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Cake day: June 25th, 2024

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  • It still won’t work.

    We already need lots of hydrogen for various industrial use cases. We currently get it from methane. First thing we should do with green hydrogen is make it replace the fossil based hydrogen.

    Once that’s done, we might have the abilities to expand the facilities to create more hydrogen. Those are expensive, so they won’t just run if the electricity is almost free. You don’t buy such a machine and have it idle most of the time - up hydrogen won’t ever be free, for the cost of the electrolysers alone. The tech overhead needs to be paid for. Same goes for transport.

    You know what can be done with surplus electricity more easily and with the existing infrastructure? It can be put in batteries.

    But as I write, it’s all probably moot, because the conditions will arrive too late, so batteries will probably have taken over everything.

    It won’t be because hydrogen’s late but because batteries are - in cars - the less complex, more reliable and cheaper solution.

    But maybe in planes because of the better weight energy ratio, and maybe also in trucks to be able to have higher load capacity. And as I write instead of fuel cells, the hydrogen can be used directly in jet engines, but also in an only slightly modified ICE car.

    It makes sense for planes, I never argued against that. Especially because the weight is reduced while you use the fuel you’re carrying. I don’t see it for trucks simply because the infrastructure for battery electric trucks is already everywhere, but yeah, charging several hundred kWh takes time and such large batteries have a price tag attached to them - but that’s not what we were talking about, no?

    Disregarding the problems you describe there are actually hydrogen fuel cell cars on the roads, that have been sold commercially and been available since 2021.
    For instance the Toyota Mirai:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Mirai

    So kind of weird to claim a product that is actually available now, isn’t possibly feasible in a future where it can have basically free fuel!
    It probably boils down to which form is cheapest to create AND store, hydrogen in containers or electricity in batteries. Batteries will always be more expensive than a container, but hydrogen has way greater loss. So it’s not an obvious calculation with one solution that fits all cases.

    I’m well aware of hydrogen cars existing. Hydrogen based cars have been around for so long that most of them got discontinued quite some time ago, such as the Mercedes GLC F-Cell. It’s not that I say that you can’t build them, I just say that there’s no economically viable use case for them. There won’t be free fuel for them because hydrogen will remain rare as manufacturing and transporting it will remain difficult. Fuel cells and tanks that withstand 400 to 800 bar pressure aren’t free either - and neither is the whole infrastructure to distribute it, which goes way beyond the transport as a fuel cell gas station is a much larger hassle to set up than hooking up a charging station to an existing energy grid. The point remains that even if electricity gets to be free at times, it’s much more efficient to just store it in batteries than to translate it to hydrogen, ship that around the country or to another continent, store that in a cryo tank for days or weeks and then translate it back to electricity to then be stored in the battery your fuel cell based car still needs to operate (albeit smaller than those in BEVs, granted). It just doesn’t make sense to assume that hydrogen, with the given overhead attached, will ever be free. Even electricity often isn’t when it seems to be (e.g. I might see a price of -2 cents at night but the bill then includes a 12 cents “network fee” per kWh), so it surely won’t be the case for hydrogen either. And then, with all the overhead attached, you still need several times the energy to move the car the same distance as a battery electric car which makes it even less of an economical use case, assuming there’s always a price attached to the energy you need (which there is - even for my own photovoltaic setup, I usually calculate about 6 cents per kWh to account for the depreciation of the modules).

    So yes, it’s an obvious calculation. Batteries aren’t free, I get that, but neither are fuel cells, containers and smaller batteries. Just as with ICEs, the running costs will be the defining aspect of the TCO of a car and there’s just no way for hydrogen to ever meet the price of putting electricity in a battery because a fuel cell car does that, too, plus all the conversions. Its operation is literally a superset of a BEV, so the running costs will be higher, unless you use fossil hydrogen, which i hope nobody ever seriously suggests as a large scale solution to de-carbonify traffic.


  • However the Hydrogen car may actually still be the future, that future is just not yet

    Hard disagree here.

    Conversion always costs energy. There is no way around it. We’re talking about physical properties, not something that can be optimised away. With batteries, electricity is stored and released, but transfer through the existing infrastructure has been optimised to death and there are no conversions during the transport.

    For fuel cells, you not only have exactly the same tech in the car (including a battery, as the fuel cell usually cannot deliver the peak power required to quickly accelerate) with the overhead of the conversion from electricity to hydrogen and back again, you also have an energy carrier that’s hard to store and transport, leading to even greater losses concerning the energy efficiency. To move exactly the same distance, a fuel cell car either needs a lot more electricity or it needs hydrogen from other sources such as methane, which suddenly turns the whole climate neutrality of those engines upside down. There’s fundamentally no way around this. So no, I really don’t think there’s an economically viable way to run fuel cell based cars.


  • The infrastructure may be a thing, depending on where you live. I’m in Central Europe and can’t confirm that over here.

    The cold climate is something I can’t confirm. If anything, I prefer my BEVs over the ICEs when it’s cold, just because I don’t have to wait for the engine to get warm until the heating works. Range is reduced during winter, true, but tbh I don’t usually have to charge over the course of a day even during winter. Still, I guess the best argument against your point is Norway. That country’s cold, but BEVs have clearly taken over the market there.





  • the UN gave them money to research ways the UN could use AI, so that is what they did.

    That’s kind of my point… They didn’t. To research ways the un could use ai, you could have workshops and interviews with various groups, experts and non-experts alike. You don’t just pick one, utterly insane use case (that is called out beforehand as such) and implement that. You do research on the options and pick either the best ones or, if there’s no good one, none!

    To come up with a research project, it has to go through various pitches, drafts and proposals. I can’t imagine every single control instance failing so utterly that this kind of project with this high school level of arguing (“well, we could do this, so why wouldn’t we?”) passes each of them. There has to be a better reason why they did this. And if there really isn’t, a lot of people should ask themselves what the fuck they’re getting paid for if they let this happen - and some other people if they’re the ones who should fire the former.


  • Those are kind of non-answers… “Why the fuck are you doing that?” and the answers are all “Well, somebody’s probably doing it at some point, so why don’t we do it now?” or “you gotta try stuff” as if that explains anything. Like, no, there are some things that don’t need to be tested. This is arguing on the level of “Caaaaarl, that kills people!” You don’t need to punch people in the face to know that’s a dumb thing to do. You don’t need to spill milk to know it’s a dumb thing to do. And you sure as fuck don’t need to date somebody you dislike to know that fucking them is a dumb thing to do or create ai refugees as the UN to know it’s a dumb thing to do! Like, what argument is that? We’re not talking to three-year-olds that have never touched a candle! The UN should be able to anticipate the consequences of their actions! ESPECIALLY IF THEY HAD WORKSHOPS WHERE PEOPLE TOLD THEM IT’S A FUCKING DUMB THING TO DO!! So, no, those aren’t answers.


  • In early tests at a workshop attended by humanitarian organizations, refugee aid groups, and nonprofits, Albrecht and Fournier-Tombs said the reactions were strong and that many were negative. “Why would we want to present refugees as AI creations when there are millions of refugees who can tell their stories as real human beings?” one person said

    I love how the article then proceeds to not answer this question. What a dumb idea. What a waste of UN funds.




  • No no no, you don’t get it! Humans only have eyes, so cars that only have eyes should perform just as good as humans! Disregard that humans don’t perform well in fog or rain or generally anything that isn’t good weather and also disregard that to match our eyes’ resolution you’d need extremely high resolution cameras that produce way too much data for current computers and also disregard that most of the stuff isn’t happening in our eyes but in our brains and also disregard that the point that is usually being made to advocate for self driving cars is that they should be better than humans!



  • How can you be so dense?

    Using a calculator for math is cheating unless it has been explicitly allowed. Which it isn’t until higher grades because before that, people are supposed to do math without a calculator. Which they should do to get a proper understanding about the subject.

    The same holds for literally any tool. If the goal is to get the students to be able to convincingly communicate their thoughts or to see if they understood a topic by making them explain it, having them use chatgpt accomplished nothing and just wastes everybody’s time. If the goal is to see if they can produce enough bullshit to satisfy an average public administration, then letting them use llms might be valid. Just like any other tool, it’s legitimate to allow llms or not, based on whatever is supposed to end up in a student’s head. But using it without it being allowed is cheating, simple as that.


  • DS9 is waaaay better than voyager.

    That’s debatable. Both had their flaws, but I really preferred Voyager’s idea of “dang, it’s going to take us decades to get home and we’re in uncharted territory, so let’s explore the hell out of our way back” over DS9’s “were sitting at the galaxy’s newly discovered traffic junction and our new enemies look like anything, so our major conflict is that anybody could be a traitor and our utopia is turned upside down into a surveillance state”.