391–400 of 502 posts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_the_flag_(cybersecurit... still has no mention of AI, but that will likely change as they increasingly dominate competition.
Using AI on CTF is like using a car to get better at the 100 yard dash
Must I beg to have an acronym spelled out a least once, the first time it's used? Even if you assume 90% of readers already know, the other 10% (including me, in this case) will thank you, it doesn't take much effort, and it expands the reach of your communication or idea. Exceptions for cases where the acronym is just so well known that a lot of people don't even know what it stands for even though they know the con…
I didn't know what BGP is, but I did know CTF. YMMV
I feel the post. For me AI has ruined both, playing CTFs and also building CTFs challenges. The most annoying thing to me is the "yeah idk but here is the flag" mentality. Before when playing CTFs with my mates was usually sitting there for hours tackling a challenge until some other mate joined, had some look together and solved it with you together in 30 minutes which is the most rewarding learning experience. Nowa…
I don’t know like chess engines didn’t kill chess. You could just play with people that don’t use the “engine”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_the_flag_(cybersecurit... still has no mention of AI, but that will likely change as they increasingly dominate competition.
Using AI on CTF is like using a car to get better at the 100 yard dash
>The competition is turning into "who can afford to run enough agents, with enough context, for long enough." This will basically become true for everything.
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Which acronym do you mean? CTF? I think that acronym, just like BGP, is more well known by itself than what it stands for. More generally, not every piece of writing is meant for every audience. Like if someone writes a blog post about CTFs aimed at people who like CTFs, nobody in the target audience needs to have CTF explained to them. Ultimately HN is a link aggregator, but sometimes its a bit like eavesdropping on…
I dont know what CTF stands for so I dont know if I am interested in this article or learning anything about it. Maybe I am. Are you really arguing for not just typing out whatever 3 words this stands for once in the name of clarity?
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Best practice in writing about technical concepts is to spell out acronyms like this on their first use. There is a ton of stuff I learn about here on HN that I didn't know anything about before. It doesn't help that the linked article never bothers to explain this either.
For a general audience this is good advice. This article was written for a specific audience who follows this blog because they know the term. If you start spelling out fundamental acronyms it makes the content look more basic and general. This always upsets the general audience who stumble upon the article (like this) but it wasn’t meant for a general audience. CTF is extremely well known and the people who would be…
Informal writing about technical topics is another story. There you can assume a lot more shared context, as you are only writing for a specific subculture within the field. It doesn't matter much if other people in the field fail to understand you.
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Since this is the top comment at the moment: CTF stands for Capture The Flag. Personally I have never, ever heard that concept referred to by the initialism. Granted, it's almost never come up in my circles, so... shrug
Just to give the actual answer, CTF in this context means a computer security competition. Generally the way they work, is you get some programs, and you have to hack them to get some string called the flag (e.g. maybe the server has a root owned file called flag, so you have to get root somehow to read the file). Team with the most flags at the end wins. In this context, CTF is almost exclusively referred to by the…
This has been the most annoying HN so far until your comment appeared.
Kinda FUD article... the reality is that common problems are going to be easy because the solution is probably inside the training dataset, the challenge should be adapted to make LLM's useless for example once at Defcon CTF the problems were for an unknown CPU architecture based on octal that required to write even your own disassembler... this are the kind of things that will probably be hard for frontier LLM's
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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 wher…
I feel the same way about inverting a binary tree, but a lot of people act like it's an arduous request. I am guessing it's because they've never read the description of what inverting a binary tree is, but maybe people are just that bad at recursion.