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SETI@home is in hibernation

setiathome.berkeley.edu

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Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#241

Post by Kye »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #196
dustymcp wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just cant get a laptop i feel comfortable working on, they all have that slow feel, where a desktop is just crisp and i can always just switch out anything i dont like about the current build..

Part of the problem is just raw TDP. There’s only so much horsepower you can squeeze out of 45-65w laptop chips. The brand new Ryzen 9 7945HX is damn fast though, with 16 real cores on a way better node size than Intel is using for their 13th gen parts that, at most, get you 8 real cores plus a 16-core Atom on the same die. Stuff like the Asus Zephyrus Duo have RAID-capable m.2 (and that one has two screens, one of w…

I lucked out with getting one of these on sale just before they went away: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1746503-REG/lenovo_82...

The 300W power brick provides enough juice to feed both the CPU and GPU, and the laptop variant of the 3070 ti isn't too much slower than the desktop version in practical terms (I don't feel that 30% less performance). I've never tried it on battery or on the 135W USB-C power limit, but reviews report getting sufficient performance.

I don't have room for a desktop, so it's nice to not feel like I'm compromising on power with something that fits. The memory and SSDs are user accessible, too.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#242

Post by mysterydip »

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…

Make a windows XP VM and install some of those old versions and see how fast it runs on modern hardware (even while emulating the entire PC to run it on!). Many modern devs chose ease of development over end user efficiency/performance.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#245

Post by b112 »

int0x2e wrote: post #229
seanp2k2 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Someone should do an accurate figure of compute power usage, including things such as cars, or media centres, and then try to analyse how the existing trend of "wasteful development" affects this.

I bet all the upset over bitcoin power usage, is a tiny thing, compared to (for example) the whole node ecosystem.

Even something such as gmail is massively overengineered. Heck, there are very few improvements over the interface a decade ago, yet I bet it used 5% of the power it does now.

Yet think of how much gmail is used.

And it's not just raw compute. 3d on a page for no reason, massive js binaries for no reason eg ram + bandwidth.

A modern phone could last weeks as a browsing device, if looking at static html.

But all of this means more development skill, less use of fluff and junk, care for size of page loads, and on and on.

Put another way, people concerned about power usage, should realise that using node, means burning more coal/NG. Literally.

Because that's where the excess power comes from.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#246

Post by atemerev »

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 spirit is alive with AI.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#247

Post by sph »

philjohn wrote: post #236
sph wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Another option is to get the iPad (and magic keyboard and pencil) and remote desktop into your home machine. Put it behind a VPN, use wake-on-lan and boom, iPad is essentially a fully blown computer.

No, that would turn it into a fully blown thin client.

What is the point of having half a TB of storage, however many gigs of RAM, lidar, radar, sonar, and the best processor architecture money can buy to render a glorified, interactive video?

I would like to be able to write code without having to pay the price of internet latency. I don't need a $1000 tablet to render RDP.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#248

Post by schiffern »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #193
nprateem wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The psyops around UFOs must rank as one the most effective ever launched for prejudicing people against the subject.

> The psyops around UFOs must rank as one the most effective ever launched for prejudicing people against the subject. I struggle to believe that UFOs are objectively real because I have a basic grasp of the size of the universe, how much of it is just empty, how hard it is to travel between the bits that aren't, how inhospitable almost all of it is to organic life, and because everywhere we look it seems primordial…

That's like bacteria in a Petri dish saying:

"I struggle to believe that The Pipetters are objectively real because I have a basic grasp of the size of the laboratory room, how much of it is just empty, how hard it is to travel between the bits that aren't, how inhospitable almost all of it is to bacterial life, and because everywhere we look it seems primordial and uninhabited. I don't think that is prejudice."

Don't forget, we're mind-bogglingly primitive and ignorant. We don't even know the laws of the universe yet! (ie unify GR and quantum mechanics)

Of course we haven't figured out UAP-type technology, whether what we're seeing is interstellar travel or something more exotic.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#249

Post by dools »

latchkey wrote: post #74

This makes me sad because it reminds me of something similar I just went through. For the last few years, I've been running >120k gpus to mine ETH. Before we turned them off after ETH switched to PoS, I tried really hard to find an alternative workload for them. A large number of the GPUs were based on the PS5 chip, which is an APU (CPU+GPU) and ran as blade computers. It is actually a pretty power efficient chip, bu…

Fucking hell crypto is such a colossal waste of resources

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#250

Post by SkyMarshal »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #193
nprateem wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The psyops around UFOs must rank as one the most effective ever launched for prejudicing people against the subject.

> The psyops around UFOs must rank as one the most effective ever launched for prejudicing people against the subject. I struggle to believe that UFOs are objectively real because I have a basic grasp of the size of the universe, how much of it is just empty, how hard it is to travel between the bits that aren't, how inhospitable almost all of it is to organic life, and because everywhere we look it seems primordial…

I agree with everything you said, though there’s also a time dimension to it. Humanity could be a relative latecomer to the galaxy/universe, since we weren’t the first species to evolve on earth. The dinosaurs were first, something like 300 million years ago, went extinct ~65 million years ago, then humanity evolved a few million years ago.

Assume there’s at least one other planet, say in the Milky Way, that evolved life at roughly the same time as Earth, except its first major species was intelligent. They would have a 300 million year head start on humanity. Whatever science and tech they developed in that time would be far beyond what we can currently even imagine. Crossing the vast distances would likely be more viable for such an advanced species.

There’s probably some statistical distribution, Normal or otherwise, governing the odds of emergence of intelligent life on any given planet capable of supporting life. Most such planets may never evolve intelligent life, or may take more than two tries for it. Earth and Humanity may even be somewhere far to the right of the mean and median. But if even just a few planets are further to the right of Earth, then you could end up with those species having hundreds of millions of years of a head start vs humanity in their evolution and development.

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