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SETI@home is in hibernation

setiathome.berkeley.edu

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Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#221

Post by LoganDark »

sph wrote: post #209
kalleboo wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My MacBook Pro with M1 Pro is the first laptop I've had that hasn't had that slight hesitation that laptops have always had. I think this is why people praise Apple Silicon so much even though the benchmark numbers may not always back it up - so many other people are also coming from similarly-hobbled laptops.

I have a great desktop, and every day I curse Apple and Tim Cook because I cannot get an iPad Pro that runs full macOS. That would be the ideal device for me when I'm on the go, that I can still use to watch Youtube videos in the bathroom. I do not need a full laptop when I work at home with a $5,000 desktop PC, nor I want to buy a crappy $300 laptop that always feels slow and underpowered. It is really sad to have t…

> nor I want to buy a crappy $300 laptop that always feels slow and underpowered.

Meanwhile, the expensive laptops with actual desktop-class components have unacceptably shitty peripherals, so you can't even pay more money for what you want; it simply doesn't exist.

This is what upsets me the most about laptops.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#222

Post by 411111111111111 »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #219
411111111111111 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a Homeserver, not a Datacenter. The definition of a Datacenter includes that it's complex , which your given example just isn't

Sorry, I was trying to be funny with the datacenter, using that word together with cupboard upper shelf and my equipment :) This may have been funny for people who know me and my 30n years of work with real datacenters. This is also an example of how badly written words on internet convey emotions (especially humour)

I just dislike purposefully misused technical terms, including in jest, as that's how we've gotten to this point where every second disagreement boils down to people not agreeing to the same definition.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#223

Post by pfdietz »

ETH_start wrote: post #179
iopq wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, the costs of nuclear power are quite substantial AND they are front-loaded making it a bad investment. You will need to go through a lot of red tape and spend all the money right away to get some benefit later when it's built. Second, it's not zero carbon if you include building the plants, since the plants have a limited lifespan, so there's still a carbon footprint for the materials. Third, if you switch all…

>>Third, if you switch all of our energy to nuclear today with a magic switch, we would run out of all easy to mine uranium in a few decades. There are vast quantities of uranium in ocean water in concentrations that while low, still allow it to be extracted. More importantly, breeder reactors can harvest 100X more energy from uranium than currently deployed reactor types, and in the process eliminate all of the long…

All those options are significantly more expensive than what we've been building. I mean, we've built fast reactors, and thermal breeders with thorium, and had pilot efforts for U extraction from sea water. None of them could compete with LWRs with a once-through fuel cycle on conventionally mined uranium.

Fast reactors also present the possibility of prompt fast criticality (that is, an actual nuclear explosion) in a serious accident if enough of the core melts and moves around.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#224

Post by pfdietz »

iopq wrote: post #137
jimmydorry wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

But you can't both have cheap nuclear and the current regulations since they are in conflict. But I think molten salt thorium plants can offer superior safety

Molten salt reactors might provide superior safety (the thorium is irrelevant to that). However, they also would likely imply higher operating costs, because now instead of being sealed in fuel elements your fuel is flowing through a larger part of your reactor, and volatile fission products are escaping into the off gas and have to be trapped in another system (which will have to be cooled to prevent melting). So you now have complex systems that are too radioactive for anyone to touch for maintenance. Reactor structural elements are also now exposed to more neutron radiation as well.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#225

Post by LoganDark »

p1mrx wrote: post #27
arvidkahl wrote: post #7

I snuck SETI clients onto the computers in my school. This is a sad moment — but I rejoice in knowing that it embedded the concept of distributed computing among nerds in our collective memory. Protein folding, weather prediction, and looking for pulsars as an in-game feature of EVE Online... glad these things came out of it.

You forgot the biggest distributed computing project: finding SHA256 hashes with lots of zeroes at the beginning.

You could make a religion out of this... oh wait

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#226

Post by pfdietz »

RobotToaster wrote: post #154
kelnos wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There was less than 100 deaths from chernobyl, and only one person died directly from fukushima[1]. I suspect more people have died from falling off roofs while fitting or cleaning solar panels than that. You're correct that nobody builds rbmk reactors any more, but others of the design continued to operate safely for many years. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-cher...

> There was less than 100 deaths from chernobyl

There may well be tens of thousands of deaths from Chernobyl. No, we can't state that these deaths absolutely occurred/will occur -- they are spread throughout large populations, mixed into the vast number of naturally occurring cancers -- but technology regulation is not like criminal prosecution where things must be proved beyond reasonable doubt. Technologies are not innocent until proven guilty.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#227

Post by Noujin »

grumbel wrote: post #204
fho wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> looking back, it honestly it is somewhat to see the state of cryptocurrencies today. Steam and pretty much every other regular retailer dropped Bitcoin support five years ago. The state of Bitcoin feels even more hopeless today than it did back then. It is impressive how you can run a trillion dollar pyramid scheme on just digital nothingness, but I always hoped for cryptocurrency to eventually turn into a real dig…

It's still taking time I think. We understood that L1 should never have been the place for the end consumers and that's why all the chains (Bitcoin-Lightning; ETH various systems like StarkNet, zkSync, Loopring and so on) are currently in the process of finding out how to make everything that is happening on L1 possible on L2. On Ethereum one big part left out is still the the general ability to run EVM code on L2, but that is happening like right now.

Biggest problem after that will be user experience, but I am currently in the Ledger Connect (now Ledger extension) Testflight beta and it makes using dApps on iOS with a hardware wallet a really good experience. No cables, no app switching, no weird abstraction barrier. The new Stax also seems like a well thought out wallet that was created with a focus on UX. Only thing I don't yet see is a good NFC integration for existing payment terminals.

I still think the industry is really early. Layer 3 is now a topic for privacy preserving user interactions which is super interesting. It doesn't then stop at being your own bank, but with it you will be able to really control your own identity without anyone standing in the way. For needing less trust sharing your data and being self sovereign. Using the chains just as a highly accessible, authorized data store.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#228

Post by Noujin »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #213
fho wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Once the original Bitcoin OG cypherpunks shifted from “here is an amazing new technology that could do entirely new things” to tweeting about the USD price of Bitcoin, I knew that era was over. I think it was done by ~2015. The Ethereum research community is still doing very neat cutting-edge things, but they’re a younger generation and didn’t claim to believe in the same principles (only to later disappoint us all.)

How did the Ethereum research community disappoint us all?

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#229

Post by int0x2e »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #192
kelnos wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

I remember when power wasn’t 51c/kWh and a powerful PC didn’t suck down >1000w. I know we get way more perf/watt these days, but I don’t feel as a user like that translates into a notably better experience. For most things for $work, Slack, Spotify, GMail, Google Docs, and VSCode feel a lot less responsive than irssi, Winamp, Sylpheed, OpenOffice, and $ide_of_choice did a decade or two ago. What Dr. Lisa Su giveth, S…

We also used to write code in low-level languages, and system designs were simpler compared to our current approach of writing a lot of stuff in JS and using Electron everywhere, having a huge dependency tree and in general - optimizing for fast development rather than efficient runtime.

Having said that, optimizing for perf is rarely worth it because people don't usually care, and when it is - you can often make the biggest difference by figuring out why some step requires O(n^3) instead of O(n) like it should and fixing that, rather than rewriting the entire stack to get some 10-20% improvement...

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#230

Post by pfdietz »

concordDance wrote: post #208
paganel wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's cheap, at least current costs of building new nuclear tell us that.

And why do you think current ones cost 4x as much as 80s ones even after you adjust for inflation and power output?

Well, construction is a lot safer now. The death rate of construction workers has fallen by a factor of 5 since the 1960s in the US. It's possible those lower construction costs were at least in part due to a cavalier disregard for worker safety.
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