Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

kabir.au

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 502 posts

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#171

Post by IanCal »

josh2600 wrote: post #165
IanCal wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can’t say you’re wrong but the last anecdote describes many I’ve had to review for jobs long before LLMs. Fizzbuzz is a classic thing that shockingly many devs genuinely cannot do, even at home.

Why is it important that a dev can’t do fizzbuzz without ai? If they can ship code that matches a spec, why does it matter if they’re using ai or not? Genuinely curious.

Fizzbuzz is such an incredibly simple problem if you can’t do it I struggle to see how you’d be able to complete any task that requires very basic reasoning and very basic coding knowledge. And if an AI system can do those parts, what am I getting for spending tens of thousands of pounds per year by hiring a person who can’t? Wouldn’t I just tag codex on the tickets?

I’m not talking about gotcha level stuff here where the first time it didn’t compile because of a bracket or anything, or even first time wrong. They couldn’t do Fizzbuzz in a language of their choice, at all.

Those that could were always annoyed at having to do such things because how could someone coming for a contract position not be able to do this? Without seeing what a filter it really was.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#172

Post by hnthrow0287345 »

josh2600 wrote: post #165
IanCal wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can’t say you’re wrong but the last anecdote describes many I’ve had to review for jobs long before LLMs. Fizzbuzz is a classic thing that shockingly many devs genuinely cannot do, even at home.

Why is it important that a dev can’t do fizzbuzz without ai? If they can ship code that matches a spec, why does it matter if they’re using ai or not? Genuinely curious.

It doesn't. It's just a low-end skill filter that got really popular. It could have easily been replaced by other tests like is this word a palindrome.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#173

Post by jadar »

gedy wrote: post #148
sigmoid10 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I've interviewed people like this 15 years ago. Degrees and experience mean nothing in this field. The best predictor I found was personal passion projects. Let them get as nerdy as possible, then you will see pretty quickly where their skills are at and what their limits are. And you will immediately filter out people who just studied CS because they heard you can make good money.

I agree, however there are so many interviewers who will still treat that as some softball criteria and insist that unless you "prepare" for an interview by memorizing leetcode you are 100% a faker and liar.

Maybe they themselves are fakers and liars / deeply insecure. I got bumped out of an interview rather rudely once because I blanked and couldn’t answer a trivia question about arrays.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#174

Post by tardedmeme »

When I did my first CTF, it was close to the deadline and I thought I had the extracted the flag from the program and the rest of the program was just filler, so I entered the flag, and it told me it was not the flag. It turns out the program multiplies the input by a pseudorandom matrix before comparing it against the flag, so I had to implement a matrix inversion and then get the flag. That's not the story though.

The matrix was always the same and the challenge was clearly designed so that the point was being able to read anything at all, not knowing how to invert a matrix, so I asked the creator what was up.

He told me that there were tools that would trace input values until they reached a comparison instruction, then print what they were compared against. Therefore it was necessary for every deobfuscation challenge to scramble the input in some way too complex for these tools to undo, before comparing it. Hence the multiplication by a pseudorandom matrix.

The point is, cheating tools aren't new.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#175

Post by eastbound »

hnthrow0287345 wrote: post #172
josh2600 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it important that a dev can’t do fizzbuzz without ai? If they can ship code that matches a spec, why does it matter if they’re using ai or not? Genuinely curious.

It doesn't. It's just a low-end skill filter that got really popular. It could have easily been replaced by other tests like is this word a palindrome.

And yet, some people argue that you shouldn’t ask a developer to align 3 “if” and 1 “for”!!!

The energy spent arguing that those 4 instructions in a row “are not a mark of someone who can write code” would have better been spent firing them.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#176

Post by dguest »

mr_mitm wrote: post #161
zem wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to be fair, fusion does violate conservation of mass, just not the way the teacher explained it. the loss of mass is where the energy comes from.

Yes, there is no law of conservation for mass like there is for energy. Fusion is a good example for why it's not conserved. The teacher was right.

He was right that it violates conservation of mass. He was completely wrong that it violated it by adding 2 atomic mass units when hydrogen fuses.

In reality heavier isotopes of hydrogen fuse, conserving the total number of nucleons, but the resulting hydrogen has a lower rest mass than the parent particles. The extra mass is released as energy and the total energy is conserved.

By his logic the system either violated energy conservation (by creating nucleons while releasing energy) or was endothermic (creating nucleons from the surrounding energy).

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#177

Post by tardedmeme »

josh2600 wrote: post #165
IanCal wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can’t say you’re wrong but the last anecdote describes many I’ve had to review for jobs long before LLMs. Fizzbuzz is a classic thing that shockingly many devs genuinely cannot do, even at home.

Why is it important that a dev can’t do fizzbuzz without ai? If they can ship code that matches a spec, why does it matter if they’re using ai or not? Genuinely curious.

For the same reason it's important your mechanic can identify which parts of a car are the wheel.

Who cares as long as the car is fixed, right? As long as the mechanic can Chinese-room his way to a working car, why does it matter how much of it he actually understands?

And why hire the mechanic instead of hiring the Chinese room?

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#178

Post by andai »

baq wrote: post #44

Replace ‘CTF’ with ‘high school’ or ‘university’ and you’ve described the total slow motion collapse of education; the only saving grace is that most of it requires in person presence. We’ve figured out the human replacement pipeline it seems, but we haven’t figured out the eduction part. LLMs can be wonderful teachers, but the temptation to just tell it ‘do it for me’ is almost impossible to resist.

They were a forcing function for skillz and they no longer are. We need new forcing functions for skillz or we will become WALL-E blobs.

Well, they were ostensibly forcing functions... ten years ago everyone was paying the exchange student to do their homework and assignments for them, and that guy was paying his cousin back in his home country, but the whole thing is a bit more efficient now.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#179

Post by andai »

Gigachad wrote: post #86
baq wrote: post #44

Replace ‘CTF’ with ‘high school’ or ‘university’ and you’ve described the total slow motion collapse of education; the only saving grace is that most of it requires in person presence. We’ve figured out the human replacement pipeline it seems, but we haven’t figured out the eduction part. LLMs can be wonderful teachers, but the temptation to just tell it ‘do it for me’ is almost impossible to resist.

We are interviewing for a software dev role and we made the first round in person to prevent cheating. The gap between people who learned pre ai vs post is immense. I had a dev with supposedly 3 years experience and a degree in software who wouldn't have been able to write fizzbuzz without AI.

That's actually the origin of FizzBuzz! A puzzle invented to weed out the perplexing multitude of CS graduates who apparently cannot program.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#180

Post by dguest »

bernds74 wrote: post #133
dguest wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll always remember my middle school science teaching telling us that nuclear fusion violates conservation of mass because the 2 protons in a pair of hydrogen nuclei combine to make helium with 4 nucleons. It's not true, but that's not the point. But he was a great teacher anyway. He was engaging and kept the kids in line and learning. I eventually learned the truth, and most of my classmates forgot about it. Teachi…

I had a chemistry teacher who told us that hydrogen reacts violently with oxygen, and this is how the hydrogen bomb works.

Hey it's a bomb made out of hydrogen! Also the deployment system for a thermonuclear bomb might involve that reaction in the rocket engine.
Post reply on HN