Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

> Without a computer, there is no video.

There's nothing about video that uniquely requires computers. Maybe you meant "streaming video"?

I realize you're probably under 30 and don't remember "ye olden times" but nearly 90% of U.S. homes and every school had an analog VCR long before they had a computer. Widespread consumer video formats included VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray, Laserdisc, etc. I still buy some movies I care about on UHD discs and watch them in a dedicated Blu-ray/UHD player. Even the 'smart' TVs and streaming sticks most people watch streaming channels like Netflix on aren't functionally computers (no meaningful user accessible local storage, input like keyboard/mouse, CLI or windowing GUI).

Personally, I learned an enormous amount from video before I ever touched a computer. In elementary school we learned from 16mm films almost weekly and watched space launches and Carl Sagan's Cosmos series on TV (it was rebroadcast in the mornings specifically for schools). My junior high had a television in every classroom and some classes were planned around shows on PBS, NASA channel, C-SPAN and BBC. In the late 80s there was thousands of hours of educational video programming sent via direct broadcast satellite to 18-inch dishes at schools. In the 90s every grade and subject had hundreds of interactive video DVDs in large notebooks (four discs to a page in plastic sleeves) and multiple DVD players per classroom.

The peak installed base of VCRs in the U.S. was in 1999. Streaming video wasn't common in consumer households until well into the 2000s, YouTube didn't even exist until 2005 and most people had never heard of it until 2007. In 2010 Netflix mailed DVDs in envelopes to 25M homes every week. They didn't even offer a streaming plan until 2011.

As someone who's spent most of my adult life thinking about video technology, with patents ranging from analog days to the streaming tech you use today, computers have been extremely disappointing in terms of enabling any unique "learning from video" features that are computer-specific. In the 90s we realized that computers could make digitized video random access letting us sequence it non-linearly to make it interactive in response to user input. We knew that computer-enabled interactivity, responsiveness and real-time adaptation to learner progress would be incredible for improving video education. Yet the vast majority video content available online today is still linear in form. Even video that's specifically educational is no more interactive or user responsive than a 90s DVD disc.

Sadly, only two things have really changed about consumer video in the last 30 years: quantity and distribution. There's much more video content and it's remotely accessible on-demand instead of being limited by broadcast channels and storage media. But that's far more about communication technologies like broadband than computer technologies. For a few years YouTube even had authoring features like interactive menus and conditional branching but removed them because it didn't increase ad revenue. There are a few dedicated video authoring platforms for education which can apply uniquely 'computer things' to video like dynamic scripting, conditional branching, viewer annotation and timecode-linked threaded Q&A. Unfortunately, such content is rarely found outside high-end corporate training and some university courses. But there are so many other ways we could combine the strengths of advanced wikis with interactive video. Today, the most the public sees is just an HTML link from a wiki to a video clip. Almost none of the learning features computing could uniquely bring to video are widely available to learners. Since ~90% of everyone already had access to linear video playback before they had access to a computer and most online video today is still primarily linear, in my opinion, there's still virtually no uniquely 'computer-enabled video' involved in learning. Computers haven't enabled much that's new in video - just much more, much cheaper and more convenient forms of what we could already do without a computer.

I feel like you have not responded to my comment.

An acronym is an abbreviation, and they specifically do not spell out the very first acronym on the page the first time they use it.

> The reality is that a human will learn, given any materials including LLMs, but only if they truly desire to learn. We've had MOOCs, gigantic libraries, all full of free information. You can obtain a PhD level understanding in any technical field of your choice today just by consistently going to the library and consistently applying yourself.

Not true. In every field there is guild knowledge that a person can't acquire from a library. In technical disciplines PhD-level knowledge requires experience in collaboration, research, and frequently lab work, which is impossible to acquire without access to a lab -- or just direct experience with research methods, whatever those may be. Reading papers and absorbing information aren't enough. PhD-level knowledge comes from the process of writing and doing original work.

> The reality is that a human will learn, given any materials including LLMs, but only if they truly desire to learn.

Also not true. We require kids to go to school partly because exposure to the environment and work inculcates skills regardless of whether kids want to do the work -- and regardless of whether they want to learn.

LLMs are damaging to students partly because they provide an escape hatch from that work and thereby prevent kids from acquiring skills.

Think of it this way: most people who want to be healthy and eat a healthy diet still find easy junk food tempting. What they want does not change the temptation, because the body and brain gravitate towards easy, cheap fulfillment of basic drives.

People facing challenging tasks, similarly, are tempted to take measures that reduce the amount of effort they require. The availability of tools that reduce the required effort also help shape a person's understanding of the value of the challenge and the work: "why should I do this hard task when I have a tool that can do it for me?" You and I know the answer to this question when we're discussing something like writing an essay or solving a problem in a math or programming class. Students frequently don't. They are by definition ignorant. Children, moreover, lack maturity. Their brains are less capable of resisting the easy path than an adult's. That's partly why parenting is important: parents provide boundaries and limits that kids need but won't and can't provide for themselves.

Sometimes people, especially kids, really do need to be dragged, kicking and screaming, through something in order to receive the benefits it offers. Being dragged through it sometimes convinces a person of its value and benefits. In a kid's case, there's a decent chance that the experience will improve executive function, shape expectations in a healthy way, inculcate grit, and become appreciation -- or at least habit.

I would not have written essays on my own as a student in secondary school. My English teachers had to provide that structure for me and impose the demand. But LLMs make it much more difficult to impose the demands, and kids are ill protected against the temptations of the cognitive equivalent of junk food, but an order of magnitude worse and more damaging.

Film is a chemical medium for storage of images.

Video is an electronic process for capturing images and displaying them.

Before digital video there was analogue video, and analogue video was perfectly possible without digital sampling, or computers. Heck, video pre-dates silicon chips and used to be done with CRTs and valves.