[Dylan16807]

Having a human-visible delay to calculate a single statistic about a small block of numbers is a bad thing.

Do not use such a naive algorithm on arrays this big. If this code is going to actually be used in something, it's a performance issue.

In general these optimizations don't involve much time thinking them out, and a bunch of them are fine as far as debugging and maintenance. The first prompt-engineered version is fast and simple.

(Though the issue isn't really algorithm, it's that you don't want to be doing much number and string crunching in pure python.)