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SETI@home is in hibernation

setiathome.berkeley.edu

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Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#121

Post by jandrese »

ETH_start wrote: post #95
porknubbins wrote: post #69

Earlier 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.

Nuclear power has proven to be a lot of things, but cheap is not one of them. In theory it is possible to build nuclear power plants at scale and at reasonable cost, but in practice that has not worked out in the real world.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#122

Post by stouset »

KerrAvon wrote: post #97
porknubbins wrote: post #69

Earlier 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.

Solar panels.

So now you need additional capital expenditure to handle the extra load of running your CPU and GPU 24/7, above your base load.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#123

Post by Georgelemental »

jandrese wrote: post #121
ETH_start wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nuclear power has proven to be a lot of things, but cheap is not one of them. In theory it is possible to build nuclear power plants at scale and at reasonable cost, but in practice that has not worked out in the real world.

It has actually, in places and times where regulations were reasonable.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#124

Post by [deleted] »

thfuran wrote: post #80
IncRnd wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chungy is correct though. Bitcoin has absolutely nothing to do with "cracking sha256 hashes". Bitcoin hashes until the correct output is found. There are double hashes, but that is solely to avoid collisions and has nothing to do with determining the plaintext from a known digest.

>and has nothing to do with determining the plaintext from a known digest. So why'd you bring it up?

[deleted]

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#125

Post by landoftheice »

fho wrote: post #101
Breza wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you. The early web was full of amazing opportunities but had trouble monetizing things. Cryptocurrency is the opposite, it tries to monetize everything but doesn't have practical uses.

Bitcoin was "old internet" tech at some point. Just for reference, I bought my first BTC at 0.20 €/BTC. Back then it looked like the future to a lot of us ... "hey! We/Hackers can make our own money. And it is superior to state issued money!" ... looking back, it honestly it is somewhat to see the state of cryptocurrencies today.

[dead]

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#126

Post by kelnos »

fsckboy wrote: post #25

I don't specifically miss SETI@home as much as I miss the spirit of the internet back then, the "what will they think of next!?" The idea that all of us could together could crack RSA keys wasn't just a thought exercise, people signed up and did it. Now computers are so complex and task heavy and fraught with problems it seems like more hassle than it's worth. I liked when wondering "why is my machine so slow", that…

The last time I ran SETI@home (and Folding@home), I had a fixed desktop machine that I always left on, and I think it was old enough that the fan speeds weren't variable, so it was just constant background white noise.

In that context, running those apps in the background all day and all night was fine, and if they ever noticeably interfered with performance while I was using the machine, pausing them for a bit was easy to do.

I haven't had a desktop computer in at least 14 years. When I'm not using my laptop, I close it and it goes to sleep. Running CPU-intensive apps on my laptop spools the fans up to their loudest, and makes the bottom of its chassis uncomfortably warm. The CPU cores will sometimes hit thermal throttling too. I just don't want to deal with that sort of thing all day.

Then again, I do have a couple Raspberry Pis, an old Mac Mini (running Linux), and a CM4-based NAS in various places in the house running 24/7. I could probably run an @gome-type app on one or more of those. But for whatever reason, doing so just never really occurred to me.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#127

Post by SkyMarshal »

nprateem wrote: post #112
pmarreck wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are people really prejudiced against aliens and UFO’s though? Aside from the fringe conspiracy theorists fretting about lizard people, and the few claiming to have been abducted, most people seem ambivalent. Largely because whatever the UFOs/UAPs are, they’ve been around for almost a century now, and for all that time almost entirely benign. No invasion, no conquering, no stripping the Earth of resources, no enslaving people, etc. They don’t even shoot down our planes when we spot, track, and record them. It seems most people are withholding judgement for now.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#128

Post by kelnos »

ETH_start wrote: post #95
porknubbins wrote: post #69

Earlier 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.

After looking at my utility bill, less than half of the cost is electricity and natgas; the rest is delivery charges -- that is, paying to maintain the power grid itself. Assuming the utility is breaking that down more or less honestly, reducing the cost of electricity here probably wouldn't decrease my utility bill as dramatically as one might guess. (And I live in California, where electricity prices are notoriously high.)

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#129

Post by kelnos »

Georgelemental wrote: post #123
jandrese wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear power has proven to be a lot of things, but cheap is not one of them. In theory it is possible to build nuclear power plants at scale and at reasonable cost, but in practice that has not worked out in the real world.

It has actually, in places and times where regulations were reasonable.

You mean the places and times and regulatory environment that brought us Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima?

I'm not going to get into a debate over the safety of nuclear over other generation options, but is it conceivable that, if the modern regulatory environment were in place when those three plants were built and operated, they never would have suffered major incidents?

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#130

Post by jimmydorry »

kelnos wrote: post #129
Georgelemental wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has actually, in places and times where regulations were reasonable.

You mean the places and times and regulatory environment that brought us Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima? I'm not going to get into a debate over the safety of nuclear over other generation options, but is it conceivable that, if the modern regulatory environment were in place when those three plants were built and operated, they never would have suffered major incidents?

Those power plants wouldn't have been allowed to be built... so yes? With the modern regulatory environment, those three nuclear power plants would never have melted down (because they wouldn't exist).
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