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SETI@home is in hibernation

setiathome.berkeley.edu

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Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#341

Post by postalrat »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #131
thfuran wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

User bitcoinistrash is the one that brought it up, and they're spreading incorrect information about how it works. Cracking sha256 hashes implies trying to reverse a specific hash. There are literally thousands (millions?) of potential inputs that hash to a valid bitcoin mining block output. It's basically a race to find the first one matching the rules of the current block difficulty. The goal isn't to produce any o…

And if you cracked the math of sha256 you wouldnt need to search you would just calculate one of the inputs to produce whatever you want. All zeros would be as easy as one.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#342

Post by kjs3 »

latchkey wrote: post #275
dools wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fucking hell crypto is such a colossal waste of resources

In comparison to everything else, it is tiny. All of banking could be significantly automated to the point that we don't need to build physical buildings all over the planet and stuff them full of humans who drive their cars to work every day to take your money and write it down on a ledger. Talk about absurd. Remember also, this equipment is being turned off because ethereum has grown to be more efficient. It is now…

In other words "It's okay that I'm wildly wasteful, because someone else is wildly wasteful too".

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#343

Post by EricE »

I loaded the original screen saver on a cube farm of computers when it first came out. Wish I would have thought to have taken a picture of the cacophony of color that resulted when you turned the lights in that room out at night but had all the computer monitors on. Then again I might have not even owned a camera back then.

I haven't crunched SETI for years, but I do still tilt at numerical windmills - Primegrid can be great fun if you are lucky enough to hit a mega prime (I have three!).

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#344

Post by selfhoster11 »

IshKebab wrote: post #189
tablespoon wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is even sadder: https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85870&po...

Not everything that's old is worth saving.

This is a piece of shared history of computing. It's worth saving. That's different from having funding to do it.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#345

Post by hot_gril »

Noujin wrote: post #227
grumbel wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, b…

I like cryptocurrency overall, but the bar for convenient purchases is really high. For anyone to care, it'd better be as easy as tapping my credit card on the terminal... which even Apple Pay isn't.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#346

Post by hot_gril »

RobotToaster wrote: post #340
andirk wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you bought $10 USD of it "at the time", you'd have a giant pile of USD. Who is stupid in that lack of purchase? Point is a lot of things are stupid and turn out to work really well. USD is backed by a computer at the Federal Reserve. Sounds pretty stupid but it works.

Oh, I definitely feel stupid for underestimating human stupidity. >USD is backed by a computer at the Federal Reserve. Sounds pretty stupid but it works. Pretty much why I think it's stupid as an investment, it's no better than the USD if SHTF. You can't hold it like gold or silver.

You're right that it's not meant for SHTF. It's for holding value under normal circumstances instead of passively investing in whatever other bubbles (stocks etc).

Btw, not very many people are putting their money into gold and silver. Returns on that have been lackluster for decades. If BTC truly became "digital gold," I wouldn't be very interested.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#347

Post by pfdietz »

iopq wrote: post #329
ETH_start wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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…

I'm only including things that are viable. It seems it's just going to be cheaper to build out significant wind and solar, while keeping nuclear around for the times there's neither wind nor sun.

That's a complete terrible way to use nuclear. The cost per unit of produced energy will be so large that other systems (like storage, including burning hydrogen in turbines) would be much more economical to cover those dark-calm periods.

Nuclear should either be operated all the time, or it shouldn't be used at all.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#348

Post by nprateem »

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…

Saw this and thought of you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yX6ETCKyPo

At some point this ex-Pentagon guy says top guys at NASA, current and former US senators, Obama and current and former US military and intelligence officials are all on record as saying UAPs are real. He says the question has now moved on to what they are, given there are recorded sighting of them going back at least to the 1940s if not far longer.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#349

Post by ETH_start »

pfdietz wrote: post #230
concordDance wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It'd be valuable to determine the additional lives lost due to increased energy costs from these higher construction standards, and the lives saved from these standards.

My wholly intuition-based guess would be that the net effect of these higher construction/safety standards is massively more lives lost.

But if that is the case, it's worth remembering that the lives lost from higher construction standards are a result of second order effects and populist government-interventionist political ideologies are generally quite poor at factoring in second order effects, as we saw with COVID lockdown policies, which resulted in far more lives lost from the second order effects of the lockdowns than lives saved from the lockdowns mitigating the spread of COVID.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#350

Post by pfdietz »

ETH_start wrote: post #349
pfdietz wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It'd be valuable to determine the additional lives lost due to increased energy costs from these higher construction standards, and the lives saved from these standards. My wholly intuition-based guess would be that the net effect of these higher construction/safety standards is massively more lives lost. But if that is the case, it's worth remembering that the lives lost from higher construction standards are a resu…

Another possibility is that the US simply isn't building as much these days, and heavy construction might have lost economies of scale. The Baumol Effect is another possible contributor. Renewable construction is not of the same kind, especially PV.

Specific construction expertise for nuclear very likely has degraded (the US can no longer forge the large reactor vessels for PWRs, for example.)

Nuclear is going to be further negatively affected if there's a transition away from fossil fuels, since the industrial infrastructure for making steam turbines will no longer have as much support. Bespoke turbines from smaller makers will be more expensive.

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