Stephen Shankland
@stshank.bsky.social
1.3K followers 800 following 1.9K posts
Head of Content at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a company commercializing fusion energy: clean, safe, affordable, secure. Former science and technology journalist. Bird nerd. Assigned to the Conehead clique as a teenager.
Posts Media Videos Starter Packs
There are lots of AI technologies; LLMs that power chatbots like ChatGPT are the highest profile today. Our partnership between with Google DeepMind involves other approaches like reinforcement learning that could help us explore and optimize our SPARC fusion machine.
#FusionEnergy
It’s time to bring the new computing power of AI to fusion energy. Today, Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Google DeepMind — giants in these two fields — revealed that we’ve joined forces to explore how AI can improve our SPARC fusion machine. blog.cfs.energy/with-ai-alli... 🧵

#FusionEnergy #AI
With AI alliance, Google DeepMind and CFS take fusion to the next level | The Tokamak Times
#Fusion energy holds the promise of clean, affordable electricity that can help power the next phase of our civilization’s development, a tool to bring many other advancements within reach. And AI alr...
blog.cfs.energy
That's true, and usually "nuclear" = "fission" in mainstream and even expert energy circles.

I find the overall push and framing here pretty interesting, though, more than the implementation particulars at this stage.
👀

JPMorganChase Launches $1.5 Trillion Security and Resiliency Initiative to Boost Critical Industries

www.jpmorganchase.com/newsroom/pre...
The firm’s effort comes at a time when the U.S. is looking to modernize infrastructure, fortify supply chains, and implement policies that promote growth. JPMorganChase will focus on the following four key areas, supporting companies across all sizes and development stages by offering advice, providing financing, and, in some cases, investing capital:

Supply Chain and Advanced Manufacturing, including critical minerals, pharmaceutical precursors and robotics
Defense and Aerospace, including defense technology, autonomous systems, drones, next-gen connectivity and secure communications
Energy Independence and Resilience, including battery storage, grid resilience and distributed energy
Frontier and Strategic Technologies, including AI, cybersecurity and quantum computing
Yeah, not sure what happened to it.
DOE's new fusion energy roadmap to support commercialization: www.energy.gov/articles/fus...

#FusionEnergy
It was warm the second day I took out Canon's 200-800mm lens. I was photographing birds that were pretty close, but I was appalled how bad the heat distortion was and wondered if I had a dud lens (I didn't).

Early morning photography is much much better.
There is nothing like that sweet, sweet line of sight.
*Angels. LOL. Though I kind of like the name Blue Angles. Ninth grade geometry was my favorite math class ever.
800mm telephoto shot of @sutrotower.bsky.social from ~15km / 9mi away yesterday — randomly got a Canadian Forces Snowbirds jet. They substituted during Fleet Week in San Francisco for the US Navy's Blue Angles, grounded because of the US government shutdown. Heat distortion makes everything blurry.
A photo of San Francisco's Sutro Tower with a jet arcing downward through the sky over hills with lines of houses.
TIL the MacOS 7.5 control panel said "Daylight Savings Time" instead of the correct but less common "Daylight Saving Time." (Though you don't need to capitalize it.) Via the amazing tour de control panels, with emulation, from the incomparable @aresluna.org: aresluna.org/frame-of-pre...
#UI #MacOS
A screenshot of the MacOS 7.5's Date and Time control panel including a section for "Daylight Savings Time."
Words whose original, legitimate meaning I have come to appreciate despite their overuse in business jargon:
— critical path
— integrated
— synergy
— leverage
Interesting that North America plunged while APAC and EMEA surged.
Come for the Tesla FSD 14.1 evaluation (the first I've seen for brand-new v14 release), stay for the comments discussion about turn signal protocol & rules in roundabouts.
youtu.be/K424Ezrt9NQ
FSD Supervised v14.1 First Impressions Drive - Memorial Park
YouTube video by Chuck Cook
youtu.be
This is relevant to my interests
Cholla cactus backlit by the New Mexico sunrise this morning.
shutdown, n.
shut down, v.
Each of our TF magnets is made of a stack of 16 "pancakes" that house a coil of superconducting tape — a hugely powerful electromagnet when assembled. DOE has validated vetted our TF performance test success, confirming this production magnet works under SPARC conditions.
#FusionEnergy #EnergySky
It’s a great moment to celebrate milestones at CFS — in more ways than one. Today we announced we’re done manufacturing one of our key magnets and putting it through a rigorous, month-long battery of performance tests — which it passed. 1/4

#PowerMoves
CTVC on Climate Week NYC:

"Less 'climate' this week, more of 'Energy AI' week, with adjacencies like security, affordability, resiliency, and efficiency also taking the spotlight... the vibe itself felt resilient."
www.ctvc.co/overheard-at...
#EnergySky #Climate
🌏 Overheard at NYCW '25
Move over, Climate Week, it was NY Energy & AI Week
www.ctvc.co
Really miss those blue tits from when I lived in UK & France
You can see the sunspots without using fancy filters if you take a photo of the sun with the right thickness of clouds in the way.