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this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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Yeah, not seeing any results was the big downside. I remember being so excited to participate in SETI. Only for nothing to ever come from it. Admittedly, SETI may have been overly ambitious and that set it up for failure.
But I'm also a bit skeptical of how effective home computers can be for a lot of these projects, considering how unfathomably massive data centers are these days. Not saying they aren't impactful, but rather that any really compelling study is likely to get a grant or corporate sponsorship that can pay for a bonkers amount of computational power.
Consumer hardware is relatively inefficient by comparison and requires doing redundant extra work to prevent fake results (because trolls will troll anything). Plus it's not considered acceptable to run at 100% on people's home PCs. If I remember correctly, they usually throttled the work so that it wouldn't be so noticeable.
Wasn't folding@home not responsible for finding how the spike protein of Covid-19 folds?
So was the Rosetta project on BOINC Along with finding and advancing treatments It was all posted as a notification by the project through the BOINC client That one of the great things I like about the network is getting notifications and news from the projects I contribute too
Much of science is broke/underfunded and home computers have collectively a shit load of idle computing power on traditional processors and GPUs which are harder to get and more expensive in DCs. The idea of distributed computing for science is sound.
I was mostly disillusioned by the lack of feeling of participation or accomplishment.