Shot and chaser. March: www.npr.org/2026/03/23/g... April: www.semafor.com/newsletter/0...

American avocets feeding and flying at Baylands Nature Preserve on the San Francisco Bay. #birds #birding #NaturePhotography #California 🐦

China’s Electrostate Is Poised to Win From War in the Middle East www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/b...

My goodness. Gustav Mahler's Resurrection Symphony is in a McDonald's ad. Do I need to move to my bunker in New Zealand now, or do I have a few days to tie up some loose ends? www.instagram.com/p/DVJSCKWiVpM/

Acronym disambiguation survey time. CMOS stands for: 1. Complimentary Metal Oxide Semiconductor 2. Chicago Manual of Style

SPARC overall is about 75% done now. The virtual tour video includes a look at the CFS neutron lab, RF building, power building, assembly hall, cryogenic yard, and of course tokamak hall. #FusionEnergy #SPARC

A first look inside the Tesla Semi factory. I'd actually wondered if the Tesla Semi was ever going to be real or whether it had turned to vapor like the next Tesla Roadster. I'm much more interested in this than the Cybertruck. www.corememory.com/p/exclusive-...

CFS announced today we’ll design and build high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets for Realta Fusion in a long-term strategic partnership that’ll benefit both companies’ efforts to bring this new form of clean, affordable energy to the electricity grid. 1/4 #PowerMoves

Five California quail came by our house yesterday. Very hard to see in the underbrush with various plants in the way, but they stuck around for awhile and eventually perched on an oak. They're very round. #birds #birding #California 🐦

We announced a deal with Realta Fusion today: We'll design and manufacture magnets for their magnetic mirror machines — a different variety of magnetic confinement fusion than our tokamaks, but with a common foundation of high-temperature superconducting magnets. #FusionEnergy

A big chunk of very carefully shaped, milled, drilled, and welded steel, hoisted across the room. #FusionEnergy #Manufacturing

Robots gonna put Danny MacAskill out of a job. www.instagram.com/reel/DWEf3Ef...

Washed the solar panels after sunset tonight. This is why people on movie sets water down the roads for night scenes. #solar #sunset #California

"Model collapse isn’t a theoretical risk for some distant future generation of AI systems. It’s a process already underway, driven by the quiet accumulation of synthetic data across the web." cacm.acm.org/blogcacm/mod... via @charlesarthur.bsky.social #AI

My MacBook (latest MacOS Tahoe) no longer remembers window positions when I connect my external monitor, so I have to manually drag my app windows to the second screen. It used to remember my dual-monitor arrangement. Anybody have any advice or pointers? #TechSupport

Fusion simulator using a variety of tokamaks. www.fusionsimulator.io

As long as we're talking about em dashes and AI — can the Google Gemini team please put spaces on either side of them? I know it's a styling choice, but I find it visually easier to parse with the spaces. "system efficient enough—to keep that heat" vs "system efficient enough — to keep that heat"

University of Arizona making more noise about commercial fusion energy. research.arizona.edu/news/powerin...

Huh, Google is getting into neutral atom quantum computing, too, in addition to its earlier superconducting qubit approach. blog.google/innovation-a... #QuantumComputing #Google

I recommend The Rest Is History's 4 episodes on the Islamic Revolution in Iran in the 1970s — really informs what's happening today. More important now than the Russian Revolution. Fall of the Shah, Rise of the Ayatollah, The Hostage Crisis, Death in the Desert. therestishistory.com/episodes/fal...

A nice little dose of whimsy for your day: cables for overhead electric power lines have standardized "code names" based on their size and balance of aluminum/steel strands. In the US, those code names are birds! 🔌💡 e.g.: Drake, Cardinal, Condor, Eagle, Dove, Swift

The ongoing record-breaking heat wave in the West will continue while expanding across the Central U.S. through the weekend. Based on preliminary data, there have been around 50 March high temperature records broken since March 17 and more than 150 daily high temperature records broken.

New Lenovo T14 and T16 laptops get a remarkable 10/10 on @ifixit.com repairability score. Wow. www.ifixit.com/News/115827/...

How long for a protein to fold? 1 to 4 microseconds. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Google Gemini success: constructing regular expressions to get what I wanted out of Google Docs search & replace. Though \t doesn't insert tabs in Google Docs — copying a tab character from a doc and pasting it into the replace field worked instead. #AI #TechSupport

Nvidia trying to add some privacy and security guardrails to OpenClaw with NemoClaw. I'll pass on being the guinea pig on this one. nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-... #AI #agenticai #security

3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510582097494459230781640628620899862803482534211706798214808651328230664709384460955058223172535940812848111745028410270193852110555964462294895493038196442881097566593344612847564823378678316527120190914564856692 🧵 1/∞

Props to my home state for stepping up.

I'm so old I remember thinking 200-amp electrical service to a house was big. Now people increasingly are going with 400A. emp.lbl.gov/publications...

Interesting work in lithium refining. Demo refinery set to make 1,000 tons of lithium hydroxide per year in British Columbia starting in the second half of the year. spectrum.ieee.org/mangrove-lit...

I set my alarm for 3 a.m. to photograph the blood moon (lunar eclipse) but alas, it clouded over. The good news is that my test shots from before I went to bed came out. An weirdly flat moon — no shadow contours except a smidgen at the lower left because the sun was directly behind me as I shot.

I knew Dario Gil from when I was covering quantum computers and he was at IBM Research. Our paths cross again.

Georg Cantor, pioneer of the mathematical concept of infinity —and plagiarist. How many of us have heard of Richard Dedekind? www.quantamagazine.org/the-man-who-... #math

Today was Reddit AMA day with our Chief Science Officer and Co-founder Brandon Sorbom — lots of good questions and interesting answers. Tritium, supply chain, AI, magnets, plasmas, antennas... and of course tokamaks. www.reddit.com/r/fusion/com... #FusionEnergy

Dear 1Password: Just bite the bullet and say "Important: We’re increasing the cost of your subscription." Because we all know what "updating the cost" in the subject line will mean. Also, aren't subscriptions supposed to pay for ongoing development and innovation? Gripes aside, I like 1Password.

"Russia ramped up its drone, missile, and artillery assaults, eventually carrying out at least 1,894 separate attacks on energy infrastructure between February 2022 and today." www.semafor.com/newsletter/0...

Teachable moment: OpenClaw starts nuking email inbox of AI safety & alignment director at Meta Superintelligence: x.com/summeryue0/s... What they did: x.com/summeryue0/s... Semi-panicking to figure out how interrupt the process: x.com/summeryue0/s... Gained their trust: x.com/summeryue0/s... #AI

I loved the book After Man by Dougal Dixon when I was a kid. Never knew about snouters though! bigthink.com/history-soci...

“If you look at the change in your health insurance premium this year over last year, about 30 percent of that is GLP-1s." –Luca Maini, assistant professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School. How much do insurers get back from better health outcomes? news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor...

Q>1

Woo hoo! JPEG XL image support is in the new Chrome v145: www.phoronix.com/news/Chrome-... I had to enable via a flag: chrome://flags/#enable-jxl-image-format You can test support here: jpegxl.info/resources/jp... #JPEGXL #web #Chrome #photography

"Electricity demand growth in advanced economies is accelerating again after 15 years of stagnation... electricity is a major energy input to some of the most dynamic drivers of global economies, such as AI, data centres, and advanced manufacturing." www.iea.org/reports/elec...

This jumped out at me, too, during the halftime show. It took me a few seconds to realize why there were linemen working on power poles.

As if on cue just ahead of Superb Owl Sunday, a great horned owl hooted nearby just after sundown at the end of yesterday's hike in Wildcat Canyon Regional Park near Richmond, California. Took me a few minutes to find it in the trees. Quite a specimen! #superbowl #birds 🐦

A home battery company I had my eye on back in my journalism days. Lunar Energy raised $233M. www.lunarenergy.com/blog/news/lu...

Late Friday night / early Saturday morning in Boston, still with a lot of snow on the ground. #photography #architecture #Boston

Annoying when Zoom mobile app goes into safe driving mode while I'm out walking the dog. A lot of work has gone into turning phone/watch accelerometer data into activity tracking. Maybe Zoom can adopt some of that? #UI #algorithms

I'm not as full of hatred for Liquid Glass as some folks, but I haven't encountered anything about it that fills me with delight, and I don't like this transparent UI one bit. Also, oversaturated MacOS app icons are garishly awful and I don't like faux blurring. Guess it's time to dig into settings.

My late-night flight over the Midwest was particularly vivid — all those city streetlights reflecting off the snow. This is the Toronto area of Canada, with Lake Ontario to the right.

30 hours of US history, highly recommended by a friend of mine for the USA's semiquincentennial. www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...