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Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

kabir.au

211–220 of 502 posts

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#211
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.

Everything we've learned in the last 10 years is telling us that computers do not help human education in the slightest. We remember better when we write with pen and paper. We learn better with whiteboards and paper books. The simple answer: Remove most computing from education entirely. Blue composition books, pencils, whiteboards is what trains humans. Calculators are helpful perhaps but it is quite possible that…

I think this overlooks the potency and scarcity of 1:1 time with the teacher. If you've only got maybe a few minutes of that in an average schoolday there's a huge difference between whether or not you've talked it through with an AI before trying the question out on the teacher.

They're wrong sometimes, but usually in verifiable ways. And they don't seem to know the difference between medicine and bioterrorism, so often they refuse. But these limitations are worth tolerating when the alternative is that our specialists in topic X are bogged down by questions about topic Y to the point where X isn't getting taught.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You absolutely need to have some basic level of abilities if you are going to be operating AI coding tools for software that is going to have paying users.... I use these tools very very heavily I'm not against them at all and I don't scrutinize every single line of code that they write but it is very often that I catch it doing some brain dead stuff and if I didn't have a decade plus of experience I wouldn't know th…

I think we're rediscovering management from first principles. The main selling point of AI is that it writes code faster than you could. Checking it line by line undoes most of that benefit. In the same vein, there's no real benefit to leading a team if you plan on supervising every task. But here's the thing: for humans, this is manageable because we've come up with a number of mechanisms to select for dependable wo…

Your conclusion is pretty silly.

My expertise has led me to the obvious fact that I would never give an LLM write access to my production database in the first place. So in your own example my expertise actually does solve that problem without the need for something like a consequence whatever that means to you.

We already have full control over the input and tools they are given and full control over how the output is used.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#213
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.

Everything we've learned in the last 10 years is telling us that computers do not help human education in the slightest. We remember better when we write with pen and paper. We learn better with whiteboards and paper books. The simple answer: Remove most computing from education entirely. Blue composition books, pencils, whiteboards is what trains humans. Calculators are helpful perhaps but it is quite possible that…

> computers do not help human education in the slightest

I had no access to anyone who could teach me calculus as a kid except Khan Academy, so I think this is a gross exaggeration. But I agree in the end, that all my "real" learning did come from pen-and-paper practice, not watching videos.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#214
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. If you remove the "without AI" and the end, I've been hearing similar anecdotes about fizzbuzz for years (isn't the whole point of fizzbuzz to filter out those candidates?)

Some percentage of developers before AI were unable to code fizzbuzz. Some significantly higher percentage of them are not able to do so now.

Saying there have always been bad developers doesn't change that there's a higher ratio of them now.

No stats to back this up. Just interviews I've done recently and historically.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonderful teachers that give unreliable information with total confidence?

They'll also encourage and praise you even when you're heading down the wrong path until you think you've uncovered the secret of the universe or proven that established science was wrong this whole time when really you've just been bullshitting with an engagement bot.

No, they don't really do that anymore, if you use the latest models with reasoning enabled.

Like almost everything else about LLMs, this unfortunate tendency has gotten a lot better recently, which you might not realize if you gave up after getting some lame answers or bogus glazing on the free ChatGPT page a couple of years ago.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#216
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.

Everything we've learned in the last 10 years is telling us that computers do not help human education in the slightest. We remember better when we write with pen and paper. We learn better with whiteboards and paper books. The simple answer: Remove most computing from education entirely. Blue composition books, pencils, whiteboards is what trains humans. Calculators are helpful perhaps but it is quite possible that…

[deleted]

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#217
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ctfs need preparation and unconstrained internet, even if you block domains it’s possible to tunnel out

Presumably if you block domains, you wouldn't be able to use AI to find a way around the block. So doing so demonstrates at least some human skill

Proxy through an EC2. Ask me how I know.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything we've learned in the last 10 years is telling us that computers do not help human education in the slightest. We remember better when we write with pen and paper. We learn better with whiteboards and paper books. The simple answer: Remove most computing from education entirely. Blue composition books, pencils, whiteboards is what trains humans. Calculators are helpful perhaps but it is quite possible that…

I think this overlooks the potency and scarcity of 1:1 time with the teacher. If you've only got maybe a few minutes of that in an average schoolday there's a huge difference between whether or not you've talked it through with an AI before trying the question out on the teacher. They're wrong sometimes, but usually in verifiable ways. And they don't seem to know the difference between medicine and bioterrorism, so o…

And now they'll have less time because they will be bombarded with slop to no end.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#219
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.

Everything we've learned in the last 10 years is telling us that computers do not help human education in the slightest. We remember better when we write with pen and paper. We learn better with whiteboards and paper books. The simple answer: Remove most computing from education entirely. Blue composition books, pencils, whiteboards is what trains humans. Calculators are helpful perhaps but it is quite possible that…

I learned calculus thanks to wolfram alpha step by step solving feature

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#220
post #27

Right, the same way that car racing has "broken" jogging. This is so dumb. /s The whole point of competitions is to provide a safe environment thanks to a set of rules all participants AGREE on in order to progress together. If new tools "break" the competition, we change the rules and that's A-OK. CTF isn't a natural phenomenon, if tools change, rules change, simple.

The only way this actually works is if you move CTF to in-person only. There's no other way to reasonably prevent the whole leaderboard being taken up by whoever spent the most on tokens.

Sure, I don't know how to make it work. I just know that DeepBlue didn't kill competitive chess. We simply have at least 3 different rule sets, namely

- no computer assistance, which does also mean no mobile on competition, human only

- advanced chess with assistance

- computer only, no human assistance

and arguably chess itself is not doing worst since.

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