So, I joined today's round with pretty high expectations, because I enjoy trying to speedsolve div3's and 4's However, the problems today were truly awful and rife with issues.

Let's start with Problem A. It's probably the easiest problem ever seen on this site. As soon as the contest began, submissions poured in by the thousands, clogging up the queue. It was chaos. I ended up submitting C and D before even finding out if my B submission was correct.

Speaking of Problem B, it was a nightmare of unclear instructions, leading to a flood of Wrong Answer submissions from thousands of people. "For a better understanding, please check the notes section." Seriously? That’s just pathetic, and so lazy...

Surprisingly, Problem C was decent, but Problem D? An absolute disaster! The weak pretests allowed a flood of grey Python/C# users to fail miserably when my braindead brute-force hack of:

1
?????????????????????????????...
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabc...

caused a whole page of submissions to topple like dominoes. And don’t get me started on the terminology — it's "contiguous subsequence," not "continuous." Google could have corrected you, for crying out loud!

Then there was E. Another nightmare with weak pretests and ridiculous O(nt) solutions passing (and of course, the legendary stils somehow using some kind of black magic to withstand about 300 hacks of a nonsense O(nt) solution, including about twenty from my friend myst-6). Of course, it is even in the contest creation guidelines to ensure that "stupid bruteforce solutions" don't pass, but I guess the rules maybe didn't apply to today's contest? Lord knows.

And just when I thought a good problem came up, one I actually rather enjoyed solving, I get a message straight after the contest from a certain AG-88301 telling me that GitHub Copilot solved this problem with no input from him???? I thought it was common sense to run problem statements through generative AI to make sure they aren't instantly solved, but I guess not for today's problem writers.

And then after all this, we're hit with just about the most standard ternary search question in existence? It's not even funny at this point, it's just embarrassing.

Rant over. I hope those who deserved rating got it. In a perfect world, low-quality contests like this wouldn’t happen, but in our flawed reality, it’s just another day.