271–280 of 502 posts
Neither the article nor the comments in this thread explain which of the many meanings the acronym CTF is being applied to...
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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.
It's not unlike going to the gym, and we see how many people do that regularly. Except it's even funnier, because people serious about the gym but what? Tutors. They call them personal trainers. We've known for a millennium or more that 1-on-1 instruction is vastly better than anything else, but most people actually don't want to get into shape, and most people actually don't want to learn.
The first paragraph on anything with an acronym in it should explain the bloody acronym. I assumed CTF was an encryption standard, given the headline. It was only coming here and reading the comments that made me realise it's a game-format ("Capture The Flag").
I don't mean that everyone must know what CTF is, but sometimes it's OK to write things just for your community (CTF community in this case), not for general population.
I don’t think CTFs are dead, they’ll just evolve. The difficulty level will need to be increased or the rules locked down. Just like sports and racing persist despite the existence of performance enhancing drugs and rocket technology. I just did a CTF where I was in the top 10. It was the first CTF I completed and I used AI because the rules permitted it. That said, I couldn’t solve all challenges. But yes, it was si…
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…
> 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.
But that's not using "computers" as a computer but as a video player. When evaluating whether computers are "good for learning", I don't think we should include using a computer as a video player, a book, or even flash cards. It should be things a computers uniquely offer which a books, paper, videos and a physical reference library cannot.
Based on the results of deploying hundreds of millions of computer to schools in the 80s and 90s, the evidence was mostly that computers are good for learning computer programming and "how to use a computer" but not notably better than cheaper analog alternatives for learning other things.
Interestingly, a properly trained and scaffolded LLM could be the first thing to meaningfully change that. It could do some things in ways only human teachers could previously since it is theoretically capable of observing learner progress and adapting to it in real-time.
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I first did fizz buzz about 10 years ago fresh out of college. Now, after 10 years in full stack and fully vibe coding, I forgot basic python syntax. An interview like yours would have false positives if you are checking for syntax because well, its like looking up spelling, I just ask the AI for the syntax inline.
> I forgot basic python syntax If you cannot write "basic syntax" for any language then you are not a programmer, and certainly not a software engineer? This is not a value judgement, it's ok (probably good tbh) to not be a programmer. But you are wasting everyone's time by interviewing for a programming position in this case.
Like sure, I can probably write some python, but will it be pythonic? I might still be Java-minded for a while, trying to OOP my way into solutions.
Earlier today I needed to write some PHP and couldn't remember if it used length, count, or size. I had to look it up. I've been doing this for 20 years.
Meta: this was submitted with the article’s title “The CTF scene is dead” which I found very easy to understand. It has just been updated to use the subtitle’s first sentence, “Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format”. I find that much harder to grasp, rather like a garden-path sentence. My immediate thoughts were that “Frontier” was a company name, and that there was some file format named CTF. If you don’t know…
Basic rule: define every abbreviation when it is first used.
“solve”, why not solution? Like “spend” and not expenditure, why use the verb as a noun and not care about grammar?
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There actually is a law of conservation of mass (it's the same law, because mass is energy) and it only appears violated if you forget about the particles that are zooming away at the speed of light. Of course the mass of a system changes if mass can flow in and out.
Mass is not the same as energy. Mass can be converted to energy or has energy, but a photon, for example, is massless while carrying energy.
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> 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.
Yeah I agree. I grew up in a very blue-collar town, and anything I wanted to learn (outside of public schooling) either came from emaciated websites or whatever books I could find at the library. Having YouTube and Khan Academy and everything else would have made such a huge difference for me.