81–90 of 90 posts
The SETI@Home screensaver [0] (the predecessor to BOINC) was the peak of nerd-cool when I was 11 or 12 years old. I had no idea what any of the graphs meant, and still don't, but I knew that I could help find _aliens_, and look like a hacker doing it [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI@home?useskin=vector#/medi...
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I understand that; I didn't express my question clearly: Given the electricity used, how efficient are (Boinc + my desktop) at generating heat? For example, is it equally efficient to use Boinc + Desktop to warm my office as it is to use a space heater, or electrical radiated heat?
A computer consuming 500 watts of power and an electric heater consuming 500 watts of power are equivalent. Therefore, I think it's perfectly reasonable to run BOINC to warm your office.
Distributive DCP lets you compute other people's distributed research/workloads and get paid for it (no crypto involved). Compute workloads get run in secure js/wasm compute nodes (which could be your browser, or a screensaver, etc). For instance, my friend built a Blender cycles renderer using it It's cool tech continuing the awesome legacy of BOINC! I work at Distributive, AMA if you're curious
More important for this discussion: there is zero indication of what people earn, in return for offering their computing power. Which probably means that it isn't much - better to mine some random coin?
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Just wait until you hear about Bitcoin
Just wait until you hear about most ecommerce platforms doing `SELECT * FROM` just to display 2 columns.
The situation is a bit different today. Back when Bionic and Set@home were more common the CPUs used more or less the same power whether they were idle or in full use. Nowadays however running something like this will run up considerable extra power usage and is no longer "free".
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If you're this salty about SETI being a waste Of computing cycles, wait till you learn about bitcoin.
It's weird people keep comparing this to Bitcoin. That's like "Oh our best & brightest sunk years and billions into a known-bad type of Alzheimers research? Wait till you hear about Pets.com"
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If you're this salty about SETI being a waste Of computing cycles, wait till you learn about bitcoin.
It's weird people keep comparing this to Bitcoin. That's like "Oh our best & brightest sunk years and billions into a known-bad type of Alzheimers research? Wait till you hear about Pets.com"
One was a launching platform for dozens of scientific and other large scale volunteer computing projects, and the other's value is entirely based in speculation.
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Folding@Home predates the ML approaches to protein folding. Just because it has been eclipsed now doesn’t mean it wasn’t worthwhile.
Well, it predates the deep-learning ML approaches to protein folding like Alphafold. But people have been applying ML methods to protein folding for decades -- that has long been the two camps in the protein-folding bioinformatics world -- whether the best way to get structures was to simulate what the protein was actually doing or if there was a computational shortcut.