I wanted to share a side project from my work at UNSW that has recently become all-consuming!
Essentially, we built a new kind of CTF where players competed to dominate an in-house social media platform, set in a fictional country, with the goal of swinging a simulated election.
This was done to both raise awareness that such kinds of AI-powered campaigns are possible, as well as build a rich environment and dataset for red-team blue-team R&D in future.
So that we could tune every part of our system, we built everything from the ground up - including our own social network (based on early twitter), our own news websites (built with Jekyll), and our own multi-agent framework for simulating NPCs (built with too much spaghetti Python).
The whole game is multiplayer, so every player and team was competing against every other player and team interactively to try and sway the NPCs in their direction.
We had 277 students from 18 Universities across Australia sign up to play, and ended up with 42 teams on the scoreboard. Our final prizegiving event was yesterday, and the team from QUT - all freshmen/first years - took the win (of AU$5,000)!
Overall we had such a blast running the event, and I'd love to hear your thoughts and comments.
Already we are helping Day of AI Australia produce their own open-source version of the game for high schools in Australia, and for future CTNs starting next year, possible collaborators from two overseas universities have reached out to discuss running a joint international event (really hoping we'd be able to do that).
Strange question - has the "submitted at" times been edited on this post and all the comments here? I swear I read everything on this submission, including the comments, several days ago, but nothing here is longer than a few hours.
Actually, google search agrees with me - if you search for the title here + hackernews, it says that it saw this post and several of the comments 6 days ago (apologies that I can't link to the cache as this is no longer a feature of Google).
Why are all the post and comment times here saying less than a few hours ago?
Unlike Reddit, the ordering of HN posts isn't only a function of the numbers of votes, number of comments, and time. Some other moderation activity can cause a front page post to suddenly be buried many pages deep.
I am devastated by this news. I was lucky enough to work with Mohamed and Andy for several projects (including taping out the world's first ChatGPT-authored silicon [0]), and I've never met people more passionate about making chip design and silicon tape-out accessible to all. This is a real loss for the academic and maker communities.
I think a more reasonable interpretation might be "the government knows about expensive cars (i.e. that they are registered, have numberplates etc), and so charges some annual tax on the owners of those cars."
Describing wealth tax reasoning with an absurd example of the same reasoning on an individual level is an attempt to get people to understand what wealth taxes are.
The government that is supposed to work for you thinks you have accumulated too much stuff and is trying to make it legal to take a percentage of your physical wealth annually.
You only accumulated and maintain the wealth because of the government. Without the government and the economic system it cultivates, you’d never have it.
>You only accumulated and maintain the wealth because of the government
This is simplistic nonsense. No, the majority of wealthy people didn't accumulate their wealth because high and mighty lord government willed it into their existence. They did it within a system of laws and regulations that government admittedly does create for fostering such wealth creation. However, this still often requires strenuous effort by these people for their own ends. If it were otherwise, many more people would be rich just by virtue of living under a government. There is a real place for giving people credit for the wealth and capital accumulate, well beyond what government offers.
It's contradictory and absurd to argue that people accumulate wealth because of the government while at the same time arguing that we live in a situation in which we need more government control of people's earnings to prevent oligarchy since government doesn't do enough.
> They did it within a system of laws and regulations that government admittedly does create for fostering such wealth creation. However, this still often requires strenuous effort by these people for their own ends.
You are confusing two things thinking they aren’t highly related but they are. This statement could otherwise be written “government created a flawed system and motivated individuals achieved wealth by taking advantage of that system”. That implies a flawed system was causal. We don’t need bigger government, we need the right government. No one wants to say that those who worked hard - even by benefitting from a flawed government - should not have high wealth, but by your same argument, what did the wealthy children of these individuals do to justify their wealth? Their children? How long do we believe this chain of inheritance is sensible?
Most cancers didnt grow because some high and mighty body willed it into existence, they did it within a system of biological laws and conditions that admittedly the body does generate
To steelman the argument that wealth is earned, this kind of stuff tend to follow a power law. So a 10% increase in effort or talent can result in a several fold increase in wealth - especially when the effects of compounding interest are considered.
This is most apparent in sports or the arts. Being just a little bit better at baseball can be the difference between a million dollar contract and being stuck in the minor leagues.
Of course the question of whether we should want success to follow a power law is a different matter. As is the role of luck. Going back to the sports example, being born at the right time of year can be a huge, permanent advantage[1].
Your argument is built on a flawed premise that ignores the foundational role government and society play in enabling wealth creation in the first place. The counterfactual is simple: without government, without the legal and social structures upheld by a functioning society, there would be no stable mechanism for accumulating wealth at all.
Wealth does not exist in a vacuum. It is not some inherent trait of individuals that manifests independently of the structures around them. The wealthiest people succeed not just because of their individual effort but because they operate within a framework that provides enforceable contracts, property rights, regulated markets, financial systems, infrastructure, security, and a workforce educated by public institutions. Strip all that away, and they are no better off than anyone else in a lawless wasteland where power is dictated purely by brute force.
If wealth were purely a function of individual effort, we’d see people amassing fortunes in failed states or ungoverned regions where there is no government interference—but we don’t. In fact, in those places, the absence of government results in instability, extreme poverty, and the inability to conduct large-scale business. Conversely, the wealthiest individuals overwhelmingly exist in places with strong institutions and legal protections—because those things are prerequisites for wealth accumulation.
Your contradiction is actually the real contradiction. You claim that people become rich despite the government but then ignore the fact that wealth is unequally distributed precisely because the government does not intervene enough to prevent market capture by a small elite. A government that enables wealth creation is not the same as one that ensures it is fairly distributed. It is perfectly consistent to acknowledge that wealth requires government structures while also recognizing that unchecked capitalism leads to oligarchy.
So no, this isn't simplistic nonsense. The simplistic nonsense is pretending that wealth creation happens in a vacuum when, in reality, it is entirely contingent on the existence of an organized society with functional institutions.
> No, the majority of wealthy people didn't accumulate their wealth because high and mighty lord government willed it into their existence. They did it within a system of laws and regulations that government admittedly does create for fostering such wealth creation.
This is akin to saying you only achieved a high score in a video game by your own sweat and effort, and saying the video game developer had nothing to do with it. Without their work, you wouldn't have a system within which to accrue wealth. You may not even have the concept of wealth or property. Bezos wouldn't have his wealth regardless of himself creating amazon if there didn't already exist power grids to electrify his warehouses and data centers, roads upon which his delivery vans could travel, a financial sector to see him be paid for his goods, on and on and on.
The mythmaking of the self-made-wealthy has gone completely off the fucking deep end at this point with a portion of the population, as if these CEOs fell from the sky, cratered in the Earth, raised their arms and from them spawned hyperscaler businesses and cavemen left their campfires, picked up Macbooks and started writing React code.
> It's contradictory and absurd to argue that people accumulate wealth because of the government while at the same time arguing that we live in a situation in which we need more government control of people's earnings to prevent oligarchy since government doesn't do enough.
This is not contradictory at all unless you boil the points down utterly beyond recognition.
Not always one for pithy remarks, but the quote from George Orwell seems prescient here: "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."
I'm not American, but FTA it sounds like having a politically biased NARA director could have some interesting consequences for the formal parts of all y'all future electoral matters.
I noted in a different comment in this thread that we teach all first-year compsci and software engineering students at my university MIPS assembly. They may then specialise into other areas, security, operating systems, embedded, etc., and in those specialties may need assembly for more modern CPUs.
We have found that when needed, students pick up the newer/more advanced assembly languages (e.g. ARM, x86) fairly well, so we believe the early and universal introduction to MIPS does provide benefits.
In Australia at least, anyone who is enrolled at or works at a university can use the taxpayer-subsidised "Gadi" HPC which is part of the National Computing Infrastructure (https://nci.org.au/our-systems/hpc-systems). I also do mean anyone, I have an undergraduate student using it right now (for free) to fine-tune several LLMs.
It also says commercial orgs can get access via negotiation, I expect a random member of the public would be able to go that route as well. I expect that there would be some hurdles to cross, it isn't really common for random members of the public to be doing the kinds of research Gadi was created to benefit. I expect it is the same way in this case in Canada. I suppose the argument is if there weren't any gatekeeping at all, you might end up with all kinds of unsuitable stuff on the cluster, e.g. crypto miners and such.
Possibly another way for a true random person to get access would be to get some kind of 0-hour academic affiliation via someone willing to back you up, or one could enrol in a random AI course or something and then talk to the lecturer in charge.
In reality, the (also taxpayer-subsidised) university pays some fee for access, but it doesn't come from any of our budgets.
In my experience in computer engineering in the academic systems of the USA, New Zealand, and Australia, a very large proportion of students will write their first paper in their first year. It is field dependent, but when I was a postdoc at a top US R1, 100% of the students I interacted with had their first paper in their first year. These even included students working on LLMs :-)
Also, top non-US universities often graduate their engineering students within 3-4 years of commencing, with 3-4 papers being a very common international expectation as well.
If you want to finish a PhD in 3 years and are interested in academia, in addition to following the path the OP has laid out you may also look to good international universities and then get your next 3-4 papers as a postdoc.
I appreciate adding data for the crowd but "a very large proportion of students will write their first paper in their first year" is simply not true when talking about the whole population. My department, albeit not CS but stats/ML, the first year is dedicated to doing courses and preparing for the qualifying exams. Some students would publish a paper. A few more might be coauthors with an upper year student (read, very little involvement). Pretty close to half would not even have an advisor until the summer. I studied at, supposedly to US News, a top 10 in the US for CS.
Typically, non-US universities have 3 year undergrads and 2 year masters prior to PhD. End-to-end, you are looking at the same time. There are, of course, exceptions. UK I think shaves off a year by integrating undergrad and masters.
Hiding the years or a PhD by doing an extended postdoc is barely the point of the exercise. The median time for a CS PhD in the US is 7 years [1]. Subtract 2 years for good students but add a year postdoc and I think you have a realistic 5-6 years from start of PhD to first academic position for the top decile.
I wanted to share a side project from my work at UNSW that has recently become all-consuming!
Essentially, we built a new kind of CTF where players competed to dominate an in-house social media platform, set in a fictional country, with the goal of swinging a simulated election.
This was done to both raise awareness that such kinds of AI-powered campaigns are possible, as well as build a rich environment and dataset for red-team blue-team R&D in future.
So that we could tune every part of our system, we built everything from the ground up - including our own social network (based on early twitter), our own news websites (built with Jekyll), and our own multi-agent framework for simulating NPCs (built with too much spaghetti Python).
The whole game is multiplayer, so every player and team was competing against every other player and team interactively to try and sway the NPCs in their direction.
We had 277 students from 18 Universities across Australia sign up to play, and ended up with 42 teams on the scoreboard. Our final prizegiving event was yesterday, and the team from QUT - all freshmen/first years - took the win (of AU$5,000)!
Overall we had such a blast running the event, and I'd love to hear your thoughts and comments.
Already we are helping Day of AI Australia produce their own open-source version of the game for high schools in Australia, and for future CTNs starting next year, possible collaborators from two overseas universities have reached out to discuss running a joint international event (really hoping we'd be able to do that).