I love(d?) reverse engineering... I would be working on reversing some binary and a whole night would pass without me even noticing, it was so much fun banging my head against the wall and spending days in IDA trying to figure out what a program is doing...
I say fun, it was more agony than fun, but the godly orgasmic satisfaction you got once you finally solved a challenge you'd been stuck on for days... I cannot describe it.
I started playing flareon with flareon 11 and in that one, i managed to complete only 6 out of 9 or 10 challenges. In flareon 12, I was motivated to do better and managed to get to challenge 7 (even did 8 with a friends help after ctf ended because i was close and could not sleep without having solved it. friend wasn't ai, ai wasnt good enough last year, atleast for me, so it was still fun).
And at that time I decided i was going to complete all the challenges for the next one for sure, no matter what. I decided to switch my job to a better one that will let me take time off for flareon (F you, ex boss for denying me PTO for the ctf). I setup reminders and everything to take time off from work to do this... And i did.
I completed all challenges this year. in 4 hours! But I... Feel... Nothing... because a bot did all of them. 0% brain engaged except for the space invaders, 0 orgasms, 0 fun.
and sure, you can tell me "just dont use AI", "just solve them yourself", "atleast you'll know you did it by yourself
all good suggestions, no hate to anyone who says that. but...
I dont know how, ok? I dont know how to do that. i dont know how to shut off my brain when every single challenging thing i run into, it just comes up with a "oh, u could use ai for this", "llm would be perfect for this problem", "most efficient way to solve this problem would be with a ai"...
I can't f**ing turn it off...
also, whats the point if there's no leaderboard? (there is a leaderboard, but it loses its meaning when you have more than 200 solves in the first day of the CTF, and I know i'm part of the problem.).
flareon was fun for me because of the exclusivity, single player, difficulty, and the leaderboard, this may be the narcissist in me, but, i felt indestructible last year because I was #2 rank from my country on the leaderboard even if i didnt complete all challenges in time. competing was the fun part...
Fuck AI, it has ruined flareon... and probably reverse engineering in general, for me, and undoubtedly a lot of other people too.
i dont know the solution... i am sure the challenge authors tried their best to make the problems difficult to solve even for LLMs... but idk.
Chess atleast had a good solution for this, two people sitting across, and playing on a physical board with no vibrators up their butts for cheating... i dont know how you do that to online CTFs like flareon atleast... make it physical, and monitor and ban all AI traffic?
is using AI even cheating?