In practice, storing energy for a longer period of time is basically never done, with the only real exception I can think of being space travel. And it's not how long the storage period is that matters. It's how quickly you need to get the energy when you're done. Sure, if you store a year worth of energy in a day and dribble it out over a year, a tiny fuel cell and a huge tank is great for cost. But literally space travel is the only practical application of that. For every real-world application other than space travel, you need to be able to dump the entire contents of the fuel cell in at most maybe five to ten times the period of time over which it was built up, if not less. That means either big fuel cells or a lot of fuel cells.

See above. And to that, I would add that converting electricity to hydrogen with electrolysis of water and back is likely to result in a loss of somewhere around 60% to 70% of the energy that you put in. So even if you somehow manage to find some rare edge case (e.g. trying to do solar in Alaska or something similarly nuts) where you really do want to store power long-term and spread it out over a long period of time, the loss of energy is still going to be around 5x as high from fuel cells as lithium ion batteries even factoring in the self-discharge rate over several months.

And that's before you factor in the additional losses from having to pressurize the hydrogen, which adds further the losses. In fact, you'd actually be better off building air tanks and pressurizing them and using the air pressure to turn turbines than doing electrolysis, pressurizing hydrogen, and dumping it into a fuel cell. That will give you a loss of only 25% to 50% of the energy that goes in. Sure, it will take up more space, but you won't have hydrogen making the metal brittle after a few years, requiring you to replace the whole system over and over again, so it makes *way* more sense.

When I say that IMO, there is literally no case where hydrogen fuel cells make sense other than space travel, I mean that. It is utterly terrible efficiency-wise, so much so that almost anything is better, including things that are way simpler and cheaper than hydrogen, like a giant air tank and an air turbine.

I would still expect it to be less efficient than electric arc furnaces, but maybe not, so I'll grant you that this might be a very narrow use case, solely because burning the fuel source is actually important for that. :-)

Fuel cell efficiency is at best about 60%. So no, you do NOT have 80% round-trip efficiency, unless you've found a way to violate the first law of thermodynamics.

Qui Bono?

Certainly not the bots that are downloading the music!

The only person I can think of who would benefit for more money going to Drake is Drake.

I don't trust that Tesla will expand it's robotaxi service to 8 to 10 major US cities in less than two months.

Musk has always, constantly and consistently, lied about how long things take, and often they haven't happened at all. He is the master of hype and short on substance.

Will the service go driverless in Austin by the end of the year? I doubt it. Tesla's robotaxis are already crashing in Austin. (https://www.techspot.com/news/110085-tesla-robotaxis-already-crashing-austin-data-points-gaps.html)

60% efficiency times 68% is 40.8% efficiency. Yeah, that's slightly better than 34%, but in much the same way that a s**t sandwich is slightly better than s**t. :-)

And this will still be capable of running on natural gas, which probably means it won't be optimal efficiency-wise for either fuel.

The losses from electrolysis alone make it a bad idea, even if the next step were 100% efficient. It just gets worse from there.

Easy for you, a technical person familiar with LLMs and WebAssembly

I'm not talking about how to develop LLM inference servers. You don't have to understand WebAssembly in order to run a WebAssembly program in your browser any more than you have to understand Javascript to run Javascript in your browser. It's *less* technological knowledge than using the Play store. And installing Ollama is no more difficult than installing any other app.

Your difficulty conceptions are simply wrong.

I don't understand your response. Was "life breathed into" the ancient Chinese robotic orchestras and singers, or the Islamic robotic orchestra and mechanical peacocks?

And re: myths, the aforementioned myths literally involved *humans* making the automatons. Ajatasatru for example, the maker of the robots to guard the artifacts of the Buddha, was also famous for using a mechanical war chariot of great complexity with whirling spiked maces, and later one with spinning scythes - not the sort of things you would describe as having "life breathed life into", and actually quite similar to Leonardo Da Vinci's chariot (in some versions he made it/them, in other versions it was a gift from the Indras). As for the robots guarding the Buddha, in one version they're literally powered by water wheels. In another version, Greco-Romans had a caste of robot makers, and to steal the technology, a young Indian man was reincarnated as a Greco-Roman, marries the daughter of a robot-maker, and sews the plans for robots into his thigh, so that when he's murdered by killbots as he tries to flee with the plans, they still make it back to India with his body. Yes, ancient Indian legends literally involved robot assassins.

And as for the robots in the Naravahandatta, they were literally made by a carpenter, and are specifically described as "lifeless wooden beings that mimic life".

Even with Hephestos, a literal god, they're very much not described as merely having life breathed into them - they're literally described as having been crafted (the Greeks were very much into machinery and described it in similar terms), and they behave as if something that were programmed (the Kourai Khryseai are perhaps the most humanlike of Hephaestus's creations, but even they aren't described like you would describe biological beings, they're described for being remarkable for how lifelike they were). Of course it wasn't for-loops and subroutines, people had no conception of such a thing, but his creations behaved in a "programmed" way, not as things with free will.

I don't know why some people are so insistent on imagining that "sci-fi" things have to be recent. They're not. There were literally space operas being written in Roman times. Not scientifically accurate, of course, but sci fi things - including automated things that mimic intelligence - simply is not new.

I'm sorry, but let me repeat: it is an apt description of what it's doing. Nobody says ".... and does so via the exact same mechanism that the human brain uses when paying attention" (which I doubt you could describe anyway, and is in reality very much still a topic of research)

The EV infrastructure does that now, so what exactly is your point?

Actually for most of the US this simply is NOT the case regarding EV infrastructure...

but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.

China is not communist, even if it refers to itself as communist. It's not neoliberal, either. China has a strong private sector with strong individual initiative. It was communist, but that started to change in 1978. China is a one-party state.

China is, however....our enemy.

We'd be well served to NOT become any more dependent upon them than we already are....

You can go away from home without planning or stress about where you need to charge or how long it will take - most daily journeys are much shorter than the range of typical EVs. So it's more about how willing people are to be subservient to those who have told them to think of it as sacrificing freedom.

Most people also do not stay at home 365 a year...they travel...for vacations, work, holidays, etc.

Currently they have ICE vehicles and supporting infrastructure that supports both, without the consumer having to even think of planning...

The same cannot be said for an EV....and most folks don't wanna lay out heavy cash for a one trick pony.

Till the EV and infrastructure can support the casual ease of the ICE experience....it just ain't gonna happen.

Hell, even for those daily short trips you promote...a very significant portion of the US population has no viable way to charge at home overnight which completely kills getting an EV.

If 99% of householders *also* didn't park on their driveway, perhaps you'd have a point. But most people with a driveway and a car do in fact park on their driveway, so you don't have a point.

Lots of folks out there renting those houses with driveways you speak of....

Landlords tend to take a negative attitude of tenants tearing things up and installing stuff on the house....not to mention, tenants aren't too happy to pay to install hardware, etc...that they have to leave behind when they move.....