alt Hacker News>If adaptation means accepting that the scoreboard is now an AI orchestration benchmark, then we should say that honestly instead of pretending the old competition still exists.
This is like someone complaining that making machine parts has been ruined: Skillful craftsmen used to make them by hand using manual tools!
Nowadays the CAD/CAM/CNC cheaters have almost completely automated the whole thing. How is the next generation of craftsmen going to learn how to craft a gear by hand when the process of gear making has been reduced to pressing start on a CNC machine?!
See what I mean? Sorry, I think this article is just Luddite. I can empathize with the pain of your beloved craft basically being rendered obsolete by new technology, but the process can neither be stopped nor is it bad in general.
The manual skills you trained with CTF puzzles are now simply no longer relevant . (Field-specific) "AI orchestration" is the new cyber securtiy skill if LLMs really have become so good at this, and what the author used to do manually then has the same value as being able to craft a gear by hand.
The way I read the post is that the author is disappointed that the community is gone. The CTF was just a reason for a number of like-minded people to organize around an activity.
Indeed, in the real world, plenty of people organize to do formerly-skillful tasks together. I have not personally crafted a gear by hand, but I have built a house in a long-abandoned style with a group of people only using hand tools.
There _is_ a danger that society forgets how to do these things. During that house-building exercise, there were many tricks of the trade that, while likely documented somewhere in a book, would have been difficult to reproduce without seeing a demonstration. From the standpoint of “does it matter?” it depends on what you care about. We absolutely do not need cruck-framed houses with scribed joints. Modern construction is faster and cheaper and lasts long enough. But it would sadden me greatly if practices like this faded from memory, because it’s one of those things that makes you gasp “wow!” when you see it. And your appreciation only deepens when you try it yourself.