> But while homomorphic encryption has a nontrivial cost overhead, it shifts the capability/privacy trade-off to a question of cost. And the cost of homomorphic encryption is rapidly decreasing.

Which doesn't spell out exactly hon "nontrivial" the cost overhead still is.

"As far as my technological life goes"

Speaking from my own perspective (and not any of my challenge co-authors), I felt completely blindsided by the incredible progress frontier models made in solving CTF challenges between 2025 and 2026. We've been running the BSidesSF CTF for more than 10 years now, gaining experience on what makes a good, fun, and fair (solvable without random guessing) CTF challenge. 2026 was the first year where all of our past experience didn't seem to apply. Challenges that I designed to be hard, that I expected to take a dedicated human 10-20 hours to solve, fell to LLM automation in minutes.

I don't know what the future of CTFs is going to be, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're largely dead in 1-2 years. A lot of the satisfaction I get from making challenges is in seeing players struggle, learn, and then eventually solve them. I'm not sure there are going to be many players willing to sink 20 human hours of their weekend into one challenge when a dozen teams using AI solved the challenge in under an hour.

Overall I'm thrilled with the capabilities we're getting with AI, but saddened by what we're losing. I hope CTFs can somehow hold on, and that I can still get a lot of satisfaction out of building challenges and having players solve them.

Or rather could have been, since the issue seems like it was transient. I'm now getting resolutions.

Very strange, I wish I'd recorded what was going on better while it was broken.

But a dig +trace archive.ph (which recurses all the way to the root locally) resolves it fine.

Is there some US-mandated DNS filtering I don't know about?

I chalk this up to primary two reasons. First, I cared a lot more about the implementation details of the C program than I did the Python one, and second, it's just better at simple stand-alone python programs than it is at C programs.

The criteria I know use is "do I care about the implementation details of this?". If I do (because for example it's going to be long-term code that I need to maintain) then the agent likely isn't worth it. But if I don't, there are huge efficiency gains to be had using the agent.

Between this, and SNES emulation (searching memory for values and adjusting things to see how they'd affect the game), I was destined for computer science.

You can reject them, but doing so just throws away useful tools without gaining anything in return.

There is a big difference between “infinity doesn’t exist” and “infinity doesn’t exist physically”.

I should also add that the resolution of zeno’s paradox in the form of calculus where and infinite set of steps can occur in a finite time (or infinite set of distance can span a finite total distance) is conceptually very simple and useful. Rejecting it as unphysical, or saying it must imply time or space come in discrete chunks, is not contributing to an understanding of reality unless the rejection also comes with a set of testable (in principle) predictions.

And in general, why not also reject zero, negative numbers, irrational numbers, complex numbers, uncomputable numbers, etc.?

Seems like an article about quacks that can’t even agree on what the bounds and rules of their quackery are.