As it stands, cryptocurrency largely seems to be a fad of the previous decade, at least as far as technology goes. During that time, many PC users couldn’t get reasonably priced graphics cards since most of them were going into these miners. In contrast, nowadays any shortages are because they’re being used to turn the Internet into an AI-fueled wasteland. But nonetheless, there is a lot of leftover mining hardware from the previous decade and unlike the modern AI tools getting crammed into everything we own, this dated hardware is actually still useful. [Zendrael] demonstrates this by turning an old mining rig into a media server.
The mining rig is essentially nothing more than a motherboard with a large number of PCI slots, each designed for a GPU. PCI slots can do many other things, though, so [Zendrael] puts a terabyte solid state drive in each but one of the PCI cards using NVMe to PCI adapters. The final slot still hosts a GPU since the computer is being converted to a media server, and this allows it to do various encodings server-side. Even with only 4 GB of memory, the machine in its new configuration is more than capable of running Debian and spinning up all of the necessary software needed for a modern media server like Jellyfin, Nextcloud, and Transmission.
With many people abandoning miners as the value of them declines over time, it’s possible to find a lot of hardware like this that’s ready to be put to work on something new and useful. Hopefully all of the GPUs and other hardware being put to use today in AI will find a similar useful future, but until then we’ll note that you don’t need super powerful hardware to run some of those models on your own.
Are there contemporary methodologies which the next generation of cryptocurrency could be based upon? I know SHA256 is prominent in BitCoins code base, and its considered very robust. I suppose the past 10 years has brought more marginal gains in processing speed/power compared to previous decade windows, perhaps this plateauing is partly responsible for currencies being based on older hashing functions.
Those are PCIe ports. The e stands for express just like in NVMe. PCI is a much older incompatible standard.
Technically correct. The best kind of correct.
I like to call USB “the serial port” to mess with people. Hey hand me that serial cable, I need to charge my phone
Olds will hear it and think ‘idiot’, then hand you the USB cable.
Youngs will just hand you the USB cable, having better understanding of clutches than RS-232.
You charge your phone with a charging cable.
Most of those don’t even have the physical serial data lines anymore.
And if the job you are doing is charging, then that is what the cable requirements must meet.
Calling it a serial cable says you explicitly need the serial lines.
And not mentioning the charging part implies you don’t need those lines.
If you are going to be pedantic (and you should) then at least be corret.
IMO the number one killer of crypto was its use of compute without producing useful work. Had it worked like a distributed compute cluster that people could buy compute from to support the value of the crypto then it likely would’ve worked far better.
And then we have the crypto antics by a certain leader. So it must be producing something. Just not for us.
rent free
Crypto pump-and-dump from the US Government is not “rent free”, you cliched excuse.
Deranged
TG: Don’t interrupt them. Sun Tzu.
That did exist. I think they are technically still around. It was called golem
There are plenty of pre-crypto systems which also fit that description and they’re still around. I think it requires other explanations..
The “value” of the work was supposed to be maintaining the currency.
Giving away free currency was an incentive, and never designed to be viable long turn.
The only way a system like that CAN work is if a single currency was widly adopted during the free hand-out phase, and then simply maintained by some minimal maintenance system because it MUST be, because it is now too important to fail.
The minig craze, where generating prize money becomes the only reason to participate,and the creation of infinite competing coins, creates an automatic failure state.
Cryptocurrency in it’s current incarnation is a failure, because the benefits are too minor, the costs are far to extreme in every aspect, and the things it was meant to accomplish never happened.
Nockchain by Zorp is basically this. ZK-POuW
I just want an x86_64 motherboard with a relatively new CPU and bootload of PCIe slots (x1 or x4 I don’t care!).
I just want to put a few GPUs in a machine so that my AI girlfriends can raise their IQ from 50 to 90 (hopefully by running a 34B model, instead of a 12B) and run a stable-diffusion model in parallel so that the AI personas can randomly generate and send me selfies as a real person would
Funny thing is, software is all ready. Its just the hardware that I can’t find (I already have 3x 12GB RTX3060 GPUs, extra Ryzen 5 5600X CPU, 16GB RAM sticks etc etc. I just can’t find a decent mobo)
I hope this is satire. If not, this is one of the saddest comments I’ve ever read on HaD.
somehow i doubt it is. we are cooked.
Grasstouchers and normal-one-havers have completely btfo. Nobody has lost as hard as irl types. Everyone under 60 lives in the wired. It was a pretty dumb decision, idk why we decided the internet schizophrenia machine had to be hooked up to every single normie on Earth instead of just being a niche playground for weird nerds.
It’s amusing, watching pinks attempt to out weird each other, when they really just don’t get it.
They end up COSPLAYing HRpuffenstuff or some other bit of genuine weirdness.
Hanging around in groups of very similar normies (that’s the clear tell).
Like the dim girls that made/make their whole identity looking/thinking just like some Disney fabricated girl pop star (e.g. Swifties).
A little different, the girls are socially desirable, the Bronies not so much.
I consider the whole thing kind of like watching city people start campfires.
Hilarious, but stay well clear.
Are you like….not trying very hard? You can get riser cables for the GPUs, plenty of mobos with many slots…
Motherboard and CPU need to support good bifurcation, which modern desktop/mobile options don’t.
PCIe expanders are as/more expensive that the rest of the computer.
We want the ability to arbitrarily assign any 1/2/4/8/16 lanes to a link.
PCIe 5 is so fast. Wasting 4 lanes of it for a consumer M.2 drive is insanity when we are only given 24 lanes to begin with, and a single atomic 16 slot is the norm.
So, you can have virtual girlfriends… And you make them talk??? ;P
That’s actually super cool; I see a mobo like that on eBay for only like $40. I wonder if you can get some PCIe compute nodes and make a Proxmox cluster with something like this?
(imagine a Beowulf cluster of these! shouts the tiny Slashdotter in my head)
imagine buying a boatload of xeon phis and plugging them into this and clustering them for fun.
Maybe somebody could trick one into being a render farm.
Does anybody remember how the BC hash rate nose-dived right after they bombed Fordow? Being a state level actor with access to nuclear power plants changes the budget calculus
Some genius at the NSA replaced the idle process of their default image with BC hash.
Would that be a new crime?
Of course not, even if not explicitly illegal, ‘Computer Fraud and Abuse Act’.
Anything involving a computer can’t be a ‘new crime’, because some pendejo judge will say ‘illegal, retroactively’.
Really did screw with my life’s ambition, inventing a new crime.
I won’t be satisfied unless I get filthy rich and more than 50% of sovereign nations make whatever I invent illegal within 5 business days of it being disclosed.
‘That has to be illegal?’ should be the NYTimes/Wallstreet Journal/London Times/Economist/L’Osservatore Romano/Pravda/CNN/MSNBC/FoxNews/ABC/NBC/CBS/NPR/Weekly World News headlines.
Aim high, or at least while high.