Note that this has time complexity O(N^2) while it's possible to achieve O(N).

Never mind, the piece of optimisation I failed to figure out was checking for a set rather than the entire string. My bad.

I continuously timed out with this exact solution...

I'm new to programming and if I'm wrong please someone correct me!

I believe it's because it's being considered to be null terminated strings.
Therefore the last character of these strings are '\0', but in a empty string this would be the only character
and when we compare it with a string that isn't empty it would return true since '\0' is present in both.

But as far as I understand it isn't something that will be printed in the screen, just something that will be
considered by the machine.