a few days ago, i read something that hit me harder than it should have.
flare-on 13 had just opened. it’s an annual reverse engineering challenge by google. the kind of thing that attracts the “elite of the elite” in security. flare-on 10 had 219 finishers out of 4,767. most people don’t finish. most people don’t get close.
this year, a guy named ryan merket placed 9th. all nine challenges solved. on night one.
he’s not a reverse engineer. he runs a tech news site. he used an ai — codex — to do the actual work. he supplied the files. the ai inspected them, explained behavior, wrote analysis programs, tested answers.
one challenge’s readme contained the flag. another hid logic in a signing certificate with over a thousand asn.1 records. the ai decoded it, followed the state machine, derived the key, decrypted the flag.
merket openly says he didn’t reverse-engineer the binaries by hand.
i sat with that for a while.
because this is my field. security. reverse engineering adjacent. the kind of skill that takes years to build. the kind of skill that made you “elite.”
and now a journalist with an ai workflow placed top 10 on night one.
the worry#
i’ve been carrying a low-grade worry for a while.
morality declining. uncertainty rising. the world getting faster and weirder. ai doing things we thought only humans could do.
this flare-on story made it concrete.
if ai can do this, what else can it do? what’s left that’s actually mine? what skills are safe?
and if skills aren’t safe, what is?
epictetus, 1,900 years ago#
i stumbled on epictetus a few days later.
he was a stoic philosopher. born a slave. lived in rome. his whole thing was simple:
some things are up to us. some things are not.
up to us: our opinions, our actions, our responses.
not up to us: everything else. other people. the world. ai. the economy. the future.
his argument was: we waste our lives fighting the second pile. we worry about what we can’t control. we exhaust ourselves on things that were never ours to begin with.
stop. sort the two piles. spend energy only on the first.
i read that and thought: this is exactly what i needed, written 1,900 years ago.
the sakshi bhav connection#
it maps to something from our own tradition too.
sakshi bhav. witness consciousness.
the idea that you are not the doer. you are the observer. you watch the world, you act where you can, but you don’t cling to outcomes.
epictetus says: focus on what you can control.
sakshi bhav says: witness without attachment.
same move. different roads.
both are saying: you are not responsible for the whole world. you are responsible for your response to it.
the counterpoint#
but here’s the tension.
“focus on what you control” can become an excuse.
it can become “i don’t need to engage.” “i don’t need to care.” “let the world burn.”
apathy dressed as wisdom.
epictetus didn’t mean that. he meant: stop wasting energy on what you can’t change, so you have energy for what you can.
the audit is not an excuse to disengage. it’s a way to engage better.
what the audit actually looks like#
i tried it.
on the flare-on worry: is ai taking over my field up to me? no.
what is up to me: learning how to work with ai, not against it. building skills that compound. staying curious. preparing.
on morality declining: is the world’s morality up to me? no.
what is up to me: my own behavior. how i treat people. what i accept. where i draw lines.
on uncertainty: is the future up to me? no.
what is up to me: my response to the present.
the audit doesn’t solve the worry. but it gives the worry a place to sit. and it gives me something to do.
the takeaway#
some things are up to you. some are not.
the world will change. ai will keep doing things we didn’t expect. uncertainty will grow.
you can’t control that.
but you can control what you do next.
what’s one thing you’ve been worrying about that isn’t actually up to you?
took ai help to clean up typos. my brain works faster than my fingers. xd
