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(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.

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This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
It's always been on my mind to find something for my computer to idle on. Never heard of "Folding@home". Thank you I'll try it out.
You're welcome! Folding@home is the big one, and the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search is also pretty popular (though IMHO a waste of resources for a relatively useless result). But I just looked into this topic myself after posting that comment, and turns out there's a huge list of such "volunteer computing" projects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volunteer_computing_projects
So while Folding@home is a great one and medical scientific research, you might pick something else from that list. Perhaps more than one!
Now the confession: I'm a hypocrite. I never ran any of these volunteer computing projects on my own PCs. But that's partly because I tend to shut them off every night, so a lot of the usable time for it isn't really usable. The other part is basically that I never bothered to do it.
But I think after this conversation reminded me of it, I might look into installing it on my PC!
I used to do it for SETI@home (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) and a few other projects. Haven’t in a while now but maybe I will again since my server pc never shuts off anyway.
Back in the day I used boinc or some such to interface, it sort of looked like a torrent page, with progress bars on the tasks and stuff. It was kinda neat having an impact.
Based confession
~~You should check out the great internet mersenne prime search as well: mersenne.org~~
Edit: forgot to read comments first