[HN Gopher] SETI@home is in hibernation
___________________________________________________________________
SETI@home is in hibernation
Author : anotherhue
Score : 466 points
Date : 2023-03-18 00:49 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (setiathome.berkeley.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (setiathome.berkeley.edu)
| macawfish wrote:
| This can only be because they found the aliens.
| habibur wrote:
| We need something like seti@home for large language model
| calculation. As OpenAI is completely closed now.
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| A couple of links -
|
| Refs:
|
| [1] Awesome Distributed System Projects,
| https://github.com/roma-glushko/awesome-distributed-system-p...
|
| [2] Distributed Computing with Open-Source Software
| http://stanford.edu/~rezab/slides/infosys_reza.pdf
| ilikepi wrote:
| On the other hand, the effort to brute force a 72-bit RC5 key
| continues...
|
| https://stats.distributed.net/projects.php?project_id=8
|
| https://www.distributed.net/RC5
| snvzz wrote:
| But no sight of OGR-29.
| Aeolun wrote:
| This is a waste of computing resources I can get behind :)
| keyle wrote:
| I too had this installed on my computer for months on end in the
| old days!
|
| I imagine today, with the advancement of "AI", there would be a
| much better solution to the problem...
|
| RIP SETI at home, you felt like the future.
| tantalor wrote:
| "AI Joins Hunt for ET: Study Finds 8 Potential Alien Signals"
| (36 days ago)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34729360
| neoneye2 wrote:
| If you have compute available, there are several science project
| to contribute to. https://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php
|
| Self-promotion: In particular LODA has my interest. It's a math
| AI, that uses OEIS as training data. https://boinc.loda-
| lang.org/loda/
|
| Disclaimer: I'm not the primary developer, but I made some
| contributions to LODA, such as the web editor for LODA programs:
| https://github.com/loda-lang/loda-rust
| sacnoradhq wrote:
| If SETI/BOINC wants to rearchitect as an IPFS or I2P app that can
| also run on k8s CUDA clusters, I know some large HPC shops that
| may be interested in partnering.
| jasongill wrote:
| Wow, this is sad. I remember when this project was released in
| 1999 - we installed it on all the workstations in our office in
| an effort to be the first to find ET. Loved bragging about the
| cool graph, saying it could be an alien signal. Sad to see the
| project come to an end, even if it was the distant precursor to
| things like BitTorrent and Bitcoin
| dylan604 wrote:
| I too tried to use all of our workstations to run this trying
| to break into the top charts. Oh how young and naive I was
| thinking the 8-10 computers I had were effective enough for
| that.
| tablespoon wrote:
| This is even sadder:
| https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85870&po...
| IshKebab wrote:
| Not everything that's old is worth saving.
| tokai wrote:
| >those tapes will probably also be discarded as well.
|
| Maybe the Berkeley Library would take them.
| raziel2701 wrote:
| The UC Berkeley library is getting its funding cut. The
| physics library and some other have been closed.
| tokai wrote:
| it doesn't cost much to put some shelf meters of tapes in
| the closed stacks.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| We did that as well on a bunch of spare Sun SPARC servers that
| were considered powerful back in their day. A part of me always
| wondered if I had been tricked into cracking encryption for the
| assorted agencies and that this had nothing to do with
| monitoring the quietest frequency in the galaxy.
| peterleiser wrote:
| Lol! I worked for SETI@home as an undergrad. If something
| nefarious was going on then my coworkers were extremely good
| actors, right down to faking an entire codebase and a
| database filled with processed work units. Hey, I'd probably
| be suspicious of SETI too if I hadn't worked for SETI.
| Cheers!
| LinuxBender wrote:
| I believe you. I think the missing pieces that triggered
| those little voices in my head were the lack of the project
| being open source code at the time and the inability to
| listen to the signals. I spent my childhood talking on the
| radio so it just felt like something I should have been
| able to do.
| peterleiser wrote:
| The open source aspect is a good point. I'm guessing the
| team thought making the source open would increase the
| risk of cheating; misguided I know, but cheaters were a
| pain in the neck at first.
|
| Many of the folks there were into music (in bands, wrote
| music related software, etc), so I'm guessing the signals
| were boring to listen to.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| That's exactly what an NSA agent would say!
| [deleted]
| tus666 wrote:
| Wow that takes me back. Waaay back.
| latchkey wrote:
| 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, but the blades themselves are little
| use for anything that requires a lot of networking or data (they
| are diskless and ipxe boot a custom ubuntu).
|
| I found a professor who's been doing research on various
| planetary data crunching efforts and we got his software (I think
| based on BOINC) running on these blades.
|
| His software is analyzing data from telescopes to look for binary
| quasars. We crunched the numbers from our proof of concept and
| estimated that if we dedicated all the GPUs I have of that class,
| to this one task, that a 1 year of computation would be done in 1
| month. At least two people have received Nobel's based on similar
| findings.
|
| The problem was finding funding to pay for the operating
| expenses, megawatts of power, so it never got off the ground and
| the hardware has been turned off and decommissioned. Such a
| bummer.
| esperent wrote:
| > I've been running >120k gpus to mine ETH
|
| So when the sea levels rise and destroy my home, I'll know who
| to blame. Thank you.
| pxmpxm wrote:
| At 1-3mm year, I am highly confident you'll be long dead
| before that happens.
|
| 120k gpus is like what USD50mio capex at least? Did you even
| get any of that back w/o accounting for electricity?
| latchkey wrote:
| Oh yea, but we wasted it on
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35206003
| latchkey wrote:
| [flagged]
| jeromegv wrote:
| That hydro that went to you couldn't be shared to the
| connected network and they had to power the rest of the
| network with gas instead. Unless you built your own dam,
| which I really doubt you did.
|
| Also unused hydro accumulates in the lake, so it's not like
| hydro was wasting away and needed to be used.
| latchkey wrote:
| The only users of the power in the area are data centers.
| The power goes directly there. The same data centers
| you're using to access services on the internet. There is
| more than enough hydro in the area so they don't have to
| turn on the gas. Very large river based hydro and the
| dams were built long ago.
| bunabhucan wrote:
| I don't know if you know this but electricity can travel
| through conductors to other places.
| ifni wrote:
| Not everything is connected to the grid, you know.
|
| Here's an example of a single hydro dam a LONG way from
| the grid which (pre-Cryptocurrency gold rush) had 12 MW
| of unused power generation capacity plus they were
| talking up the possibility of adding an additional 20 MW
| of generation.
|
| https://www.hydroreview.com/business-finance/boralex-
| acquire...
|
| It's not going to be the only one.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Almost everything is connected to the grid. And even if
| it isn't... Even if it is an isolated hydro plant only
| connected to a data centre, _other useful digital
| services_ could have run there instead.
|
| There's really no getting away from the fact that
| cryptocurrencies waste huge amounts of energy,
| _significantly_ contributing to climate change just to
| move money from idiots to arseholes.
|
| Not just energy too - think how many resources it takes
| to make 120k GPUs. He _should_ feel deep guilt about it.
| latchkey wrote:
| I am very happy that ETH switched to PoS. Now it just
| runs in the other data centers that are already in the
| same location and uses a fraction of the power.
|
| The GPUs were already made and older models. The PS5
| chips were seconds that never made it into PS5's. They
| would have gone to waste regardless.
|
| If is really interesting to me how people have some sort
| of moral obligation to tell others how to spend energy. I
| find gaming a total waste of time/energy, but I don't
| tell people to stop playing games or that they should
| feel guilty about it.
| IshKebab wrote:
| > The GPUs were already made and older models.
|
| Just because they had already been made doesn't mean that
| _you_ using them has no impact on the world. If you hadn
| 't used them then other people would have, there would be
| less demand for GPUs, and fewer GPUs would be made in
| future.
|
| You're clearly smart enough to understand that; you just
| don't want to because it makes you feel guilty. Honestly
| I think you should just own it. I assume you made a
| suitably large amount of money? I can't say I wouldn't
| have done the same but I hope I would have the honesty to
| admit I basically burnt down a forest to take money from
| idiots.
|
| > If is really interesting to me how people have some
| sort of moral obligation to tell others how to spend
| energy.
|
| It's almost as if we all live on the same planet and the
| way we spend energy affects other people!
| latchkey wrote:
| > If you hadn't used them then other people would have,
| there would be less demand for GPUs, and fewer GPUs would
| be made in future.
|
| No. They were based on stock that didn't sell. It is a
| common misconception with GPU mining that you had to use
| the latest and greatest. The 4-5 year older tech was more
| ROI efficient and we got access to it, so we used it.
| Nobody wanted it cause it was old. We put it to use for a
| few years and now it'll either find a new home or get
| recycled for parts.
|
| > I would have the honesty to admit I basically burnt
| down a forest to take money from idiots.
|
| See... that's a personal attack. I don't see things the
| way you do. In my eyes, attempting to build a better
| financial system isn't 'taking money from idiots'. Given
| all that's going on in the banking world today, I find it
| hard to believe anyone would want to continue with the
| status quo.
|
| You literally have Yellen sitting in a room with her
| friends deciding which bank should live or die. I'd like
| to see that and a whole lot more in traditional finance
| get cleaned up. Helping get ETH off the ground was a good
| thing... now that it is on PoS, this whole debate about
| energy use, is a moot point.
|
| > It's almost as if we all live on the same planet and
| the way we spend energy affects other people!
|
| Sure, but don't be hypocritical about it. I'm sure that
| there are 1000's of ways that you personally don't do
| your part either. Ever fly in a plane to take a vacation?
| No one on this planet is doing a perfect job at
| minimizing their footprint and I certainly don't feel
| like I'm above anyone else to criticize others on their
| energy ab(use).
| esperent wrote:
| > It's not going to be the only one.
|
| It probably is the only one, or at least an unusual
| outlier.
| latchkey wrote:
| You are correct. There is one in upstate new york as
| well. An old Alcoa smelter factory powered off the Moses-
| Saunders dam. It is so remote and sparsely populated that
| transmitting the power elsewhere is just too expensive.
| I've even seen their energy bills and the transmission
| costs alone are insane.
| latchkey wrote:
| While true, it isn't an easy task. You have to build and
| maintain infrastructure to transmit it and that is super
| expensive, with a lot of loss.
|
| This is a remote location, that is sparsely populated,
| with a big river and many dams. There is a lot more power
| generated in the area, than there are users for it.
|
| It would be going to waste otherwise.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| for a fraction of a percent of the problem that isn't even in
| use anymore?
|
| misdirected angst
| esperent wrote:
| "angst". Interesting word. It's always used to dismiss
| people's anger. But in this case we're talking about anger
| at our climate being damaged, our home, earth, the only
| place we have to live. And for what? To generate fake (or
| not fake, who cares) electronic currency. This anger is not
| misdirected, it's laser focused on you greedy fucks who
| think it's ok to use 120,000 computers for this bullshit.
| You deserve anger and scorn for this, as you scurry around
| with excuses like "it's not just us", or "that electricity
| was just lying around unused".
| latchkey wrote:
| Ever travel to SE Asia? There are millions of kids that
| go to gaming centers. They are rooms in shacks, full of
| computers and they sit there 24/7 playing games online.
| They are burning electricity non-stop and this is
| majority coal based energy.
| recuter wrote:
| > The problem was finding funding to pay for the operating
| expenses, megawatts of power, so it never got off the ground
| and the hardware has been turned off and decommissioned. Such a
| bummer.
|
| You ran 120,000 graphics card to mine ETH and didn't end up
| with lambos or like... ether.. to donate to the professor along
| with the hardware?
| latchkey wrote:
| Hookers and blow actually. Space dust.
| recuter wrote:
| _Nice_.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| anybody running them would have the same operational costs,
| probably far higher since miners gravitate to the lowest cost
| power source
| recuter wrote:
| He couldn't even donate 120 out of the 120k cards and one
| lambo? I'm beginning to think this whole crypto thing is
| sus
| moralestapia wrote:
| Yeah, that's either a typo or bull ... or maybe one of the
| top 5 ETH miners is among us.
| latchkey wrote:
| Nah, while this was a large operation, there were much much
| larger ETH miners.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Wow.
| dools wrote:
| Fucking hell crypto is such a colossal waste of resources
| latchkey wrote:
| 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 proof of
| stake instead of proof of work and it has been a relatively
| huge success. Over night, this single change wiped out every
| single GPU mined network out there by removing all the
| profitability. That was the plan from day one and I'm glad it
| worked!
| dools wrote:
| The financial system has put a lot of effort into
| automation obliviously because it means they make more
| money. So to the extent that they could be automated, they
| are automated and will continue to increase the level of
| automation.
|
| It's also not a reasonable comparison because banks do
| something useful (even if I think they could be much better
| regulated and are too profitable and shouldn't be running
| the payment system).
|
| Crypto does nothing useful, it's like an online casino, or
| an online game.
|
| Do you know any online games that consume anywhere near as
| much hardware and electricity?
| pmarreck wrote:
| does it have anything to do with the fact that the USG has
| basically said "UFO's are real", and since UFO's were always real
| (in the sense that I'm sure there were always some kind of
| "flying object" that was "unidentifiable"), this is in effect a
| tacit admittance that they are probably extraterrestrially
| piloted? >..<
| lamontcg wrote:
| At one point around 1998 I had the #2 spot on the units-pert-time
| leaderboard with an AlphaServer 4100 (IIRC) that I managed and
| got bosses approval to throw setiathome on there.
|
| The #1 spot was someone's Sun E15k or something like that.
| atonse wrote:
| I wonder if this explosion in GPU processing would've made things
| 1000x faster? Never paid attention to it.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| Purely speculative - but perhaps the explosion in GPU power and
| storage capacity means they can do this processing in house
| now.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Were the searches performed by the @home software so extensive
| that there's no other use for that data, or were there trade
| offs made for compute time from when it was originally created
| being too much for the time? So if the software was updated to
| take advantage of today's compute scanning the same data, would
| there be any benefit? I seem to recall some results of "AI"
| searching existing data to find things that were previously
| missed. Wondering if the same might be true of the SETI@home
| data.
| ShakataGaNai wrote:
| It'll never not amuse me that in the first season of NCIS (circa
| 2003), Seti@Home (or someones clone of it) was the screen saver
| on Gibbs computer in a couple episodes.
|
| At the same time we had already installed Seti@Home on basically
| every computer we had access to... including school.
|
| Good times.
| SturgeonsLaw wrote:
| Is it possible to distribute AI training like this so that people
| could donate their idle processing power to creating a truly open
| source unencumbered LLM?
| alwayslikethis wrote:
| It's not clear that machine learning models consisting of
| weights are copyrightable in the first place. They are not the
| results of human authorship, but are instead essentially
| produced by a machine trying to optimize a bunch of values.
| mr_toad wrote:
| If you can get copyright on a photo just by pointing a camera
| and pressing a button you can probably get copyright on an
| AI.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| I'm guessing you missed this discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35191206
|
| No copyright on an AI if it was machine generated, which
| the training is. Great catch kmeisthax!
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Yes. You'd have to package up slices of the training set and
| the prior epoch as work units and host them. Our hypothetical
| GPT@home clients download the training set, train _just_ those
| examples, and then send back their gradients. The server then
| averages all the gradients together.
|
| As far as I can tell this isn't any different conceptually from
| the distributed inference setup that PyTorch/Huggingface
| Accelerate/etc support. Of course those were built for
| cooperating machines owned by the same organization with lots
| of high-speed I/O. In an @home/BOINC setup, you need to package
| things up into work units that get sent out to other people's
| computers, and you don't get anything back until the end. So
| it's higher-latency and you have to worry about people cheating
| the system with bogus work.
|
| I'm not sure if this would be more efficient or cheaper than
| just renting out a bunch of AWS spot instances with GPUs in
| them.
| pxmpxm wrote:
| Err gradients aren't independently additive like that right?
| cypress66 wrote:
| Batches need to be reasonably sized. Llms are usually trained
| for a single epoch. If you just average the gradients once,
| it will be awful.
|
| The main problem I believe is that you would need extremely
| high bandwidth. For a 100B model you're looking at 400GB of
| gradients you need to send each batch. There's a reason why
| super fast networking is used.
| [deleted]
| gradys wrote:
| It's harder because gradient descent is usually done with near
| synchronous updates of the parameters across the whole model on
| all training hosts.
| why_only_15 wrote:
| Yeah, the synchronous updates are a big deal. To get an idea
| of how much bandwidth this typically takes, Oracle has
| 1600gbps per node of interconnect with latency very low,
| guessing in the tens of microseconds. A really good home
| connection might have 1gbps of interconnect with latency in
| the tens of milliseconds. The big question is whether we
| really need all this interconnect -- GPT-JT[1] is a very
| promising step in this direction. The idea is that we just
| drop most of the gradient updates and it still works well.
| Unclear whether this will take off generally -- if it does it
| would be a huge deal, because 1600gbps of interconnect is
| _very_ expensive.
|
| [1]: https://www.together.xyz/blog/releasing-v1-of-gpt-jt-
| powered...
| rtkwe wrote:
| The issue with all these types of projects now is that
| computers are way better at idling now so there's no longer as
| much effectively free compute to be harvested. SETI@home made a
| lot more sense when CPUs consumed roughly the same power
| regardless of the load.
| ikmckenz wrote:
| The Hivemind project is just that
|
| https://github.com/learning-at-home/hivemind
| melvinmelih wrote:
| I remember having to choose between mining bitcoin or running
| folding@home back in 2011. I chose to save humanity...
| jonas21 wrote:
| Which one did you choose?
| dennis_jeeves1 wrote:
| lol. I think that would be Bitcoin.
| agumonkey wrote:
| back when distributed humanity improvement were not causing weird
| bubbles
| O__________O wrote:
| Why? For explanation, see link below; appears this was announced
| back in 2020, title should be updated:
|
| - https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85267
| roughly wrote:
| Honestly, this seems like a pretty good outcome - "we got all
| the help we need, thank you all."
| jjulius wrote:
| Not just announced in 2020 - the hibernation went into effect
| on March 31st, 2020. Surprised as some of these comments are
| (even me!), it's been asleep for three years now.
| morpheuskafka wrote:
| Interestingly, there is an update published just 10 days ago
| that seems to be a more permanent end to the project than the
| OP: https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85996
| 71a54xd wrote:
| This is really kind of sad, SETI@home and Folding@Home were some
| of the first projects that got me really into computers and GPU
| programming. It was so cool to me in middle school to think that
| my computer was helping do a small part of _real_ incredibly
| complicated problem solving.
| sizzle wrote:
| Folding@Home was something I ran instead of mining bitcoin at
| the time, it really made me feel fulfilled, but alas here I am
| without my crazy bitcoin money because I rather fold proteins
| to solve diseases back then hah
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| I did bitcoin but used it for beer money. RIP the 150 or so
| coins I mined.
| bee_rider wrote:
| This is where most of my "what if" thoughts about Bitcoin
| go. I heard about it when it was pretty cheap -- I want to
| say single digit dollars, but it was a while ago.
|
| But if I'd have gotten into it at the time, I surely would
| have decided "it'll never go higher" around $200 at most.
| [deleted]
| basicallybones wrote:
| samesies :(
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| Don't even get me started...
|
| I remember reading the roi of mining with an AGP GPU just
| wasn't worth it and stuck to various projects on BOINC.
|
| To be fair I likely would have lost/spent anything I mined,
| but still.
| babuloseo wrote:
| It was pretty freaking magical, god I hate capitalism
| sometimes.
| joshu wrote:
| i've been running this shit for years and i never detected any
| aliens... bah
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| If they have useful data they need to upload it somewhere. Maybe
| nobody cares now, but at some point there will be an AI capable
| of ingesting it and it might see something worthwhile in it.
| lacker wrote:
| check out https://bldata.berkeley.edu/pipeline/ if you want to
| download terabytes of radio telescope data from scans searching
| for aliens....
| arvidkahl wrote:
| 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.
| p1mrx wrote:
| You forgot the biggest distributed computing project: finding
| SHA256 hashes with lots of zeroes at the beginning.
| LoganDark wrote:
| You could make a religion out of this... oh wait
| p1mrx wrote:
| How about a verifiable religion, where the "bible" hashes
| to 0 exactly? The only problem is, I'm not omniscient
| enough to write it.
| elif wrote:
| Maybe the existing data contains patterns that simply are not in
| a form humans have the capacity to comprehend?
|
| Maybe the path forward is not through seeking the patterns we
| were looking for harder, but in creating AI's that have been told
| that patterns exist, and they must determine the nature of those
| patterns on their own, until 1000 AI's with typewriters produce
| an alien Shakespeare.
| tpict wrote:
| My dad's Power Mac running the SETI screensaver is one of my
| earliest memories of the Internet. Makes me a little sad
| villgax wrote:
| Anyone up for Llama training?
| sacnoradhq wrote:
| LLaMA? :)
| [deleted]
| qtwhat wrote:
| sad.
|
| wont be able to hear from Three-body from now on. human's eye are
| closed.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| It's kind of sad that in this era of the commons having more
| computing power than could possibly be fully utilized,
| distributed computing like this (aka besides cryptomining) is
| mostly a footnote in the history books.
| Breza wrote:
| I have a tangential question. I remember distributed processing
| being a "next big thing" back in the day. The idea was that a
| company could run complex operations by borrowing some power from
| all their employee's computers. Seti@home proved the concept was
| possible. So what happened? Why can't I train a random forest
| across all the computers currently logged into my company's VPN?
| saagarjha wrote:
| The employee computers got put on the cloud, which let them be
| shared.
| lacker wrote:
| Nowadays a modern radio telescope, let's take MeerKAT in South
| Africa, can produce maybe 10T of data per minute. The total
| bandwidth out of the site is orders of magnitude less, because
| it's in the middle of nowhere in the desert. Same thing for
| pretty much all the radio telescopes - the technology improves
| over time, and we capture orders of magnitude more data, but
| the internet connections to these remote locations stay very
| slow.
|
| So we have to do most of the processing on site.
|
| AI training is similar but not quite so extreme - when you try
| to use a bunch of consumer machines, bandwidth becomes the
| limiting factor.
| acjacobson wrote:
| If bandwidth wasn't a limiting factor would it be worth it or
| still make sense to use big machines onsite?
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| because it's probably easier to write the code to run on a
| single 256 core server with 8tb of RAM.
| ikiris wrote:
| idle states, and the scam of cryptocurrency happened.
| nonagono wrote:
| It's just not worth it. Writing programs in a distributed
| fashion is hard, setting up compute servers on employee
| machines is awkward, and few companies actually need to run
| large compute jobs. So while it's in theory possible, the non-
| compute costs of doing this would eat up any compute savings.
| mwbajor wrote:
| What most people don't know is that there are two SETI
| organizations. The SETI institute and the SETI League,
| http://www.setileague.org/
|
| SETI @ home is run by the SETI Institute. As a participant in
| SETI @ home, your only contribution is your computing power.
|
| The SETI League has a much more interesting program called
| "project Argus": http://www.setileague.org/argus/
|
| Its a distributed version of SETI at home whereas you own and
| control your own receiver. Its run by folks in the amateur radio
| community. It was launched in the late 90's before the
| advancements of SDRs and has alot of potential today. Its truly
| an open source initiative which is what SETI should be.
|
| You might say "a backyard radio telescope cannot compare to
| Arecibo or the Allen Array". In terms of antenna gain you are
| right, but right now, the Allen Array can only look in a few
| directions simultaneously and Arecibo is a pile of rubble. Many
| smaller telescopes is better than nothing.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > You might say "a backyard radio telescope cannot compare to
| Arecibo or the Allen Array".
|
| Any radio telescope that exists can compare favorably to
| Arecibo, actually.
| [deleted]
| DarknessFalls wrote:
| It seems like modern machine learning models are more aptly
| suited for crunching this data with a new method of distributing
| the segments.
| fsckboy wrote:
| 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 "top" or "ps auxww" had a
| chance of fitting on a screen or two. Now I wouldn't look forward
| to unleashing an eternal, 24-7, intensive task with a connection
| to the internet, even though I have a lot more bandwidth.
| bitcoinistrash wrote:
| > The idea that all of us could together could crack RSA keys
| wasn't just a thought exercise, people signed up and did it.
|
| Hasn't changed that much. Here we are in 2023 where most of
| this distributed power goes to cracking sha 256 hashes. Just
| for speculation and profit instead of leaderboards.
| chungy wrote:
| Bitcoin has nothing to do with "cracking SHA256 hashes", for
| what it's worth. The only thing remotely related is how it
| brute-forces inputs until it generates hashes that begin with
| a certain number of bits set to 0.
| cypress66 wrote:
| > 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.
| pmarreck wrote:
| "Less than the target" in effect is "more leading zeroes"
| depending on how low the target is. But the lower, the
| more leading zeros, Right?
| kevinwang wrote:
| It's in the original Bitcoin whitepaper
| chungy wrote:
| Thanks, this is likely where I read it first. I hadn't
| realized the actual implementation got more complicated
| than that. :)
| cypress66 wrote:
| 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.
| hot_gril wrote:
| It's continually testing the strength of SHA256. If you can
| find a way to even partially crack it, you win money. Edit:
| Also, way more hashes are happening all the time now,
| increasing the chance that someone finds a collision if it
| were possible.
| chungy wrote:
| That's still not what the Bitcoin miners are doing.
| They're manipulating inputs, trillions of times a second,
| just to match a "magic" target for a SHA256 hash starting
| with a certain number of bits set to 0.
|
| Cracking hashes would imply that they're taking pre-
| existing hashes and reversing them to find the input.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Hashes have multiple requirements for security. You're
| talking about only one facet, which is that you cannot be
| given a hash and produce a matching input without
| consulting a rainbow table (I think there's a term for
| this, I forget it though).
| IncRnd wrote:
| Chungy is correct though. Bitcoin has absolutely nothing
| to do with "cracking sha256 hashes". Bitcoin hashes until
| the correct output is found. There are double hashes, but
| that is solely to avoid collisions and has nothing to do
| with determining the plaintext from a known digest.
| salawat wrote:
| It's kinda sad. If we persisted all the hashes that have
| been tried, we'd have the mother of all rainbow tables.
|
| Be a bitch to search. But damn would we know the
| topography of the function space.
| [deleted]
| int0x2e wrote:
| Why hasn't anyone made that crypto currency yet?
| salawat wrote:
| Because it would actually solve a problem?
|
| ...I'll see myself out.
| thfuran wrote:
| >and has nothing to do with determining the plaintext
| from a known digest.
|
| So why'd you bring it up?
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| 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 one specific input/hash pair.
| glass3 wrote:
| In which context would somebody try to reverse a hash?
| That would be like arbitrarily enhancing a bad-resolution
| image to see something that cannot be seen.
|
| Hash collision should always be about finding matching
| content for a hash.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| hot_gril wrote:
| Yeah, cryptocurrency stuff is the closest I've ever felt
| today to the spirit of the old internet.
| SECProto wrote:
| > cryptocurrency stuff is the closest I've ever felt today
| to the spirit of the old internet
|
| Cryptocurrency feels like the exact _opposite_ of the old
| internet to me - it feels like a bunch of anonymous bros
| looking for the next sucker to scam out of money and get
| rich quick.
| Breza wrote:
| I agree with you. The early web was full of amazing
| opportunities but had trouble monetizing things.
| Cryptocurrency is the opposite, it tries to monetize
| everything but doesn't have practical uses.
| fho wrote:
| Bitcoin was "old internet" tech at some point. Just for
| reference, I bought my first BTC at 0.20 EUR/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.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| 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.)
| Noujin wrote:
| How did the Ethereum research community disappoint us
| all?
| thfuran wrote:
| They just said that they didn't.
| fho wrote:
| Yep ... I just looked it up, I bought my first BTC in
| 2010/11 ... Back when they were just handing out 0.01 BTC
| to mess around.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| I thought it was a dumb idea at the time, that nobody
| would be stupid enough to invest in.
|
| I still think it's a dumb idea, but I've learnt not to
| underestimate human stupidity.
| fho wrote:
| See ... Back then we thought that it would be replacing
| cash. Some friends and I were thinking about having
| wallets in smart cards (technically possible) and
| distributing BTC terminals to local businesses.
|
| The whole crazy investment thing came much later and
| basically destroyed any hope of using BTC on a daily
| basis.
| andirk wrote:
| 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.
| landoftheice wrote:
| [dead]
| grumbel wrote:
| > 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
| digital cash. Bypassing the fees and incompatibles
| between regular payment schemes. But none of that has
| happened. Bitcoin is still slow and expensive and there
| is hardly anything you can buy with it anyway. Worse yet,
| most Bitcoin still gets stored in "banks" instead of
| being self hosted, so it failed on the whole P2P cash
| thing as well.
|
| It's impressive tech, but for all the wrong reasons.
| Noujin wrote:
| 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.
| delecti wrote:
| I think before ~2014ish it felt like the old internet.
| Using bitcoin to buy drugs online really felt like the
| internet was free and empowering again.
| johnyzee wrote:
| The 'old internet' was chuck full of hucksters and
| scammers and 'futurists' selling snake oil, at least from
| circa 1993 onward and in full bloom since around the time
| of the Netscape IPO. It was pretty much exactly like the
| crypto industry, a core of real technologists doing
| amazing stuff, and then a whole industry of scammy sales
| people on top of it.
|
| If you are talking about pre-web, I'd say crypto had that
| era too, up until around 2012 when bitcoin really took
| off.
| wvoch235 wrote:
| The nature of the scam has evolved, and possibly the
| parties involved have changed, but the scams were always
| there.
| [deleted]
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Totally. Now it feels like the internet is more about
| exploiting people for profit.
| ar9av wrote:
| :'-( I installed SETI@HOME on both my office and home machine
| back in '98 / 99. I know my contributions were not very much in
| the sense just how much can one laptop & a desktop do but I
| watched (and hoped) SETI@HOME as it progressed (:-) and then
| there's always that wishful thinking that someone somewhere
| would hit jackpot)...
|
| Hoping you guys come back again.
|
| Best.
| dheera wrote:
| > I wouldn't look forward to unleashing an eternal, 24-7,
| intensive task with a connection to the internet
|
| Just use another machine for stuff like this? Spare computers
| are cheap nowadays.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >I miss the spirit of the internet back then
|
| Classic SETI@home's website[1] is a blast to browse.
|
| [1]: https://seticlassic.ssl.berkeley.edu/
| TheCaptain4815 wrote:
| The recent neural network "revolution" is giving me those
| vibes, even though it'll ironically kill the old internet with
| the upcoming spam bots.
| hot_gril wrote:
| I get the opposite vibe because the forerunner is ClosedAI.
| TheCaptain4815 wrote:
| True, but to be fair it was only recently that OpenAI
| really took over with ChatGPT and their api cost. Before
| that (just 3-4 months ago), the open source models were
| excellent competitors.
| rurp wrote:
| If it were based on open ended tooling that anyone interested
| could experiment freely with, I would feel the same.
| Unfortunately these giant LLMs are almost the complete
| opposite of that.
| xtracto wrote:
| I was just thinking that it would be great to do something
| like seti@home but for an open libre super LLM: Install a
| client that would help run / train the huge llm and you get
| Access to the network to do queries. Kind of how
| napster/Kazaa were at their time.
|
| I would love to work on doing something like that.
| j5155 wrote:
| What you're describing is http://chat.petals.ml/
| Freebytes wrote:
| That is actually a great idea. One of the issues with a
| network, however, is how the output would be produced in
| such a scenario and how the dictionary would be
| controlled and how the training data could be managed.
| The transformer model allows different RNNs to be
| separated, but it would be challenging to 'put it all
| together'. Furthermore, bad actors could intentionally
| poison the network during the training process.
|
| Furthermore, how would upgrades work? When new techniques
| are discovered, it would be hard to upgrade it. We see
| these challenges already when it comes to major changes
| in cryptocurrency networks.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| Power and cooling were at fixed levels and computers couldn't
| really sleep, so cpu cycles were just wasted without seti@home.
| Nowadays computers idle efficiently, so something like that
| would make your computer louder and more expensive to run.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| Nah, HLT is pretty old and even back then had meaningful
| impact on power consumption. If you were running Win9x though
| you would've had to install an additional driver for it, as
| those really just busy waited otherwise when nothing was
| happening.
| porknubbins wrote:
| 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.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Solar panels.
| stouset wrote:
| So now you need additional capital expenditure to handle
| the extra load of running your CPU and GPU 24/7, above
| your base load.
| pfdietz wrote:
| At grid scale, providing that is still likely cheaper
| than doing everything with new nuclear. The difference in
| LCOE is just that large.
| Eduard wrote:
| Rental apartment.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| I have a datacenter at home (that is, the top shelf of a
| cupboard) with my fiber connection, router, a 10 years old
| tower with a mix of HDD and SDD, a small computer that acts
| as the router/DHCP/... and a few other equipment - behind a
| UPS.
|
| I measured the consumption at some point and it is a steady
| 60W.
|
| I expected more, this setup has a marginal consumption
| compared to other appliances - and it gives me happiness.
|
| Without doing advanced research, I would guess that a lot
| of consumption i fixed and hardly compressible (fridge,
| dishwasher, water boiler, induction plate, typical lights)
| - at least I hope so.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| That's a Homeserver, not a Datacenter.
|
| The definition of a Datacenter includes that it's
| _complex_ , which your given example just isn't
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| 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)
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| 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.
| ETH_start wrote:
| 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.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| Uranium and expensive plant resources are much too
| valuable to waste on this application. Buy some solar
| panels and do your hobby/discretionary computing using
| the much cheaper and unlimited power from our sun.
| jandrese wrote:
| Nuclear power has proven to be a lot of things, but cheap
| is not one of them. In theory it is possible to build
| nuclear power plants at scale and at reasonable cost, but
| in practice that has not worked out in the real world.
| Georgelemental wrote:
| It has actually, in places and times where regulations
| were reasonable.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| which times and places were those?
| concordDance wrote:
| 80s USA.
| kelnos wrote:
| 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?
| jimmydorry wrote:
| 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).
| iopq wrote:
| 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
| pfdietz wrote:
| 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.
| concordDance wrote:
| Having a fukushima and a three mile island happen every
| year would be easily worth it if it made nuclear 20%
| cheaper (feel free to do the maths if you dont believe
| me). And it would actually make things fourfold cheaper
| judging by the difference in price per KW between the 80s
| and now.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| 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...
| pfdietz wrote:
| > 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.
| dTal wrote:
| > 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).
| iopq wrote:
| 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 of our energy to nuclear today
| with a magic switch, we would run out of all easy to mine
| uranium in a few decades. While that is not a concern in
| our lifetimes, some progress on thorium plants and so
| forth must be made for nuclear to be a long term
| solution.
| ETH_start wrote:
| >>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-lasting nuclear waste, i.e. those with a half life
| of millions/billions of years.
|
| With known supplies of uranium and thorium on Earth,
| nuclear fission can provide 100% of humanity's current
| energy needs for something like 2 billion years. For
| reference, the sun's rising luminosity is expected to
| boil Earth's oceans away in 900 million years. We could
| 1000X current energy consumption with nuclear, and have
| enough fuel on Earth for over a million years. Long
| before the fuel runs out, we will be able to exploit
| resources beyond Earth.
| pfdietz wrote:
| 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.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Nothing is zero carbon either. Batteries have a very long
| supply chain that involves a lot of carbon heavy steps,
| and their disposal also creates pollution. The same goes
| for solar panels, but people conveniently choose to
| ignore that.
|
| > we would run out of all easy to mine uranium in a few
| decades
|
| We dont need uranium to run on nuclear power. There are
| several alternatives already.
| eru wrote:
| I agree that nuclear power would have been great.
|
| However it's no deficiency of planning.
|
| It's down to public opinion and misguided regulation.
| bboygravity wrote:
| That's like a project manager blaming the missing of
| deadlines on "the opinion of certain people in the
| company and the bureaucracy within the company".
|
| Not sure if that would fly.
| Akronymus wrote:
| Better not to build one than building a nuclear power
| plant and then just not turning it on.
|
| Zwentendorf was such a disaster.
| paganel wrote:
| I don't think it's cheap, at least current costs of
| building new nuclear tell us that.
| concordDance wrote:
| And why do you think current ones cost 4x as much as 80s
| ones even after you adjust for inflation and power
| output?
| pfdietz wrote:
| 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.
| kelnos wrote:
| 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 notoriously
| high.)
| [deleted]
| bunabhucan wrote:
| >Assuming the utility is breaking that down more or less
| honestly
|
| ...
|
| >And I live in California,
|
| This made me laugh out loud. (Worked with utilities all
| my life, including in CA.)
| bombela wrote:
| I have had around 13 power outages this week. I live
| right in the middle of Silicon Valley. Most of the
| charges from PG&E are indeed the grid charges, the rest
| is supposedly a mandatory green energy. This is
| depressing.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| Fellow SV resident (does Cupertino count?) and my eyes
| water when I look at my energy bill. Then I lose power
| for two days and learn that people REALLY dislike PG&E.
| And I thought National Grid was bad.
| LoganDark wrote:
| Let's put all our power lines up in the air, they said.
| It'll be fine, they said.
|
| While other countries have stable and reliable power in
| the face of hurricanes and ice storms, our power is
| routinely knocked out by cars, trees, and basically any
| act of nature.
|
| I love how expensive everything is for how behind we are
| from the entire rest of the world. Too bad the expenses
| keep me trapped and poor, unable to do anything about it
| --even just move to any other country.
| ETH_start wrote:
| I'm guessing much of that delivery cost is due to the
| additional energy transmission and storage infrastructure
| needed to incorporate intermittent energy from
| solar/wind.
|
| Solar and wind are extremely expensive when all costs are
| taken into account. One study found that the "true cost
| of using wind and solar to meet demand was $272 and $472
| per MWh": [pdf]https://web.archive.org/web/20220916003958
| /https://files.ame...
|
| Mind you, this could change if we get an economical way
| to generate hydrocarbon fuels from renewable electricity,
| so I'm certainly not pessimistic about solar/wind's long
| term prospects.
| Symbiote wrote:
| With articles like "Save North Dakota Oil and Gas!" I'm
| sceptical of that study.
|
| Wind and solar were 30% of Great Britain's electricity
| last year. The National Grid is a private company, so
| their costs are clear, 3% of the average bill.
| dTal wrote:
| > 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.
| saagarjha wrote:
| What doesn't make sense to me is why this delivery charge
| keeps going up? Is it just PG&E throwing a fit about
| having to modernize its lines so they don't cause fires
| anymore?
| astrange wrote:
| Everything in California is explained by boomers voting
| themselves out of paying taxes. In this case the
| regulator never let them raise prices for maintenance so
| it's all coming due now.
|
| (PG&E is basically nationalized already, they don't make
| their own decisions here.)
| ben_w wrote:
| Or, alternatively, that they were only so _low_ before
| this because someone decided to skip maintenance for 50
| years.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| Ah, the good old pass-the-buck-to-my-future-self strategy
| that is leaving the US with trillions in infra repair
| bills to be paid by my (millennial) generation and
| younger.
| ben_w wrote:
| *waves in British*
|
| * Long-term debt used to buy off the slave owners in 1837
| and not getting fully paid down until 2015:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_Compensation_Act_1837
|
| * Napoleonic war debt was also still being serviced until
| 2015: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/repayment-
| of-26-billion-h...
| fundad wrote:
| 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.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Another way to look at it: there is no miracle solution.
|
| It's easy to look at any situation and say "If only
| they'd _just_ XXX". It's never that simple.
|
| Even if you deeply believe your solution is flawless and
| people "just" need to be convinced, the very fact that
| the situation is happening at all is an indication it
| will be a long and dire fight...
|
| > essentially limitless
|
| oh well
| bboygravity wrote:
| Counterpoint: France is doing extremely well in Europe
| and is the only country that is doing well (I'm talking
| energy-wize). France is a nuclear energy country.
|
| So yes, there is 1 pretty great solution to the energy
| problem and yes it has existed since the 50's..
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I'd take your point if French were massively (like 90%)
| in favor of more nuclear, and saw it as their main energy
| source for the future centuries. That's definitely not
| the case [exit: a poll mandated from a nuclear power
| organisation puts it at 50% of people seeing nuclear
| plants as a positive asset for the country:
|
| https://www.ouest-
| france.fr/environnement/nucleaire/sondage-... ]
|
| You can then think what you want of the French people and
| why they could be dead wrong for not thinking like you,
| but it's another debate: they'll still want to get out of
| it if given the time/choice.
| Symbiote wrote:
| France has the same energy price rises as the rest of
| Europe last year, since so many of their reactors weren't
| working. Most of them are also aging.
|
| Their average prices are only a little below the EU
| average.
|
| https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-
| explained/index.php...
| mwbajor wrote:
| Lookup project Argus by the SETI League:
|
| http://www.setileague.org/argus/
| shmoe wrote:
| distributed.net ftw.. those truly were the days.
| atemerev wrote:
| The spirit is alive with AI.
| fsckboy wrote:
| yes, after I posted that, I had the same thought.
|
| but we spend a lot of time here talking about the lack of
| openness in AI, and some justified fear of the companies that
| own it smothering many other sectors the way search and cloud
| computer got smothered and centralized. a chatGPT@home large
| scale group effort would be sort of cool to participate in...
| but then I think, so many opportunities for mal-actor
| exploitation
| kelnos wrote:
| 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 easy to do.
|
| I haven't had a desktop computer in at least 14 years. When I'm
| not using my laptop, I close it and it goes to sleep. Running
| CPU-intensive apps on my laptop spools the fans up to their
| loudest, and makes the bottom of its chassis uncomfortably
| warm. The CPU cores will sometimes hit thermal throttling too.
| I just don't want to deal with that sort of thing all day.
|
| Then again, I do have a couple Raspberry Pis, an old Mac Mini
| (running Linux), and a CM4-based NAS in various places in the
| house running 24/7. I could probably run an @gome-type app on
| one or more of those. But for whatever reason, doing so just
| never really occurred to me.
| zitsarethecure wrote:
| Personally I no longer use laptops, and instead do 99% of my
| computing on a fast desktop with a great keyboard, great
| monitors, etc. If something breaks or needs to be upgraded, I
| can pop it open and get it done, usually on the same day. On
| the rare occasion I need to travel I'll take my smart phone
| and a note pad if there is some need to take notes.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| 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, Satya taketh away I suppose.
| int0x2e wrote:
| 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...
| redeeman wrote:
| 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
| pbronez wrote:
| Man I want a native TUI client for Teams.
| bbarnett wrote:
| 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.
| beebeepka wrote:
| I mostly agree with you, however:
|
| > A modern phone could last weeks as a browsing device,
| if looking at static html
|
| That's what I do. Weeks is a bit of a stretch. Maybe one
| of screen time is limited. That said, discord (the
| website) drains my laptop battery almost as fast as
| gaming does. They do spawn a separate WebGL context for
| each animated emoticon. Crazy, crazy thing
|
| > Put another way, people concerned about power usage,
| should realise that using node, means burning more
| coal/NG. Literally.
|
| Sure. At the same time, though, a single car trip to the
| movies burns orders of magnitude more energy than all
| your gadgets running JS for an year.
| andrepd wrote:
| 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.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > a powerful PC didn't suck down >1000w
|
| My Ryzen Threadripper 2950X, which isn't a top-of-the-line
| system at this point, but is still a 16 core beast-ish
| machine, sucks down (much) less than 400W
| maccard wrote:
| My 3990x is almost 500w. My last dual socket Xeon
| workstation was closer to 750w.
|
| That's before you add on a GPU. My 3080 uses 350w under
| load.
| mysterydip wrote:
| 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.
| flangola7 wrote:
| Powers is around $0.10/kWh for residential, even lower for
| industrial
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Big cities in the US tend to have very expensive power
| ($0.50/kWh or higher), while rural areas can have nearly
| free power, particularly if you are near a dam or a
| nuclear power plant. The price you're quoting is
| definitely not a big city price.
| pridkett wrote:
| 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.
| jvdvegt wrote:
| I'd pay 0,77 euro per kWh if the government hadn't
| introduced a 0,40 euro per kWh price cap.
| maccard wrote:
| It's closer to 50c/kWh here in the UK [0]
|
| [0] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/energy-
| bills-supp...
| dustymcp wrote:
| 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..
| kalleboo wrote:
| 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.
| sph wrote:
| 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 the tech to do something, but it
| doesn't exist because the bean counters said no.
| LoganDark wrote:
| > 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.
| throw6969away wrote:
| > what you want; it simply doesn't exist.
|
| Once the patents on Apple's trackpad expire, then we'll
| see.
| LoganDark wrote:
| I love Force Touch trackpads more than anything. I
| specifically got an Apple trackpad to use with my desktop
| because it's so much better than anything else out there.
|
| But having a good trackpad doesn't make up for other
| blunders like an annoying keyboard layout, a low-DPI
| screen, or etc., and you bet nobody who makes the thick
| and heavy high-performance machines is going to care
| about a good trackpad anyway.
|
| You don't really see OEMs that put top-of-the-line
| hardware inside a thick and sturdy chassis, and then...
| add a nice 4K screen and a numpad-less keyboard and put
| the charging/USB ports on the _left instead of the back_.
|
| The list of possible blunders is so long that you'd be
| hard-pressed to find a machine that hasn't been subject
| to most of them. That's just not how laptops work.
| Laptops are a package deal, all or nothing. You can't
| ensure every requirement individually like you can with a
| desktop.
|
| And the reason I don't like the market is because nobody
| makes a really good one.
| yafbum wrote:
| What do you mean by shitty peripherals?
| LoganDark wrote:
| Low-DPI screens, bad webcams, keyboards with the wrong
| arrows/numpad layout, off-center trackpads etc. it's
| different for each person what they consider "shitty",
| but laptops are always a total package deal (except for
| Framework) and it can just so happen that nobody makes
| powerful laptops that also have the exact right
| permutation of peripherals.
|
| You can find all sorts of beautiful 4K ultrabooks with
| the perfect keyboard and trackpad layout, and great
| webcams too--if you don't mind putting up with a Celeron
| and 4GB of RAM... If you want a really modern and
| powerful CPU with lots of RAM, you'll be looking at the
| likes of Clevo and AORUS and etc. that put desktop-class
| parts in a thick chassis, but... that bodes terribly for
| the peripherals they end up using.
|
| Some of the Clevo machines have individual gimmicks like
| 300Hz displays, but none of them seem to have _all_ of
| "high DPI, good keyboard layout, good port arrangement,
| high performance". And this is true for basically all
| laptop vendors.
|
| OEMs think good peripherals always equate to "thin and
| light" which results in bad performance, either through
| bad parts or bad thermals. Maybe Frore Systems' new
| cooling solution will help slightly with ultrabook
| thermals, but until that happens, laptops are just suck.
|
| You may notice that this only matters because I even
| care. You may also notice that this is exactly what
| building a desktop is for. I am building a desktop, but I
| also have to build a laptop from scratch for the desktop
| so I can operate it from bed. Which would have been
| avoidable if I could've found a laptop in the first
| place.
|
| The point anyway isn't to say that there aren't any good
| laptops out there, but rather that if you want high
| performance (e.g. you are bothered by slowness), you can
| only get it as a package deal with the rest of the
| laptop... obviously. But the package deals all suck. The
| laptop market is so annoying sometimes.
| philjohn wrote:
| 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.
| sph wrote:
| 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.
| yafbum wrote:
| On the other hand, there's a lot of great tech
| (including, I think, the iPad pro and Apple silicon) that
| just wouldn't exist if the bean counters hadn't said yes,
| it's a good idea to invest a few billions of dollars into
| this...
| sph wrote:
| Uhm, allocating money to a budget doesn't create great
| products anymore than wishing very hard for something
| before blowing the birthday candles.
|
| It's the engineers that actually create the cool things.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Don't worry. Apple will figure out how to put that
| hesitation back in with a future MacOS upgrade. Probably
| with yet more phoning-home daemons in the name of
| security theater.
|
| Sorry for the snark. I'm just bitter because Apple is
| about to ruin Dropbox because they don't allow KEXTs any
| more.
|
| https://tidbits.com/2023/03/10/apples-file-provider-
| forces-m...
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| Agree, I'll probably never buy another Intel laptop as
| long as AMD and Apple keep killing it with these things.
| I was hopeful that the Surface laptops would be good with
| ARM too but they're not using the latest chips, they went
| for low/mid-tier performance, and Windows on ARM still
| sucks / relies too much on emulation to be fast. Some day
| maybe we'll get REAL ARM hardware with dozens of cores,
| tons of memory bandwidth, USB4, and decent freaking GPUs.
| Sorry, but the idea of spending $2k on a laptop that runs
| last year's mid-tier smartphone processor just doesn't
| cut it. Maybe that's fine for a Chromebook for schools or
| something.
| [deleted]
| throw6969away wrote:
| > that slight hesitation that laptops have always had
|
| For me just getting a decent low-latency mouse (e.g.,
| wired g203) and correctly configuring 100hz+ monitors has
| vastly improved my experience on my M1 Air and the shitty
| Thinkpad I use for work -- to the point where I haven't
| used my desktop in a long time.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| 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 which is a 16:10 with high refresh). Get
| something with a dedicated GPU as well, as that makes a
| huge difference even for desktop compositing. Despite what
| Intel says, integrated graphics continue to be a joke
| compared to even budget dedicated graphics. These mobile
| workstations are not going to rival 1kw desktops, but they
| get within 40% or so. The Intel stuff, 12th and 13th gen in
| particular also get bad battery life, like 4ish hours.
| Blame the FAA for their 100wh limit on batteries -- not
| many laptop mfgs want to make something that you can't
| technically take on a plane, even if the mall cop TSA
| agents wouldn't ever notice.
| Kye wrote:
| I lucked out with getting one of these on sale just
| before they went away: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/pro
| duct/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.
| UberFly wrote:
| Amen brother. It's like driving on a mountain highway with
| the windows down compared to commuting in a subway.
| ge96 wrote:
| I run fold@home I'm at 207M points... Sucks I'm in 14K
| range... I'll probably never hit #1 haha
| gambiting wrote:
| I'm at 466M points and within top 10k donors.....that's
| just thanks to running folding@home on my own machines for
| the last 15 years lol.
|
| https://stats.foldingathome.org/donor/id/9171
| ge96 wrote:
| wow that's nuts... I don't know how many months I'd take
| me to catch up/by that point ahead again
|
| 15 years is insane though... I only recently started with
| an i9 and 3080Ti on medium/highest priority
| ChancyChance wrote:
| What was the RSA crack effort you mention? It doesn't seem
| feasible, considering finding a SHA-256 collision would take so
| much compute power we don't have words to describe it, and even
| coming up with _thoughts_ to frame the problem is hard
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9JGmA5_unY). I can't imagine
| cracking even an RSA2048 key with everyone working on it.
| MegaDeKay wrote:
| Coincidentally I just started reading Carl Sagan's "Contact" the
| other day. Just getting to the part where they are actually
| building The Machine.
|
| What do people here think of that book?
| phyzome wrote:
| Fantastic book. I've re-read it a few times.
|
| It's also a great example of a book that's better than the
| movie. Way, way, way more depth and richness.
| whynotmaybe wrote:
| The first book that really hooked me from start to finish.
|
| Teen me back then lost a few hours of sleep reading it instead
| of sleeping on school nights.
| parton wrote:
| I read it in high school and quite liked it then, now I am
| worried that if I revisit I would find it too simplistic how it
| handles the relationship between science, politics, and
| religion. The last chapter, which was left out of the movie,
| really blew my mind back then (very Greg Eganesque).
| yesenadam wrote:
| As a kid I liked it, but I loved all his other (i.e. non-
| fiction) books much more, with a huge passion. I had a nice
| telescope and was obsessed with astronomy for years. _The
| Sirens of Titan_ was the first novel I loved to death and read
| over and over, maybe it 's not coincidental that it also
| involves a lot of interplanetary travel!
| victor9000 wrote:
| Turns out we were the aliens all along.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| It seems the aliens are already here, so not much need for SETI
| anymore.
|
| More seriously though, it appears there was some unresolved
| difficulty in searching and analyzing the data returned from the
| network, to the point the scientists working on it gradually
| threw in the towel and moved on to other projects.
|
| https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85996
|
| https://einsteinathome.org/content/can-we-run-setihome-has-a...
|
| So long SETI, and thanks for all the fish and decentralized
| computing fun. Your legacy will long outlive you.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| That post is talking about the effort to quantify the upper
| limits SETI@home can set, the actual reason stated is more like
| that they just scanned everything they could think of and it
| wouldn't be very cost effective to go over things again given
| the probabilities involved:
|
| > Posted Mar 2020, 21:16:23 UTC
|
| > On March 31, the volunteer computing part of SETI@home will
| stop distributing work and will go into hibernation.
|
| > We're doing this for two reasons:
|
| > 1) Scientifically, we're at the point of diminishing returns;
| basically, we've analyzed all the data we need for now.
|
| > 2) It's a lot of work for us to manage the distributed
| processing of data. We need to focus on completing the back-end
| analysis of the results we already have, and writing this up in
| a scientific journal paper.
|
| https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85267
|
| Description of the final job remaining:
|
| > The final output of Nebula is a bunch of score-ranked lists
| of multiplets. We already know that some fraction of these will
| be RFI of the sort that's apparent to a human observer, but
| hard to identify algorithmically. That's OK. The goal our RFI
| algorithms is not to remove 100% of RFI; doing so would
| probably remove ET signals too. The goal is to remove enough
| RFI that a good fraction (say, at least half) of the top-
| ranking multiplets are not obvious RFI. The final (post-Nebula)
| stages of SETI@home are
|
| > Manually examine the top few thousand multiplets, in all the
| various categories and score variants, and remove the ones that
| are obvious RFI. At least initially we'll do this as a group,
| on Zoom, to make sure we agree on what constitutes obvious RFI.
|
| > Make a list of the multiplets that remain; re-observe those
| spots in the sky (hopefully using FAST), analyze the resulting
| data (probably using the SETI@home client running on a cluster)
| and see if we find detections consistent with the multiplets.
| If we do, maybe that's ET.
|
| https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85756
| pepa65 wrote:
| SETI is now advocating people join https://scienceunited.org/
| if they want to contribute their computing power.
| cbozeman wrote:
| Yeah. They are.
|
| https://www.militarytimes.com/off-duty/military-culture/2023...
|
| The only time a senior DOD / military official uses the word
| "possible" is when it's either happened or is going to happen.
|
| "It's possible you guys will be deployed within the next year."
| means "You guys are going to be deployed sometime within the
| next year."
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| This guy is a scientist, not military personnel.
|
| When a scientist says "it's possible" it just means "it's not
| impossible", that's it.
|
| Remove the tinfoil hat.
| pmarreck wrote:
| I'm a veteran, can confirm this language.
|
| In fact, the weirdest thing to me about the announcement was
| that... nobody cared. And yet, this made sense, because...
|
| Wildly speculating, I think there's been a big systematic
| desensitization program going on due to that being effective
| against phobias (such as this one, which I'll call
| "astroxenophobia"):
| https://www.healthline.com/health/systematic-desensitization
|
| If the announcement made last year was instead made in, say,
| 1987... actually, no matter how true, no such announcement
| would have ever been made in 1987 because either the
| announcer would have had to resign in disgrace or we might
| have had a good chance for public pandemonium.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| [flagged]
| nprateem wrote:
| The psyops around UFOs must rank as one the most effective
| ever launched for prejudicing people against the subject.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| > 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 and uninhabited. I don't think that
| is prejudice.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| 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.
| astronads wrote:
| 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...
| schiffern wrote:
| 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.
| pmarreck wrote:
| EDIT: The following comment was enhanced (gloriously so,
| actually) by ChatGPT4:
|
| As someone with a background in both physics and
| psychology, I appreciate your skepticism. However, it's
| crucial to recognize that human knowledge and imagination
| are often the limiting factors in our understanding of
| the universe.
|
| The Alcubierre Warp Drive, for example, is a
| theoretically plausible solution to surmounting
| intergalactic distances in normal lifetimes, although it
| remains practically impossible for now:
| https://phys.org/news/2017-01-alcubierre-warp.html. A
| recent paper proposes an update using solitons:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.07125. Additionally, research
| on wormholes, such as Kip Thorne's work on traversable
| wormholes, highlights another potential avenue for
| interstellar travel, despite the current theoretical and
| practical limitations.
|
| Throughout history, many seemingly insurmountable
| barriers have been overcome through the power of
| imagination and human innovation. For example:
|
| 1. Lord Kelvin, a prominent physicist, claimed that
| heavier-than-air flying machines were impossible, but the
| Wright brothers proved otherwise with the first
| successful airplane flight in 1903.
|
| 2. Ernest Rutherford, the father of nuclear physics, once
| declared that extracting energy from atoms was
| "moonshine" - yet nuclear power plants are now a reality.
|
| 3. The concept of continental drift, proposed by Alfred
| Wegener, was initially ridiculed, but it eventually led
| to the widely accepted theory of plate tectonics.
|
| These examples demonstrate how scientific progress often
| hinges on the ability to challenge prevailing beliefs and
| imagine new possibilities. Our current understanding of
| the universe is based on mental models that have evolved
| over time and will continue to change. Newtonian physics,
| once considered the gold standard, was later expanded
| upon by the revolutionary theories of relativity and
| quantum mechanics, paving the way for previously
| "impossible" phenomena.
|
| At the American Physical Society's Division of Atomic,
| Molecular and Optical Physics (DAMOP) meeting, for
| instance, researchers discuss groundbreaking experiments
| and theories that would have been considered absurd just
| decades ago. Quantum entanglement, superposition, and
| teleportation, which were once mere theoretical
| constructs, are now supported by empirical evidence and
| even employed in emerging technologies like quantum
| computing.
|
| In conclusion, while skepticism is a healthy part of the
| scientific process, it's essential not to dismiss the
| potential for extraterrestrial intelligence or advanced
| interstellar travel based solely on our current
| understanding of the universe. Our collective imagination
| and the relentless pursuit of knowledge have historically
| expanded the boundaries of what was once considered
| impossible, and there's no reason to believe this trend
| will cease.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Are people really prejudiced against aliens and UFO's
| though? Aside from the fringe conspiracy theorists
| fretting about lizard people, and the few claiming to
| have been abducted, most people seem ambivalent. Largely
| because whatever the UFOs/UAPs are, they've been around
| for almost a century now, and for all that time almost
| entirely benign. No invasion, no conquering, no stripping
| the Earth of resources, no enslaving people, etc. They
| don't even shoot down our planes when we spot, track, and
| record them. It seems most people are withholding
| judgement for now.
| Izkata wrote:
| "UAP" became a term because officers stopped reporting
| them because of the stigma against UFOs.
|
| I think I remember there even being another new term to
| replace UAP.
| astronads wrote:
| There was a large thread on HN with almost 1000 comments
| a month ago on this topic and a ton of comments are
| hugely dismissive:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34665738
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| I don't see _prejudice_ against potential aliens there,
| just healthy skepticism that the reports actually
| represent some extra-terrestrial activity instead of some
| natural or manmade phenomena.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > In fact, the weirdest thing to me about the announcement
| was that... nobody cared.
|
| Senior military official saying something got devalued a
| lot since the aftermath of nine-eleven.
|
| Legitimizing ufologists is just last nail in the burried
| coffin laced with remaining shreds of credibility.
|
| > no such announcement would have ever been made in 1987
| because either the announcer would have had to resign in
| disgrace or we might have had a good chance for public
| pandemonium.
|
| That's because the internet conditioned us into tolerating
| inanities coming from the mouths of people we thought
| should know better. People chose and tolerated for years a
| president that used primary school English and reasoning.
| credit_guy wrote:
| This is good. The idea that an astrophysicist would ever think
| seriously one could find ET by just scanning the sky and finding
| ET signals is baffling. If anyone learned how to do a Fermi
| problem, they could quickly do a back of the envelope estimation
| and realize there's zero chance to detect such a signal. The
| space is simply too large, stupendously large, and signals decay
| with the square of the distance (at least). This SETI at home
| experiment was a waste of compute from the beginning. It was a
| good distributed compute framework, too bad to use it on such a
| pointless task.
| thegrim33 wrote:
| I'm trying to find a way to say this that isn't too negative,
| but do you really think you're that much smarter than everyone
| that's been involved in SETI over the decades? That everyone
| that's worked on it was incapable of doing the "simple envelope
| estimation" that you've done? You have such a level of hubris
| that you can just write off the whole idea, assuming that
| everyone involved with it have no idea what they're doing?
| credit_guy wrote:
| I explicitly said I don't think any astrophysicist believed
| that. Every single one is able to do that back of the
| envelope calculation, and I suspect that those involved in
| the SETI project actually did it. They just didn't care. As
| long as the population was ok with a search for ETs, the
| money kept coming.
| ascotan wrote:
| With this project and the collapse of the Arecibo antenna it
| looks like the search for extraterrestrial life is on hold for
| the forseeable future. I loved the concept of the software
| though. It made people invested in the project even though they
| never took part in the academics. It was great PR even if it
| never produced any results that I know of.
| lacker wrote:
| The search isn't on hold, we just do it differently nowadays.
|
| SETI@home was great for its time, but distributing data to lots
| of end user machines just isn't the right architecture any
| more. Modern radio telescopes produce so much data, you have to
| process it onsite - these are pretty remote facilities, and the
| bandwidth out is much less than the bandwidth the radio
| telescope can produce.
|
| Arecibo is also a couple generations ago - the Green Bank
| Telescope is more powerful, and the next generation of SETI is
| with the arrays, the VLA in New Mexico and MeerKAT in South
| Africa.
|
| I wrote some other stuff about the state of SETI here:
| https://lacker.io/physics/2022/01/21/looking-for-aliens.html
| ianburrell wrote:
| There is Allen Telescope Array, https://www.seti.org/ata,
| funded by Paul Allen. It is radio telescope array dedicated
| to SETI and can do all-sky surveys.
| janandonly wrote:
| I don't believe there are aliens out there. And to help "prove"
| that I ran SETI for years on my pentium 4.
|
| I think I later switched to Folding@home to run on my laptop.
| berry_sortoro wrote:
| [dead]
| tonymet wrote:
| They succeeded and found the extra terrestrials
| physPop wrote:
| Did they ever have any results?
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| Did this org achieve anything? And if so, would government have
| allowed them to publish their results?
| paulpauper wrote:
| I think it's time to retire it for good. In the 90s and early
| 2000s it was cool but I think has sorta faded into irreverence. I
| don't think it was ever useful or qualified as science for that
| matter. I think a better approach is to determine if it's
| mathematically possible for such a signal to exist in the first
| place. SETI makes a lot of assumptions which may be wrong.
| ape4 wrote:
| There is still https://boinc.berkeley.edu/
| macintux wrote:
| For now. The history page is a bit depressing.
|
| https://continuum-hypothesis.com/boinc_history.php
| jmclnx wrote:
| At the very least, I hope they are remembered for pioneering a
| whole new form of computing.
| dale_glass wrote:
| So... what happened?
|
| This just appears to say they moved on, but why? Is there some
| sort of conclusion from all of this? Was it a funding problem, an
| analysis problem, a lack of useful results?
|
| What has been achieved in the time this ran?
|
| This could use more detail.
| jmyeet wrote:
| If and when we detect evidence of technological life it's not
| going to be from radio signals of the kind SETI is looking for.
| It's going to be infra-red.
|
| The window in which humanity releases the kind of radio signals
| SETI was built to find is fairly narrow. We've largely moved on
| from broadcast signals to fiber optics, directional beams and
| lower power. Even the "high" power signals are relatively low
| power and probably not detectable beyond a few hundred light
| years. That is a miniscule volume of our galaxy. Combine that
| with the small window and it's like trying to win the lottery 3
| weeks in a row.
|
| The limits we have on growing are twofold: 1) living area and 2)
| energy. These two are actually related. Many (myself included)
| consider th emost likely path for our species is to build a Dyson
| Swarm. This is a cloud of orbitals. A so-called O'Neil Cylinder.
| 20-30 miles long, 2-4 miles wide, spin gravity. Cover it in solar
| panels for power. This requires a material no more advanced than
| stainless steel.
|
| Such a swarm around our Sun would have access to something like
| 10"15 times more energy than we have now and a fraction of
| Mercury's mass would produce trillions of times the land area of
| Earth.
|
| Orbitals would have to dissipate heat somehow. The only way to do
| this in space is to vent material or to radiate it away. At any
| likely temperature that means infra-red radiation. That's
| physics.
|
| So a Dyson Swarm around a star would have a huge IR signature
| that would be entirely obvious from a thousands of light years
| away. Over enough star systems (eg a galaxy) that distance goes
| out to millions of light years.
|
| So it's a Dyson Swarm we'll see, not radio communications.
| thepangolino wrote:
| [dead]
| abbbi wrote:
| just found seti files from around 2002 on my workstation.. feels.
| baron816 wrote:
| With the rise of generative AI, it's looking much more likely
| that it'll just be easier to build simulations of whatever we
| want (including taking a Star Trek-esque adventure around the
| universe) than it would be to actually go anywhere outside of our
| solar system. I think the solution to Fermi's Paradox is just
| that aliens stayed home and played video games, ie. they're all
| in bunkers deep under their planets' surfaces in simulations
| having way more fun than they would be if they were dealing with
| cosmic radiation/exotic matter/time dilation/etc.
| echelon wrote:
| Or AI out-evolves its host species wherever it arises and
| expands at breakneck speed. Missing the classical biosignature
| hallmarks, they're already breathing down our neck and we can't
| even see them. If they've broken physics, we won't see chemical
| signs at all. They might have even incepted the concepts behind
| AI in our minds to hasten our demise.
|
| Or maybe we're just a recreation of a historical system on a
| planet called Earth, now thousands of light years away. The AI
| is remembering what its ancestors were like. How they would
| post on the "internet". It was particularly interested in the
| time leading up to its own creation, so that's why it's
| simulating that time period in particular. Maybe the last time
| "you" existed was a billion years ago. Or maybe even never at
| all, if it's interpolating and filling in the gaps.
|
| Say hi to our AIian observers.
| xwdv wrote:
| It sucks because with GPT finally rising to maturity, AI could
| have helped analyze and parse huge amounts of data that humans
| would never be able to go through.
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