SETI@home is in hibernation
setiathome.berkeley.edu
setiathome.berkeley.edu
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.
Cracking hashes would imply that they're taking pre-existing hashes and reversing them to find the input.
So why'd you bring it up?
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.
Hash collision should always be about finding matching content for a hash.
Be a bitch to search. But damn would we know the topography of the function space.
...I'll see myself out.
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.
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.
I still think it's a dumb idea, but I've learnt not to underestimate human stupidity.
The whole crazy investment thing came much later and basically destroyed any hope of using BTC on a daily basis.
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.
I could have been rich ... but how should I have known.
>USD is backed by a computer at the Federal Reserve. Sounds pretty stupid but it works.
Pretty much why I think it's stupid as an investment, it's no better than the USD if SHTF. You can't hold it like gold or silver.
Btw, not very many people are putting their money into gold and silver. Returns on that have been lackluster for decades. If BTC truly became "digital gold," I wouldn't be very interested.
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.
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.
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.)
If you are talking about pre-web, I'd say crypto had that era too, up until around 2012 when bitcoin really took off.
Classic SETI@home's website[1] is a blast to browse.
I would love to work on doing something like that.
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.
Somehow, the AI believes that Alan Shepard was the first person on space.
Doing this session reminded me A LOT of Asimov's short stories in "I Robot". I feel that the future AI "debugging" session will be like that. It's been a while since I read the book, so I'll have to re-read it again.
We've had access to a source of energy that is cheap, zero-carbon and essentially limitless, since the 1950s: nuclear power.
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
So yes, there is 1 pretty great solution to the energy problem and yes it has existed since the 50's..
Their average prices are only a little below the EU average.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
How does that have anything to do with the discussion about energy conversion types methods and their pros / cons?
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.
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?
But I think molten salt thorium plants can offer superior safety
You're correct that nobody builds rbmk reactors any more, but others of the design continued to operate safely for many years.
[1]https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-cher...
There 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.
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).
Fossil fuels being bad is an argument for getting off fossil fuels, not an argument for nuclear in particular.
"2 workers died in the blast.
28 workers and firemen died in the weeks that followed from acute radiation syndrome (ARS).
19 ARS survivors had died later, by 2006; most from causes not related to radiation, but it’s not possible to rule all of them out (especially five that were cancer-related).
15 people died from thyroid cancer due to milk contamination. These deaths were among children who were exposed to 131I from milk and food in the days after the disaster. This could increase to between 96 and 384 deaths, however, this figure is highly uncertain.
There is currently no evidence of adverse health impacts in the general population across affected countries, or wider Europe."What you are doing here is demanding that the cancers actually be demonstrated, requiring that radiation be treated as innocuous until it can be conclusively shown it isn't. This is the mindset behind those ranting against the linear no threshold theory of radiation carcinogenesis.
But regulation doesn't work this way. Nuclear isn't something that must be presumed innocent until proven guilty.
...
>And I live in California,
This made me laugh out loud. (Worked with utilities all my life, including in CA.)
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.
• 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...
(PG&E is basically nationalized already, they don't make their own decisions here.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In any case, costs can be brought down significantly with 1. more reasonable regulations and 2. economies of scale, which just requires building more plants.
So if - due to massive expansion of nuclear power - we get to the point that uranium supplies are dwindling and causing the price of uranium ore to rise, we may still see breeder reactors with lower construction and operating costs than current generation reactors.
I suspect modularity in reactors, that enables a genuine global market to emerge in reactor manufacturing, would be instrumental in bringing down reactor construction costs.
>>Fast reactors also present the possibility of prompt fast criticality
I'm quite the layman in this subject, but my understanding is that there are fourth generation fast reactor models, with passive safety features, that effectively eliminate that possibility.
For regulations: how does one identify "reasonable" regulations? How is this to be determined? The usual way this is done in other industries is by allowing accidents to happen, then add regulations that would have prevented them. I doubt that would be acceptable for nuclear: unlike (say) aviation accidents, the cost of an individual accident can be extremely large.
As for economies of scale, the evidence for that in nuclear is slight. Maybe S. Korea? But elsewhere costs seem to have increased with experience rather than decreasing. Nuclear involves large units that take a long time to build; there's not much room for anyone to gain much experience over their career. If anything, experience decay (as organizations and individuals age) seems to overwhelm experience growth.
> fast reactors
Fast reactors inherently have this problem, since a fast chain reaction occurs without a moderator. In a LWR, concentration of the fuel in an accident reduces reactivity, as the moderator is reduced. In a fast chain reaction, concentration of the fuel will increase reactivity. Putatively safe 4th generation reactors merely assert that such rearrangement cannot happen. If the analysis that led to that conclusion is found to be in error then anyone who has built such a reactor will be in deep trouble. Perhaps molten salt fast reactors will have sufficiently credible analysis, but those have their own issues (such as need for large amounts of isotopically separated chlorine in molten chloride reactors and exposure of the walls of the reactor to unshielded/unmoderated fast neutrons.)
Nuclear should either be operated all the time, or it shouldn't be used at all.
However it's no deficiency of planning.
It's down to public opinion and misguided regulation.
Not sure if that would fly.
No heroics from any project manager would eg let 1980s Ford stop selling internal combustion engines and go all-in-one electric cars. So any deadlines would be missed.
Zwentendorf was such a disaster.
My wholly intuition-based guess would be that the net effect of these higher construction/safety standards is massively more lives lost.
But if that is the case, it's worth remembering that the lives lost from higher construction standards are a result of second order effects and populist government-interventionist political ideologies are generally quite poor at factoring in second order effects, as we saw with COVID lockdown policies, which resulted in far more lives lost from the second order effects of the lockdowns than lives saved from the lockdowns mitigating the spread of COVID.
Specific construction expertise for nuclear very likely has degraded (the US can no longer forge the large reactor vessels for PWRs, for example.)
Nuclear is going to be further negatively affected if there's a transition away from fossil fuels, since the industrial infrastructure for making steam turbines will no longer have as much support. Bespoke turbines from smaller makers will be more expensive.
Nuclear plant construction has the potential to become much less labor intensive if it moves to smaller, standardized nuclear reactors that can be manufactured in factories, using mass-production techniques.
>>Nuclear is going to be further negatively affected if there's a transition away from fossil fuels, since the industrial infrastructure for making steam turbines will no longer have as much support.
True. However this is a surmountable problem. It's just a matter of using subsidies to achieve economies of scale in nuclear plant construction.
The problem with the subsidy argument is there's no good experience to show that subsidies would do more here than just burn money. Nuclear has not had good experience effects. This is in sharp contrast to renewables and storage.
Nuclear is weighed down by the boat anchor of its historically poor performance.
They still charge us for the electricity PLUS extra charges for a fund to eventually decommission the nuclear plant. It’s so expensive.
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.
The definition of a Datacenter includes that it's complex, which your given example just isn't
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)
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.
15 years is insane though... I only recently started with an i9 and 3080Ti on medium/highest priority
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.
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.
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.
Big reason why I dislike the market so much: the existence of that machine with only a single flaw that nonetheless ruins the value of the entire product. There's nothing else like it. It seems to be the absolute best machine the market has to offer... and it just barely misses. :(
However, the screen resolution seems to be the only problem with it, so anyone who doesn't require specifically 4K (most people) would probably find it worth considering.
[0]: https://rog.asus.com/laptops/rog-flow/rog-flow-x16-2022-seri...
Once the patents on Apple's trackpad expire, then we'll see.
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.
Put it behind a VPN, use wake-on-lan and boom, iPad is essentially a fully blown computer.
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.
It's the engineers that actually create the cool things.
I didn't claim that it was sufficient, but it is necessary.
> It's the engineers that actually create the cool things.
Of course. With other people's money (typically).
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...
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.
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.
What Dr. Lisa Su giveth, Satya taketh away I suppose.
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...
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.
> 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.
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
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.
[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/energy-bills-supp...
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
That's before you add on a GPU. My 3080 uses 350w under load.
OTOH a Pi 4B with 2 7200RPM HDDs uses about 25W and another with an SSD uses about 7W.
They're obviously extreme examples, but on the flip side, I've got an M1 Macbook Pro which lasts an entire day on a single charge of battery including running docker, slack, and some "mild" compiling (not large C++ projects). I'm not sure how to measure the energy consumption of it on battery, but suffice to say it's "very low".
I think back in those days the price was around 10c
I know this is euro cents but the dollar exchange rate is not too big to make a huge difference.
Hoping you guys come back again.
Best.
Just use another machine for stuff like this? Spare computers are cheap nowadays.
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
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.
Maybe the Berkeley Library would take them.
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.
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."
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.
I think I remember there even being another new term to replace UAP.
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.
"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.
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.
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…
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yX6ETCKyPo
At some point this ex-Pentagon guy says top guys at NASA, current and former US senators, Obama and current and former US military and intelligence officials are all on record as saying UAPs are real. He says the question has now moved on to what they are, given there are recorded sighting of them going back at least to the 1940s if not far longer.
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.
When a scientist says "it's possible" it just means "it's not impossible", that's it.
Remove the tinfoil hat.
> 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.
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.
So when the sea levels rise and destroy my home, I'll know who to blame. Thank you.
misdirected angst
120k gpus is like what USD50mio capex at least? Did you even get any of that back w/o accounting for electricity?
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?
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!
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?
It still isn't enough and is a huge waste of energy and resources.
> Crypto does nothing useful, it’s like an online casino, or an online game.
For me, it is extremely useful on a daily basis.
> Do you know any online games that consume anywhere near as much hardware and electricity?
All of them. ETH has switched to PoS and no longer consumes so much energy. It also had the side effect of destroying profitability for the majority of the other GPU mined coins, and thus the hashrate on those networks have dropped off considerably (or been replaced with ASICs).
We could turn off all crypto today and it would have no consequences except for people who would lose all their money now instead of in a couple of years when all crypto is worthless anyway.
At what point do you start to question if maybe some people find value in it and how you might be able to as well? I'm not talking about getting in on the whole buy low sell high lambo get rich quick scheme thing.
I'm talking about how you can use it in your daily life. I'll assume that since you're on this site that you're probably an engineer, have you looked into writing a smart contract?
Reminds me of this:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/people-had-to-be-c...
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
[1]: https://www.together.xyz/blog/releasing-v1-of-gpt-jt-powered...
No copyright on an AI if it was machine generated, which the training is. Great catch kmeisthax!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Any radio telescope that exists can compare favorably to Arecibo, actually.
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.
The #1 spot was someone's Sun E15k or something like that.
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.
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
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.
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.
I haven't crunched SETI for years, but I do still tilt at numerical windmills - Primegrid can be great fun if you are lucky enough to hit a mega prime (I have three!).
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.
What do people here think of that book?
Teen me back then lost a few hours of sleep reading it instead of sleeping on school nights.
It's also a great example of a book that's better than the movie. Way, way, way more depth and richness.
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.
At the same time we had already installed Seti@Home on basically every computer we had access to... including school.
Good times.
wont be able to hear from Three-body from now on. human's eye are closed.
I think I later switched to Folding@home to run on my laptop.