SETI@home is in hibernation • Hacker News Board

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#251

Post by astronads » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 1:29 PM UTC

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…

It’s an interesting subject and if you broaden your view of what they could be, it gets even more interesting. I.e. instead of little green men flying on faster than light spacecraft gazillions of miles to visit earth, what if they are from a different dimension? Time travelers? What if they’ve always been here? What if they created us, and we are a planetary zoo? What if we are in a simulation and they are the “gods”/admins of our reality?

I’m not suggesting any of those are true, I personally have no idea. But it could be a lot of things and the sky isn’t even the limit.

All I know is that in the past few years there’s been a huge shift in what our leaders are saying and the stigma of “tin foil hat UFO nutjubs” is being lifted. The question is why? And why now?

A good primer on the topic: https://www.uap.guide/quotes/introduction

I just like to keep an open mind…

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#252

Post by dTal » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 1:52 PM UTC

kelnos wrote: post #128

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.

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 notoriousl…

> Assuming the utility is breaking that down more or less honestly

That's a bit of an odd one, as the amount of electricity you consume has little direct effect on maintenance costs. Now, it might be in some sense "fair" to charge heavier consumers more, and there's a second order effect whereby if total demand exceeds some threshold, the grid must be upgraded to cope, but if that "delivery fee" scales with your consumption then you're definitely looking at some "creative" accounting.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#253

Post by flangola7 » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 1:57 PM UTC

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…

Powers is around $0.10/kWh for residential, even lower for industrial

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#254

Post by fundad » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 1:59 PM UTC

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.

Watts per unit of fuel are cheap but only to the power companies who mark it up. We’re in the middle of Record gouging in energy and food and you think a power company won’t gouge you?

They still charge us for the electricity PLUS extra charges for a fund to eventually decommission the nuclear plant. It’s so expensive.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#255

Post by cypress66 » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 2:04 PM UTC

kevinwang wrote: post #86

cypress66 wrote: post #75

Earlier 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

Interesting. Even though I read the paper many times, I didn't catch that. I guess I always skipped that part because I assume I already knew it.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#256

Post by dTal » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 2:06 PM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #226

RobotToaster wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Technologies are not innocent until proven guilty

That depends entirely on the technology, and who is paying who. Fossil fuels have been proven guilty of numerous sins time and again and are still relentlessly defended as innocent. Leaded fuel in particular enjoyed an undeserved benefit of the doubt. Food additives are another category of chemical with very permissive regulation, provided they don't cause lab rats to immediately keel over.

Technology regulation is unprincipled at best and outright corrupt at worst, and even with the most pessimistic estimates nuclear power has the best safety record per watt of any power generation technology (and it's not close).

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#257

Post by redeeman » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 2:16 PM UTC

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…

shit like slack and other electron abominations are not just 10-20% improvement going native. We are talking a simple chat application, irc glorified to load images and preview, and this somehow takes more memory and cpu than the total resources I had in 1995 times 100.

these systems are so abominable, and people have just gotten used to it, hell, many users never even tried anything else, but saying 10-20% is just ridiculous

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#258

Post by pridkett » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 2:20 PM UTC

flangola7 wrote: post #253

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…

Powers is around $0.10/kWh for residential, even lower for industrial

Power prices vary dramatically in the United States - and are even higher in most of the rest of the world.

Here’s the prices for the United States - https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

Even these data are noticeably low for my area where we had a _massive_ rate hike in January that results in total prices for electricity (generation + delivery) without an alternative supplier being up around $0.48/kWh.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#259

Post by jvdvegt » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 2:21 PM UTC

flangola7 wrote: post #253

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…

Powers is around $0.10/kWh for residential, even lower for industrial

I'd pay 0,77 euro per kWh if the government hadn't introduced a 0,40 euro per kWh price cap.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#260

Post by andrepd » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 2:25 PM UTC

b112 wrote: post #245

int0x2e wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 int…

Hit the nail on the head. Inefficiency, which has reached gargantuan proportions, and then blown past that, doesn't just mean page loads so slow that loading a news article takes upwards of 20s on a pocket supercomputer (whereas it took barely a second or two on a Pentium II on a 56kbps connection), all the while text and buttons jump around as assets are loaded. It also means very real waste of energy and battery degradation.