• 2 Posts
  • 8 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Ah I see my confusion now

    His “water fuel cell” was later examined by three expert witnesses in court who found that there “was nothing revolutionary about the cell at all and that it was simply using conventional electrolysis.”

    I initially took it to mean they’d examined the fuel cell in the vehicle but the way that’s written it’s not necessarily the case so it was probably a separate demo prototype to the buggy.



  • Haha I never knew there was a real person attached to that myth. I was hearing about that as a big conspiracy theory from teachers when I was kid all the way here in Australia.

    That’s interesting he did produce an actual machine that could move though. I was reading the Wikipedia about him and they don’t go in to that exactly. They point out that his design and vehicle were just using conventional electrolysis and thus couldn’t work as claimed, but it still moved. What was the catch then? It uses a battery to do the electrolysis, does it just use up all the battery to inefficienly split out the hydrogen using more energy than gained from the hydrogen in the process? Making it a really weird electric car?



  • You’re unsurprisingly getting a lot of replies along these lines, taking issue with this strange and unfounded blanket statement about an entire country and you’re replying back to them with similar riffs on the theme that those commenters are being disingenuous and masking a kind of widely known understanding that the reason people visit there is for the sex industry.

    I have to say I think you might have gotten the wrong idea there. There’s a kernel of truth to it in that yes, it is known to be a place where sex tourism occurs so you could say it was famous for it, but I also don’t think that that’s like, their thing. Other commenters have tried to persuade you of this by pointing out compelling reasons one might go there other than for sex tourism but you seem unwilling to believe them because of this idea you’ve latched on to that they’re being deliberately naive. I think it might help just to point out that, at least amongst Australians, this is a very mainstream holiday destination, like it’s not a place where anyone would raise their eyebrows to hear you were going there. You could happily discuss this at any workplace and say you’re going to Thailand for a holiday and you’d probably get a lot people saying how much they love the place and asking which part you’re going to. I’d be surprised to learn if somehow all or even most of these people, sometimes families with children, had all gone there for a shag and also that this practice was so widely known that it was somehow a reasonable, immediate assumption to make about why they’d chosen Thailand and yet they also decided to broadcast this intention to everyone they know.

    While I don’t know the stats, I would guess that a lot of the world’s sex tourism probably occurs there, so I imagine that’s where you got the idea that that’s THE reason to go there but it’s also just a place where a lot of tourism generally happens.


  • The text is clearly human made, and altogether the whole thing is funny. The tool for creating the images in this context doesn’t really impact upon the quality of the work as a whole given the low standards and the fact that it’s literally a joke, and furthermore is pretty unlikely to have put anyone out of a job. I can’t imagine anyone is making a profit out of this so even the murky topic of copyright for the training data used by the model is at the very least less bad even if not completely abrogated.

    If they’d done this with stolen images from the web and Photoshop I don’t think there’d be a lot accusations of ‘Photoshop slop’ because they didn’t create costumes and props and do a shoot on location and went with the ‘lazy’ option instead.

    There are many things to be worried about with the popular availability of generative AI tools and the torrent of slop that’s being pushed out of them but this really seems not to be one worth worrying about or even having contempt for.


  • It was pretty impressive, I remembered wondering if that was something Americans got to do that we didn’t in Australia. Seems like other than a few localised experiments in some states it was fiction even for the yanks at the time. I must say I actually still think it’s pretty dope doing that. I liked the little remote controlled fireplace screensaver too. Seemed very cosy.