dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/null

Feel free to fork.

    • ImgurRefugee114@reddthat.com
      24·
      23 hours ago

      Unironically. I did this with my 480 back in the day in an uninsulated apartment. Also crypto mining in the narrow slice of time where it was profitable-ish to do so with a consumer GPU. But then ASICs took off and I went back to folding / SETI

      • juipeltje@lemmy.world
        4·
        15 hours ago

        I remember trying this for a little bit too and did some crypto mining, but after leaving it on for days my room refused to warm up at all. I think the room was just too big for the heat output of the pc to handle. In the end i gave up and just turned on the heater again.

        • ImgurRefugee114@reddthat.com
          4·
          13 hours ago

          Yeah, it was basically like me running a ~400 watt heater. It’s not a ton, but it’s also not nothing. Even when I did use resistive electric heaters, I still kept it going because it still contributed. 15A 120v circuits, ~1500w heaters are the norm. At the time I did that I was also running Dual Xeons; so, full system draw was in the ballpark of ~600w. At the time, it was cheaper-than-free heat, so why not, even if just supplemental.

          Of course, now that doesn’t work at all; always a loss. But still: It’s a heater that does some limited good while also heating. The electricity is the same anyways… May as well push it through some logic gates before warming my room.

          100% efficient. (of course, heat pumps can go over 100%… But as far as resistive heating goes, it’s not like a GPU is any worse then a space heater… Watts are watts)

      • RandomHugs@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        16 hours ago

        How much did someone make from that? With one ordinary PC I mean, to not turn my question into a “how long is a rope” type.

        • ImgurRefugee114@reddthat.com
          3·
          15 hours ago

          At the time I was running it, it was about enough to offset the cost of electricity and maybe turn a slight profit. Nothing substantial. But then it got way harder to mine btc and asics dominated the field.

          Of course, had I started a few years earlier, I’d probably be a billionaire.

    • irotsoma@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      2·
      15 hours ago

      I did this a long time ago but found that by the time my systems completed work, they were already completed and I never got any credit. Not that credit was the reason I did it, but also my results were just wasted. It’s probably been well over a decade since even looked at it and longer still since I tried doing it. Has it gotten any better about assigning smaller units of work or any other mitigation of those kinds of issues?

  • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
    13·
    21 hours ago

    So for a while I was the weed hookup of my D&D group. It was great because they all worked in education, except me and one other guy. The other guy worked as IT at a company that works with IBM on printers. Due to this he was more than happy to bring me a tower that they were going to throw away anyway, in exchange for an 1/8th or 1/4 depending on the specs.

    Due to this, and a fairly strong EvE Online habit at the time, I ended up with 8 former servers that I had maxed out everything that their boards could handle. Going and setting up my accounts to mine in a belt was enough to heat my apartment all winter.

  • crank0271@lemmy.worldEnglish
    211·
    23 hours ago

    Look at ol’ Moneybags here, with their computer hooked up to their neighbor’s electric meter.

  • qwerty@discuss.tchncs.de
    7·
    20 hours ago

    Great opportunity to get into mining monero, I’ve been using my gaming PC as a heater for years now, compute generated heat is almost 100% as power efficient as a regular electric heater.

    • grue@lemmy.world
      3·
      19 hours ago

      Regular electric heaters kinda suck, though. Heat pumps are 3-5x as efficient (they can go above 100% because they move heat rather than creating it) and natural gas is often cheaper per BTU.

      I’m not saying that mining crypto in the winter is bad, just that it isn’t necessarily completely “free” if your regular heater is something other than electric resistance.

      • printf("%s", name);@piefed.blahaj.zoneOPEnglish
        1·
        18 hours ago

        I’ll solder on a pipe onto my CPU air cooler and place the other end in my bed. That way, I’ll get crypto warmth :) just need a way to insulate the pipe…

    • palordrolap@fedia.io
      5·
      22 hours ago

      for((i=0;i<$(grep -c '^processor' /proc/cpuinfo);i++)); do dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/null & done

      killall dd if you want to kill them

      Caveats: Runs on my machine. Might not work on yours. If it does, you accept all responsibility for any system damage from running it or any version with typos.

      Other notes: This doesn’t actually lock each process to a specific processor, but the system ought to spread the load anyway. taskset --cpu-list $i before the dd if you absolutely have to have that.