If life ain’t just a joke

Germany?

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.

Toyota has clearly made a massive bet against BEVs and on hybrids and FCEVs.

And if i could i would select the physically attractive ones so that all people can have a girlfriend.

If you really think physical attractiveness is the major factor in finding a partner you should first grow up. Then, after that, you can discuss topics like the one you tried here. And hopefully, by then you’ll have a better understanding of what makes a life worth living and why it’s a bad idea to have eugenics.

8 players is tough… We play quite some couch cooperative games, so here’s some recommendations. None of them except a single party game for 8 at once though, I’m afraid.

• overcooked was already recommended. I second that. It’s great. But man, it’s intense, too… You can only play this with people who can laugh at themselves. I’ve heard purple say that this game might jeopardise friendships and I get it.
• lovers in a dangerous spacetime is a game I’m madly in love with. It’s a coop roguelike which mixes space and lasers (which worked well for some of our kids) with pink rainbow unicorn aesthetics (which worked well for the other kids) and is just all around great fun to play.
• boomerang fu was already recommended. I like the design and the the music has some real bangers, but it’s a competitive game which might lead to some conflict, depending on your group dynamics.
• unrailed cost us quite some hours as well. We really liked it, but imho it gets quite tough quite fast - we rarely got to the third of iirc ten biomes. Maybe it’s because we always play it with our kids. Maybe we just suck at it. Despite this issue, we sunk quite some hours into it because it just still works well.
• Trine is three players coop only… It’s a platformer. I didn’t like the design so much, but my kids love it, so I guess that’s still a good verdict.
• pixel cup soccer is our go-to soccer game. It’s obviously a simple arcade game, but it’s fun.
• Sonic All Stars Racing Transformed is our Not-Mario-Kart Kartracer and it works well. Not a fan of the tanks in there for a kid’s game though.
• the Jack’s party box games or whatever they’re called are a kind of mixed bag, but drawful is great fun. It’s also the only game on this list for 8 players. You draw stuff on a phone or a tablet and there’s a well-working mechanic to make people guess what was drawn.
• while I haven’t played it yet (waiting for a deal), Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge is supposedly a great take on classic streets of rage style beat em ups.
• Rayman: Origins is a beautifully made and well designed platformer that can be played cooperatively with up to four people. True classic imho.
• for a quick party session, our kids love ultimate chicken horse where you build a level and then race through it. Tbh, for me it didn’t really provide too much replayability, but hey, if the kids like it, who am I to judge?

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So… Who processes the donation?

Oh really? Man, you don’t say!

What’s your point?

It doesn’t even resemble a consciousness. It’s not even close.

Also, why are you asking your question to begin with if your answer is then just a condescending “but sometimes we can’t tell AI from humans apart”? Yeah, no shit. It’s been like that at least since the 60s. That’s not the point. If that’s all you have, then go ahead, be happy you found something “wild and so trippy”. But don’t ask if there are legitimate reasons to reject AI if all you want to do is indulge yourself.

It is the coolest invention since the Internet and it is remarkable how close it can resemble actual consciousness.

No. It isn’t. First and foremost, it produces a randomised output that it has learned to make look like other stuff on the Internet. It has as much to do with consciousness as a set of dice and the fact that you think it’s more than that already shows how you don’t understand what it is and what it does.

AI doesn’t produce anything new. It doesn’t reason, it isn’t creative. As it has no understanding or experience, it doesn’t develop or change. Using it to produce art shows a lack of understanding of what art is supposed to be or accomplish. AI only chews up what’s being thrown at it to vomit it onto the Web, without any hint of something new. It also lacks understanding about the world, so asking it about decisions to be made is not only like asking an encyclopedia that comes up with answers on the fly based on whether they sound nice, regardless of the answers being correct, applicable or even possible.

And on top of all of this, on top of people using a bunch of statistical dice rolls to rob themselves of experiences and progress that they’d have made had they made their own decisions or learned painting themselves, it’s an example of the “rules for thee, not for me”. An industry that has lobbied against the free information exchange for decades, that sent lawyers after people who downloaded decades old books or movies for a few hours of private enjoyment suddenly thinks that there might be the possibility of profits around the corner, so they break all the laws they helped create without even the slightest bit of self-awareness. Their technology is just a hollow shell that makes the Internet unusable for all the shit it produces, but at least it isn’t anything else. Their business model, however, openly declares that people are only second class citizens.

There you are. That’s why I hate it. What’s not to hate?

It’s so bright!

So what? Things are mostly valued by what the projected performance is, not the prior performance.

Also it seems that Krafton assumed they would miss the performance criteria, so they thought they’d bought it for $500 million. That doesn’t sound unreasonable for a studio that made $250 million with a single release and already had more in its pipeline.

I’m adding some second hand experience here, but what made below zero much worse for my son when he played it was that it constantly crashed, resulting in a lot of lost progress. Often crashing when saving, too, so after having accomplished something. He got it on the switch as some kind of double-feature with subnautica and below zero on a single cartridge. He played through subnautica and loved it but ditched below zero after barely a handful of hours played, purely due to the frustration, not even being at the point where those game design points would have mattered.

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.

Alfred J. Kwak was actually a co-production of VARA (NL), ZDF (DE), TV Tokyo (JP) and TVE (ES). Lots of people involved ;).

Didn’t know those German series were popular across the border! Very interesting. And hey, learning a language is never a bad thing, I guess. Sometimes I wish the Germans wouldn’t dub everything.

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.

When it was released, Alfred J Kwak was wildly popular in Germany and I think the Netherlands, too. I still consider it to be one of the most beautifully produced European animated shows from that era. DVD releases were sparse and I don’t think you can stream it anywhere (except some shady YouTube channels that probably are only left alone because the whole thing has pretty much disappeared into obscurity).

Something that I guess is only popular over here is Tatort, which is essentially your typical crime solving series. It’s released every other Sunday and always plays in some German speaking city or town. Quality varies wildly, but that is also sort of what makes it nice to watch, Tatort just hits differently depending on whether it’s the one from Münster or from Wien.

Wildly popular over here is also “die Sendung mit der Maus”, “the mouse program”, maybe. It’s usually a set of entertaining animated or puppeteered shorts, educational segments and few-seconds-long animations of the mouse. It’s been on air for decades.