They succeeded and found the extra terrestrials
SETI@home is in hibernation
111–120 of 358 posts
Re: SETI@home is in hibernation
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah. They are. https://www.militarytimes.com/off-duty/military-culture/2023... The only time a senior DOD / military official uses the word "possible" is when it's either happened or is going to happen. "It's possible you guys will be deployed within the next year." means "You guys are going to be deployed sometime within the next year."
I'm a veteran, can confirm this language. In fact, the weirdest thing to me about the announcement was that... nobody cared. And yet, this made sense, because... Wildly speculating, I think there's been a big systematic desensitization program going on due to that being effective against phobias (such as this one, which I'll call "astroxenophobia"): https://www.healthline.com/health/systematic-desensitization If the…
The psyops around UFOs must rank as one the most effective ever launched for prejudicing people against the subject.
Re: SETI@home is in hibernation
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I've been running >120k gpus to mine ETH So when the sea levels rise and destroy my home, I'll know who to blame. Thank you.
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That hydro that went to you couldn’t be shared to the connected network and they had to power the rest of the network with gas instead. Unless you built your own dam, which I really doubt you did.
Also unused hydro accumulates in the lake, so it’s not like hydro was wasting away and needed to be used.
Re: SETI@home is in hibernation
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
> hashes that begin with a certain number of bits set to 0. This myth was always intriguing to me. Where does it come from? It's not a number of 0s (which would imply difficulty could only be doubled or halved), it's just finding a hash that is less than the target.
It's in the original Bitcoin whitepaper
Thanks, this is likely where I read it first. I hadn't realized the actual implementation got more complicated than that. :)
Re: SETI@home is in hibernation
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m probably about median age for HN and when I was looking into folding Seti@home I had no idea and didn’t worry about power cost because it was subsidised by my parents or university. Plus energy was cheaper then. Now as an adult seeing a month of a few GPUs running on the utility bill really hurts.
The fact that energy hasn't gotten more affordable really demonstrates a deficiency of planning. We've had access to a source of energy that is cheap, zero-carbon and essentially limitless, since the 1950s: nuclear power.
Another way to look at it: there is no miracle solution.
It´s easy to look at any situation and say ¨If only they´d _just_ XXX¨. It´s never that simple.
Even if you deeply believe your solution is flawless and people ¨just¨ need to be convinced, the very fact that the situation is happening at all is an indication it will be a long and dire fight...
> essentially limitless
oh well
Re: SETI@home is in hibernation
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
The recent neural network "revolution" is giving me those vibes, even though it'll ironically kill the old internet with the upcoming spam bots.
I get the opposite vibe because the forerunner is ClosedAI.
True, but to be fair it was only recently that OpenAI really took over with ChatGPT and their api cost. Before that (just 3-4 months ago), the open source models were excellent competitors.
Re: SETI@home is in hibernation
#117If and when we detect evidence of technological life it's not going to be from radio signals of the kind SETI is looking for. It's going to be infra-red.
The window in which humanity releases the kind of radio signals SETI was built to find is fairly narrow. We've largely moved on from broadcast signals to fiber optics, directional beams and lower power. Even the "high" power signals are relatively low power and probably not detectable beyond a few hundred light years. That is a miniscule volume of our galaxy. Combine that with the small window and it's like trying to win the lottery 3 weeks in a row.
The limits we have on growing are twofold: 1) living area and 2) energy. These two are actually related. Many (myself included) consider th emost likely path for our species is to build a Dyson Swarm. This is a cloud of orbitals. A so-called O'Neil Cylinder. 20-30 miles long, 2-4 miles wide, spin gravity. Cover it in solar panels for power. This requires a material no more advanced than stainless steel.
Such a swarm around our Sun would have access to something like 10"15 times more energy than we have now and a fraction of Mercury's mass would produce trillions of times the land area of Earth.
Orbitals would have to dissipate heat somehow. The only way to do this in space is to vent material or to radiate it away. At any likely temperature that means infra-red radiation. That's physics.
So a Dyson Swarm around a star would have a huge IR signature that would be entirely obvious from a thousands of light years away. Over enough star systems (eg a galaxy) that distance goes out to millions of light years.
So it's a Dyson Swarm we'll see, not radio communications.
Re: SETI@home is in hibernation
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. You'd have to package up slices of the training set and the prior epoch as work units and host them. Our hypothetical GPT@home clients download the training set, train just those examples, and then send back their gradients. The server then averages all the gradients together. As far as I can tell this isn't any different conceptually from the distributed inference setup that PyTorch/Huggingface Accelerate/etc s…
Batches need to be reasonably sized. Llms are usually trained for a single epoch. If you just average the gradients once, it will be awful. The main problem I believe is that you would need extremely high bandwidth. For a 100B model you're looking at 400GB of gradients you need to send each batch. There's a reason why super fast networking is used.
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Re: SETI@home is in hibernation
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not clear that machine learning models consisting of weights are copyrightable in the first place. They are not the results of human authorship, but are instead essentially produced by a machine trying to optimize a bunch of values.
If you can get copyright on a photo just by pointing a camera and pressing a button you can probably get copyright on an AI.
I'm guessing you missed this discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35191206
No copyright on an AI if it was machine generated, which the training is. Great catch kmeisthax!
Re: SETI@home is in hibernation
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
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That hydro that went to you couldn’t be shared to the connected network and they had to power the rest of the network with gas instead. Unless you built your own dam, which I really doubt you did. Also unused hydro accumulates in the lake, so it’s not like hydro was wasting away and needed to be used.
The only users of the power in the area are data centers. The power goes directly there. The same data centers you're using to access services on the internet. There is more than enough hydro in the area so they don't have to turn on the gas. Very large river based hydro and the dams were built long ago.