I remember seeing a prank program years ago that showed the SETI@home screensaver for a bit, then popped up an alert box saying "Alien Life Found!" with options to submit or cancel(!).

If you tried to submit it would spend a while with a really slow progress bar, and then say it failed to submit and asked you to contact SETI directly. I wonder if anyone actually did....

My dad did a similar thing with a bunch of computers at his store. It made way more sense back when processors didn't clock down efficiently so there was such a thing as 'wasted/excess clock cycles' you could donate to a distributed computing project. Now though processors shut off cores, reduce their clock speed etc so there's a lot less spare processing power you can siphon off without increasing power draw.

It was my screensaver too and it felt like the most sci-fi thing ever. I'd stare it while daydreaming about aliens.

Oh, I feel this. As a pre-teen, I loved it. SETI@Home running on our family's Pentium 100, X-Files, and hanging out on the "Parascope" forum and chatroom on AOL for all things UFO related. An "I Want To Believe" poster on my wall.

I've (thankfully) moved on past that, but I look back at that with nostalgia.

When conspiracies were a bit more fun.

Anyone else collect The X-Factor partworks magazine? I used to love reading it.

Folding@home got a boost recently from Pewdipie deploying his 12-stack 4090 build against it and then getting a bunch of his fanbase to also participate in his folding@home squad.

They saw a huge uptick in users during the COVID pandemic. As the corona virus is a protein shell, and their software folds protein molecules, they were able to apply it to look for targets for other molecules to attach to the virus where it would normally latch onto a cell, this could then lead to treatments.

They'd found some promising results, and were working with a pharmaceutical company to manufacture the first compounds that could then be tested. Unfortunately that company's facility was located in eastern Ukraine. =(

But that aside, they've still been going strong.

World Community Grid at https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/ is also running, though it has had struggles since moving datacenters, and it seems their external stats are still out of commission.

I've recently decided to end my own participation, mainly because I've run three systems into the ground, and we're now in the "save what you can" era. There's one motherboard I want to get refurbished, since it became unstable when idle but loved 24x7 crunching. It would make a great NAS if I could find some DDR4 at a price I could stomach, or I could lay it in as a spare if the new motherboard goes south in the future.

Are they doing anything not covered by alphafold? I thought that approach basically crushed all previous efforts.

I would've thought that with the advent of general purpose GPUs, cloud computing, etc that they would've run out of work by now.

I forgot all about this project - thanks for the reminder!

You can run on a spare Raspberry Pi. I remember doing that. Performance isn’t great but every little bit helps

https://downey.io/blog/folding-at-home-raspberry-pi-arm/

How many papers have been published as a result of this, and more pertinently, how many "real" things are now being made or used based on that? I'm hoping it's not all just perpetual "regrowing teeth" territory where nothing ever comes from it.

My homelab is in a closet that has the water meter for my above-garage apartment. Before I put a heater in the garage itself, I needed to make sure that that closet didn't freeze. I rigged up a temperature sensor to start mprime on a server if the temperature got too low, but higher than the electric heater that's also in that closet. I figured I might as well contribute to research if I'm just burning watts for heat anyways.

I generally run BOINC during the winter in place of a space heater, but that's only a cold month or two of the year.

Yishan Wong jumpscare

Sigh. I miss websites like this.

That is very fun.

No, they just published two papers in 2025. You can watch a video about it or link to paper in my other comment on this thread: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt07R_amRT8

Well it led to the creation of BOINC, a distributed computing system that probably has led to scientific advances in other fields

So I wouldn’t say it was all for nothing, but it’s main benefit was the idea, and not the results it generated

That's pretty dismissive outright; consider uh. All forms of distributed computing, from cloud computers to bittorrent to bitcoin / cryptocurrency. Seti@home was one of, if not the first distributed projects, the predecessor of cloud computing and spreading a workload over many computers, years before Hadoop and map/reduce became popular (which at least in my head was the start of "big data" and cloud computing).

I won't claim it was "the" most important or it was critical in that, but it's not to be dismissed.

(Re)search is still valuable, even if the result turns out to be negative.

It’s all mostly all for nothing.

The fact that all SETI endeavors haven’t really found anything is actually a very valuable result, because it constrains “they’re everywhere, we just haven’t been looking” arguments quite a bit.

Even humanity’s (weak) radio emissions would be detectable from tens of light years away, and stronger emissions from much further. So the idea that intelligent life is absolutely everywhere that was liberally tossed around a few decades ago is pretty much on life support now.

If i remember correctly, back then even some sysadmins were even fired over it because of the usage of resources. It also sprouted some weird projects on how to distribute all those unused cpu cycles for other things.

It just completed. Published paper. Final release & final analysis: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ade5ab/...

It could be [sic] added to it, as the source has the same typo.