've been optimizing cache hit ratios all day and suddenly your entire life becomes a systems architecture problem. The justification is technically sound though: L1 cache for frequently accessed items (today's outfit), sized large enough to prevent cache misses (digging through the closet), with O(1) random access time. The chair is essentially acting as a hot data store while the closet is cold storage. The real genius here is recognizing that minimizing latency when getting dressed is mission-critical. Why traverse the entire closet tree structure when you can maintain a small, fast-access buffer of your most frequently used items? It's the same reason CPUs keep L1 cache at 32-64KB instead of just using RAM for everything. The only thing missing is implementing a proper LRU eviction policy—but let's be honest, that pile probably uses the "never evict, just keep growing" strategy until Mom forces a cache flush.

Binary search requires a sorted array to work. A linked list? Sure, you can traverse to the middle element, but you just burned O(n) time getting there. Then you do it again. And again. Congratulations, you've just reinvented linear search with extra steps and way more complexity. The junior dev technically knows what binary search is, which is more than some can say. But applying it to a linked list is like bringing a Ferrari to a swamp—impressive knowledge, terrible execution. At least they're learning the hard way that data structures matter just as much as algorithms. Give it a few more code reviews and they'll get there.

Day 5 of Advent of Code and you've already abandoned all principles of clean code. That incomprehensible mess of symbols? That's what happens when you stop writing code for humans and start writing it for the leaderboard gods. The "Enchantment Table" reference is perfect—it literally looks like Minecraft's unreadable alien script. You started Day 1 with proper variable names and comments. By Day 5, you're using c+c+n@ as a variable and somehow it works. This is the programming equivalent of a descent into madness, documented in real-time. Your future self will hate you, but at least you saved 3 seconds of typing. Fun fact: This style of ultra-compact, symbol-heavy code is actually a badge of honor in code golf circles, where the goal is to solve problems in the fewest characters possible. But in production code? Straight to jail.

So you spent three weeks learning trigonometry, diving into DDA algorithms, and debugging why your walls look like a Salvador Dalí painting, only to realize John Carmack did this in 1992 on hardware that had less computing power than your smart toaster. And he did it while probably eating pizza and writing assembly like it was a casual Tuesday. The "box of triangles" bit hits different when you realize modern game engines abstract all this pain away with their fancy rendering pipelines, but back then? Carmack was literally casting rays and doing trigonometric calculations per pixel to fake 3D in Wolfenstein 3D. No GPU acceleration, no Unity, no "just import Three.js"—just raw math and the will to make demons shootable. Meanwhile, you're here in 2024 with Stack Overflow, ChatGPT, and 64GB of RAM, still struggling to get your raycaster to not crash when you look at a corner. Humbling stuff.

Ah yes, the eternal truth of software engineering. While normal people debate philosophy, programmers look at the same glass and immediately think "why are we using a 500ml container when we only need 250ml? This is wasting memory." You've allocated a buffer that's double the size you actually need, and now you're paying for it in both RAM and existential dread. Could've used a smaller glass, could've used a dynamic array that grows as needed, but no—someone on Stack Overflow said "just make it bigger to be safe" and here we are. The real kicker? That glass will never get resized. It'll sit there in production for 5 years, half-full, mocking every performance review where you promise to "optimize resource usage."

Google's AI Overview just confidently explained that matrix multiplication "is not a problem in P" (polynomial time), which is... hilariously wrong. Matrix multiplication is literally IN the P complexity class because it can be solved in polynomial time. The AI confused "not being in P" with "not being solvable in optimal polynomial time for all cases" or something equally nonsensical. This is like saying "driving to work is not a problem you can solve by driving" – technically uses the right words, but the logic is completely backwards. The AI hallucinated its way through computational complexity theory and served it up with the confidence of a junior dev who just discovered Big O notation yesterday. And this, folks, is why you don't trust AI to teach you computer science fundamentals. It'll gaslight you into thinking basic polynomial-time operations are unsolvable mysteries while sounding incredibly authoritative about it.

Kid: "My daddy can fix this hedgehog!" Other kid: "Is your daddy a vet?" Kid: "No, he fixes BUGS! He has books about animals and hedgehogs!" The books in dad's room: *literally every programming textbook ever written about algorithms, machine learning, and data structures* Somewhere, a programmer dad is having an existential crisis because his child thinks he's qualified to perform veterinary surgery based on his debugging skills. Sorry sweetie, Daddy's "bugs" don't have legs, fur, or a pulse. Though honestly, after dealing with legacy code for 10 years, fixing an actual hedgehog might be easier than untangling THAT mess.

Someone taped a visual guide to urinal etiquette in a CS building bathroom and labeled it "Pigeon Hole Principle." Four urinals, three guys wearing brown shirts, one brave soul in blue who clearly drew the short straw. The Pigeonhole Principle states that if you have n items and m containers where n > m , at least one container must hold more than one item. Applied here: four urinals, but urinal etiquette demands you leave gaps, so really you've only got two usable spots. Guy in blue? He's the overflow. The mathematical proof that bathroom awkwardness is inevitable. Whoever printed this out and stuck it on the wall understands both discrete mathematics and the unspoken social contract of public restrooms. Respect.

Oh honey, someone just discovered the DARK MAGIC of file compression and decided to traumatize us all with this visual metaphor! The top panel shows your innocent ingredients—lemon, butter, cheese—living their best uncompressed life, taking up all the space they want like divas. Then BAM! Bottom panel hits you with the WinRAR treatment where suddenly everything's been VIOLENTLY SQUEEZED into a tiny archive that's somehow still all three things but also... not? The butter didn't even make it, sacrificed to the compression gods for that sweet, sweet file size reduction. It's giving "I need to email this 500MB folder but my attachment limit is 25MB" energy. The lemon stayed though—compression algorithms really said "citrus rights!" 🍋

Someone asked for help printing numbers 1-25 in a clockwise expanding spiral pattern. The "solution" is just five hardcoded print statements with the numbers manually typed out in rows. No loops, no algorithms, no spiral logic—just raw, unfiltered copy-paste energy. The sender confidently declares "It's working" like they just solved P=NP. Technically correct? Sure. The numbers are there. They're in some kind of pattern. Mission accomplished, right? This is the programming equivalent of being asked to build a car and showing up with a skateboard taped to a lawnmower. The person who asked for help said "thanks" which means they either didn't actually look at the code, or they've completely given up on life. Both are valid responses in this industry.