SETI@home is in hiberation

I wonder if that screensaver ever made it into the Xscreensaver BSOD screensaver. I hope so.

People were doing this as a donation, not because they perceived it to be free.

Of all the current US conspiracy theories, the UFO/UAP conspiracy is still the most interesting and fully developed/ongoing conspiracy space. Just check out the recent 'Age of Disclosure' documentary from this year.

I'm not arguing a position on the theory, just saying it's very active and has the old-school qualities that were present in the 90's.

Same here, you either move past it or go crazy, if the UFO subreddits are any indication. Given the population was already obsessed with blurry clumps of pixels in short video clips, AI is going to send a lot of those people into trailers in the desert with a lifetime supply of aluminum foil.

And now that we have mass-produced hyper-maneuverable quad-copter drones, the whole "it moved backward in a way that no aircraft ever could!" doesn't really hit as hard.

Here's their take on it:

https://foldingathome.org/2024/05/02/alphafold-opens-new-opp...

Does it? I stopped doing @home projects because I started never finishing a unit for credit under BOINC.

This is extremely far from any of my expertises, but I'll offer an answer while no one else did (please correct me!). Basically, all medicine (i.e. drugs) we have are proteins or certain compounds that fit within some of our cell's (or viruses) molecules and does funny stuff to them, like disabling certain parts, acting as a signal to regulate behavior, and so on. Doing funny stuff is basically about fitting into another molecule. So research about how proteins (most molecules (after water) in our body, I guess) interact is incredibly important in basically all medicine, specially in the discovery of medicine (like suggesting compounds (drug) that could fit in certain receptors or perform certain function), and understanding disease/pathologies (which give ideas on how to prevent and treat them).

If folding@home helps to understand and model this behavior of molecules (which I guess tends to be difficult and unreliable to do without the aid of computers), it is extremely helpful. Now I don't know other details like, perhaps molecular biology is the bottleneck and there is scant available molecules to analyze (reducing its impact/marginal sensitivity), or perhaps compute really is a bottleneck in this particular problem. But nonetheless it seems like a great project for which contributions do make a difference.

(Note: although, that said, if you were expecting something like 'compute->miracle drug comes out', I believe that's not quite how it works; research in general rarely works that way, I think because the constraint space and problem space that would require this approach is too large and complicated; and in fact I believe many if not most significant discoveries have resulted from playing around and investigating random molecules, often from (nonhuman) animals, plants and bacteria[1]; although molecular sciences (molecular biology) seem to enable a slightly more methodological approach)

[1] The GLP-1 based weight loss drugs for example came from investigating the Gila monster lizard venom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLP-1_receptor_agonist#History

I think you’re missing the main limiting resource: money.

Some of these projects could occupy entire regions of cloud compute in some cases for awhile, some even more depending on the problem. But running that for even a short time or decades needed would cost more money than anyone has to do.

Academic HPCs existed long before cloud compute options and for certain problem spaces could also be used even in non-distributed memory cases to handle this stuff. But you still needed allocation time and sometimes even funding to use them, competing against other cases like drug design, cancer research, nuclear testing… whatever. So searching for ET could be crowdsourced and the cost distributed which is something that made it alluring and tractable.

I used to run a small academic cluster that was underutilized but essentially fully paid for. I’d often put some of these projects running as background throttled processes outside scheduler space so the 90% of the time no one was using them, the hardware would at least be doing some useful scientific research since it’s after-all funded largely from federal scientific research funding. There was of course some bias introduced by which projects I chose to support whereas someone else may have made a more equitable choice.

I could not find mentions of any Ukraine-based company working with them. Do you have more info?

Where can I buy a compute-for-heat home system?

Edit: I have a heat pump, which is more efficient for heating of course

Small personal web is best web.

Well, except for Vogon poetry

It’s all mostly all for REDACTED

Probably due to the Great Filter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjtOGPJ0URM

>Even humanity’s (weak) radio emissions would be detectable from tens of light years away, and stronger emissions from much further.

That's not true. Non-directional radio transmissions (e.g. TV, broadcast radio) would not be distinguishable from cosmic background radiation at more than a light year or two away [0]. Highly directional radio emissions (e.g. Arecibo message) an order of magnitude more powerful than the strongest transmitters on Earth would only be visible at approximately 1000 light years away [1], and would only be perceptible if the detector were perfectly aligned with the transmission at the exact time it arrived.

[0] https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/245562

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0610377.pdf

> system that probably has led to scientific advances in other fields

Did it though?

Except as a kid back then, the screensaver was trivial to install and neat to look at, and BOINC was a pain. I dropped it when they switched. I imagine some less-technical adults who were interested did as well.

And yet, distributed computing only became huge when people could earn / generate money off of it. Seti / Folding walked so that bitcoin could run?

Yeah I remember a few projects attempting "grid computing", where the idea was distributing application threads across CPUs over freaking ethernet.

Have to say that would be a fun puzzle to try and optimize for, but network latency would always be a hard physical constraint no matter how fast. Maybe some niche use cases, but then multi-core CPUs and GPU processing really took off and I guess it just got even less useful.

TLDR of jve's AI comment:

You know of this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal

SETI at Home was a screensaver that was looking for signals like that via distributed searching and they didn't find anything (but they do have telescope time for tackling the 92 highest priority follow-up scans).