What inspires you most about F@H

[FireFox500]

Hello! 

I'm a university web design student looking to use F@H for the basis of a project aimed at creating delight in a web format. In order to do this I need to understand what drives people to continue contributing to F@H, what gets you excited about the work you are participating in? What drives you to donate your PC? Any insight would be greatly appreciated. I've been long familiar with F@H through LTTs coverage but I'd love to get a sense for what the community is most emotionally inspired by in F@Hs work. Especially in it's relation to the COVID Moonshots.

 

TLDR: What inspires or delights you most about F@H? The implications of research? The community? What drives you to keep donating processor time?

 

Thank you, 
FireFox500

[Letgomyleghoe]

looking at the points going up is the most inspiring thing to be honest,.the design of the F@H app isn't anything special, neither is the user interface, but it works.

[RollinLower]

mostly the community surrounding it, and the fact that i'm actually doing something usefull with the hardware i own.

the folding community on this forum is very much alive, which makes it fun to participate and hang out with people.

[lewdicrous]

Points go up, dopamine goes up.

Plus, helping science is cool.

[vsteel]

I lost my wife several years ago and was left with two young children to care for on my own.  I fold in the hopes no others have to go through that and it is my small way of fighting back.  No servers or anything fancy, just two PCs here in the house, I give spare cycles to the cause.

 

 

[TVwazhere]

8 hours ago, FireFox500 said:

What gets you excited about the work you are participating in?

The fact that I can take a computer and put it towards something that has actual impact on peoples lives. Collectively the processing power generated by the F@H community at it's peak was the largest super computer in the world. 

Quote

F@H zoomed to a peak performance of 1.5 exaFLOPs, making it more than seven times faster than the world's fastest supercomputer, Summit, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. 

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/how-the-pandemic-revived-a-distributed-computing-project-and-made-history/

 

8 hours ago, FireFox500 said:

What drives you to donate your PC?

For me I had about 75% of a PC in a basement being completely unutilized, so I said why not get it running and put it to work? That was October 2018 and other than power outages, upgrades or maintenance, Project ITNOS has not missed a day of folding. I could have chosen mining and done something for profit, or I could choose Folding and advance research for medicines to some of the worlds most complicated diseases. I chose the latter; its basically preference at this point. 

 

8 hours ago, FireFox500 said:

What inspires or delights you most about F@H?

For me one of my favorite parts are the events we hold at various stages of the year to help promote Folding. We also award badges for both total accumulated points of the user as well as badges for the number of official events participated in, giving slightly more incentive to continue folding (a more tangible and trackable goal for many users to help continue to inspire them to fold). 

[RollinLower]

9 hours ago, lewdicrous said:

Points go up, dopamine goes up.

Plus, helping science is cool.

the good chemicals

[Gorgon]

 

[j1philli]

On 4/15/2021 at 10:01 PM, FireFox500 said:

Hello! 

I'm a university web design student looking to use F@H for the basis of a project aimed at creating delight in a web format. In order to do this I need to understand what drives people to continue contributing to F@H, what gets you excited about the work you are participating in? What drives you to donate your PC? Any insight would be greatly appreciated. I've been long familiar with F@H through LTTs coverage but I'd love to get a sense for what the community is most emotionally inspired by in F@Hs work. Especially in it's relation to the COVID Moonshots.

 

TLDR: What inspires or delights you most about F@H? The implications of research? The community? What drives you to keep donating processor time?

 

Thank you, 
FireFox500

I got back into F@H with Team LTT at the beginning of Covid because I felt it was important and I will be continuing the support now that I'm older and understand direct impact it has.