iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 15h

Is Ribbit premium only now?

Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

My biggest annoyance with Mimestream is that opening an email marks it as read; I want that status change only when I've actually read it, not just cruised by while navigating the inbox. Guess what? There's a setting for that. Yay!

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

One difference between Kitty Hawk and SPARC Q>1: It wasn't obvious during that early flight that there would be a commercial aviation industry. With net fusion energy, that promise and scale-up trajectory are clear. #FusionEnergy

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Glad that Tesla is leaning into the virtues of powering homes from EV batteries rather than protecting its Powerwall business. IMO both approaches can be of use. www.canarymedia.com/articles/ele...

canarymedia.com

Tesla is now making more EVs that can double as a home battery

While other vehicle-to-home systems rely on customers installing pricey bidirectional chargers, Tesla embeds the power-conversion hardware in the cars…

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Q>1 isn't the destination, but it makes it clear how close the destination — fusion energy — is.

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Hilarious. On point. meatproxy.me

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I'm really annoyed at the degradation of service in my Google Home device. Also my Google Pixel often seems barely able to respond to a voice command to call my mom. Gemini's all-things-to-all-people technology has bulldozed previously useful. narrower abilities.

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Ten years later and MIT's Alcator C-Mod tokamak is *still* of use. I see new research papers circulating that include what we learned on C-Mod. For example, you can validate computer models to see if your simulations match actual results recorded on C-Mod. #FusionEnergy #Energy

blog.cfs.energy

How the Alcator C-Mod tokamak blazed the CFS trail to fusion power | The Tokamak Times

Ten years ago today, a group of physicists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology pushed a fusion machine called a tokamak farther than any had ever been pushed. In that moment, they also helped...

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

This is what we mean when we say we've begun shifting our weight from our SPARC foot to our ARC power plant foot. SPARC is a big deal, but we're tackling the longer-term ARC work, too. #FusionEnergy

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Yep. I have solar on my roof + battery so its output isn't useless. Overall cost of energy transition goes way down with clean, firm energy: www.cell.com/joule/fullte... Cost of solar goes way up with firming, even just for 4-hour batteries. www.lazard.com/media/kcfcon... Fusion is clean & firm.

cell.com

The Role of Firm Low-Carbon Electricity Resources in Deep Decarbonization of Power Generation

Full decarbonization of the electricity sector is critical to global climate mitigation. Across a wide range of sensitivities, firm low-carbon resources—including nuclear power, bioenergy, and natural...

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Yeah there are some slight implementation and output differences in solar vs actually making fusion occur on Earth. :)

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Some pretty constructive work in Washington, D.C., toward bringing fusion energy to the grid sooner and at larger scale.

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Interesting to see magnetic mirrors getting new love with new magnets. Thanks for the coverage.

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I love how raw Iceland is. That landform just popped out of the ocean! All those jaggedy rocks that haven't been weathering for millions of years!

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I wish more people shared your opinion. So I could go there again without fighting so many tourists. :) I don't mind the weather too much, I LOVE the geography with all that volcanism on display, and I enjoy cruising around seeing actual spots where Icelandic saga chapters took place.

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I wrote so much about Sun Microsystems back in the day. So funny I have to write SPARC so much nowadays, with a very different meaning.

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Our fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth TF magnets are now in place in tokamak hall. Our SPARC fusion machine will have 18 total — two sets of nine we'll later join into a single donut-shaped arrangement. #FusionEnergy

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

It wasn't a crazy high penny farthing so probably easier to get on and off the back. But still. Entertaining perhaps but awkward.

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Until the guy tries to stop rapidly...

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I just saw a guy ride past my hotel on a penny farthing in Manhattan. Pretty fat tire on such a big wheel! Only one speed though!

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Or that it's one or the other, or that either is monolithic, or that there are not other influences involved. But still, just comparing those two very broadly is interesting.

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Got this poll about AI today. Kind of engagement bait, but also thought-provoking. #AI

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Take a look at the plumbing that'll cool our magnets to 8 K (or 15 K or 80 K, in some cases). Superconducting magnets make our fusion machines possible, and cryogenics makes our magnets superconduct. #FusionEnergy

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

It's fair to ask whether fusion energy will be economical/competitive. The progress we've made nailing the physics and engineering fundamentals is what makes that discussion about commercialization worthwhile. www.bloomberg.com/news/article... #FusionEnergy

bloomberg.com

Fusion Gets $14 Billion Bet It’s More Than a ‘Science Project’

So far, scientists have pulled off energy-generating reactions only in laboratory settings, and the path there has been slow and costly. But companies say they’re getting rapidly closer to commercial ...

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Ooh, it's that time of the year again.

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

"The symbolism of Apple tackling the problem of trust in the visual record is significant. The problem of fake content is no longer a minor issue when one of the largest tech companies in the world decides to get into the game." –Hany Farid via @inafried.bsky.social: www.axios.com/2026/09/10/a...

axios.com

Apple adds new AI features to latest iPhone, watch

The company aims to offer some of the benefits of AI without adopting an always-recording system.

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

This is always cool. Pumping a lot of power out of our home battery onto the grid during a three-hour virtual power plant event. Very hot temperatures in California today, so lots of air conditioning running. We get paid for this power.

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Sure, fusion energy is hard, but remember that other hard things include smartphones, airplanes, submarines, spacecraft that keep an eye out for unpleasant solar storms, and Liebherr Crawler Crane LR 13000 Lego sets.

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

haw haw haw I've had trouble for quite some time because in my brain DDR = double data rate.

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

DDR = dry dress rehearsal = dry run × dress rehearsal. (A wet dress rehearsal for a rocket means you fuel up even though you don't launch.) Our DDR for SPARC will be like running a tokamak fusion pulse, but with just the support systems and no actual tokamak. #FusionEnergy

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

I can confirm. Google sacrificed useful brightness on the LED (which I use often as a flashlight and never as a camera flash) to add the nearly useless HiLight gimmick. Still usefully bright, but a big step backwards IMO. youtu.be/fmnYkQtdAJM?...

youtu.be

Final Thoughts on Pixel 11 Phones!

YouTube video by Waveform Clips

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Motion assist on Android sounds pretty interesting. Small moving dots to try to counteract the visual - vestibular disconnect when you're looking at your phone will driving. blog.google/products-and...

blog.google

September Android Drop: Remember where you put things, ease motion sickness, and more

Keep track of important items, reduce motion sickness during your ride, create and edit notes right from your chat, and more.

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Waymo tucks some potshots at Tesla into this interesting post on autonomous vehicle tech. — Multiple sensors (lidar, camera, radar) are essential — Supervised self-driving is a "false summit" Maybe so, but I think Tesla is climbing. waymo.com/blog/2026/08...

waymo.com

10 AI Lessons from Driving 200+ Million Fully Autonomous Miles

Much of the autonomous vehicle (AV) space is uncharted territory. However, at Waymo, with more than 200 million miles driven fully autonomously, we’re one of very few companies that can look to our pa...

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

This is confidence, not cockiness. We've put enormous thought and energy into getting this right, and we're building on lots of work at other tokamaks (including many tokamaks where our own founders and other employees worked). #FusionEnergy #SPARC

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Tonight's blood moon / lunar eclipse. Alas, the SF Bay Area clouds made it quite murky, but they were thin enough not long after maximum to let me get a photo while it was still a little red. #LunarEclipse #Astrophotography #BloodMoon #Moon

A photo of the moon during a partial lunar eclipse with the top of the moon brightly lit and the rest reddish. Clouds obscured the moon so no details on the surface are visible.

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Google Gemini is A/B testing its AI-generated responses.

A screenshot showing AI-generated text about iPhone 18 camera rumors

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

This helps you see how one of our TF magnets is hoisted into place alongside its peers. TF = toroidal field = the magnetic field going around the inside of the tokamak' donut shape, the main part of holding a hot plasma in place for fusion. #FusionEnergy

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

I, along with maybe 25 other people on the planet, have a Pixel Watch 2. I didn't expect this but I love the new feature that pauses my phone's podcast when the system detects I've fallen asleep. Maybe now I'll dig into the Phoebe Reads archive. open.spotify.com/show/4aqOirM...

open.spotify.com

Phoebe Reads a Mystery

Podcast · Vox Media Podcast Network · Phoebe reads a mystery novel. Our other shows are Criminal and This is Love.

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Nice, Firefox now has a QR code generator to share web links. (Right-click in URL bar.) You have to be OK with a big fat Firefox logo in the middle.

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

CFS is top of the heap among fusion energy startups. This list is sorted by funds raised, but of course we think we're the best in terms of team, technology, etc. www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

nature.com

The 46 companies scrambling to commercialize fusion for energy

Whether the billions of dollars of investment will lead to an inexhaustible source of clean electrical power is not yet known.

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

These tanks are for our cryogenic system — nitrogen and helium that'll get our SPARC tokamak's magnets cold for top performance. #FusionEnergy #magnets

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Interesting to see AI routing getting more serious, middlemen that sending prompts to different destinations. Routing could bypass expensive models but IMO could also send cheap and easy prompts to basic LLMs, saving money for frontier AI labs. www.axios.com/2026/08/25/r... #axiosai

axios.com

Routing is coming for the frontier AI labs

Routing turns models from destinations in their own right into interchangeable commodities.

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Amazing to see this file format make it to the web after Chrome devs initially shot it down. JPEG XL aka JXL offers smaller file sizes / higher image quality vs JPEG and other formats, plus it supports HDR photos, lossless compression options, and more. Info here: jpegxl.info

jpegxl.info

JPEG XL: Superior Image Compression

Explore JPEG XL, the next-generation image format delivering superior compression, fast encoding/decoding, and seamless JPEG transcoding. The future of image compression is here.

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Stephen Shankland @stshank.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Interesting RMI recap on emissive, not just reflective materials to passively cool buildings instead of using AC. Includes estimate of cost drops with manufacturing increase. rmi.org/resources/cl...

rmi.org

Clean Energy 101: Passive Daytime Radiative Cooling — or Really Cool Roofs

Groundbreaking materials have the potential to provide life-altering cooling to millions who lack it. How do they work? And how can they be scaled?

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