Yes, there are multiple competing providers - all the electricity comes from a single grid but competition in how you are billed for usage.
Many people choose a single fixed or variable rate tariff, but there are also off-peak tariffs that are very cheap at night but slightly more expensive in the day (designed for EV users), or even tariffs where the rate changes every 30 minutes depending on what is being generated - in this case when there is excess solar and wind generation then sometimes the rate even goes negative and you are paid to use the excess power.
It sounds like a combination of the Download Monitor plugin plus a misconfiguration at the web server level resulted in the file being publicly accessible at that URL when the developers thought it would remain private until deliberately published.
This comment reminded me to check whether https://www.distributed.net/ was still in existence. I hadn't thought about the site for probably two decades, I ran the client for this back in the late 1990s back when they were cracking RC5-64, but they still appear to be going as a platform that could be used for this kind of thing.
I was also excited about those projects and ran DESchall as well as distributed.net clients. Later on I was running the EFF Cooperative Computing Award (https://www.eff.org/awards/coop), as in administering the contest, not as in running software to search for solutions!
The original cryptographic challenges like the DES challenge and the RSA challenges had a goal to demonstrate something about the strength of cryptosystems (roughly, that DES and, a fortiori, 40-bit "export" ciphers were pretty bad, and that RSA-1024 or RSA-2048 were pretty good). The EFF Cooperative Computing Award had a further goal -- from the 1990s -- to show that Internet collaboration is powerful and useful.
Today I would say that all of these things have outlived their original goals, because the strength of DES, 40-bit ciphers, or RSA moduli are now relatively apparent; we can get better data about the cost of brute-force cryptanalytic attacks from the Bitcoin network hashrate (which obviously didn't exist at all in the 1990s), and the power and effectiveness of Internet collaboration, including among people who don't know each other offline and don't have any prior affiliation, has, um, been demonstrated very strongly over and over and over again. (It might be hard to appreciate nowadays how at one time some people dismissed the Internet as potentially not that important.)
This Busy Beaver collaboration and Terence Tao's equational theories project (also cited in this paper) show that Internet collaboration among far-flung strangers for substantive mathematics research, not just brute force computation, is also a reality (specifically now including formalized, machine-checked proofs).
There's still a phenomenon of "grid computing" (often with volunteer resources), working on a whole bunch of computational tasks:
It's really just the specific "establish the empirical strength of cryptosystems" and "show that the Internet is useful and important" 1990s goals that are kind of done by this point. :-)
I also wonder how many of the numerous AI proponents in HN comments are subject to the same effect. Unless they are truly measuring their own performance, is AI really making them more productive?
You could go the same way as the study, flip a coin to use AI or not, write down the task you just did, the time you thought the task took you and the actual clock time. Repeat and self-evaluate.
Sample of 16 is plenty if the effect is big enough.
It’s also not a sample size of 1, it’s a sample size of however many tasks you do because you don’t care about measuring the effect AI has on anyone but yourself if you’re trying to discern how it impacts you.
It's the most representative sample size if you're interested in your own performance though. I really don't care if other people are more productive with AI, if I'm the outlier that's not then I'd want to know.
It seems this is because the string "autoregressive prior" should appear on the right hand side as well, but in the second image it's hidden from view, and this has confused it to place it on the left hand side instead?
It also misses the arrow between "[diffusion]" and "pixels" in the first image.
This smells like an advert. Over the last year I've spent less money on energy by being on Octopus Tracker (which requires a smart meter) over any fixed tariff.
Many people choose a single fixed or variable rate tariff, but there are also off-peak tariffs that are very cheap at night but slightly more expensive in the day (designed for EV users), or even tariffs where the rate changes every 30 minutes depending on what is being generated - in this case when there is excess solar and wind generation then sometimes the rate even goes negative and you are paid to use the excess power.