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• Post #4389465

  Anybody here used satellite communicators like Garmin InReach? Any advice? #thruhiking

• Post #4381619

  Western tanager that showed up at my mom's house in New Mexico for a few days in July. Pretty unusual at her house, though I've seen them at lower elevations near the Rio Grande. It looks kind of chunky here but I saw it stretch its neck a lot to peer around. #birds #birding #NaturePhotography #NewMexico 🐦

• Post #3961593

  https://kilovar1959.substack.com/p/equipment-outages-the-hidden-drag Wildfire Smoke, the Gas Turbine’s Enemy A gas turbine is a mass-flow engine: it moves enormous volumes of air to make power, and to protect the precision internals from erosion by airborne grit; it relies on large, high-efficiency filters on its intakes. Wildfire smoke is almost entirely PM10 and PM2.5 — exactly the particle sizes that foul those filters fast. As the filters load up, airflow drops, and so does output.

• Post #3723310

  My mom bought "Fiery Feast" birdseed infused with chile pepper that birds are supposed to like while squirrels don't. Here's the scorecard on who actually likes to eat it, based on my last week visiting her in New Mexico: ❌ birds ✅ black bears ✅ skunks ✅ squirrels #Wildlife #NewMexico

• Post #2558871

  30 hours of US history, highly recommended by a friend of mine for the USA's semiquincentennial. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh9mgdi4rNezTQrY_6XMNBWaZqLRdgpoq #history

• Post #2558869

  Woo hoo! JPEG XL image support is in the new Chrome v145: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Chrome-145-Released I had to enable via a flag: chrome://flags/#enable-jxl-image-format You can test support here: https://jpegxl.info/resources/jpeg-xl-test-page.html #JPEGXL #web #Chrome #photography

• Post #2558861

  Terence Tao on AI solving mathematics problems: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01246-9

• Post #2213357

  A quintet of California quail dropped by the house over the weekend — a first, though I've seen them in the neighborhood before. They're very round! And usually pretty hard to see lurking in the underbrush. But for about 5 minutes some of them perched in a nearby oak at a spot where I could point my lens through the foliage. #birds #birding #telephoto #California #NaturePhotography

• Post #2070103

  John Kerry on the "sovereignty premium": "Policymakers, corporate boards, and investors must internalize what we might call a sovereignty premium. Every unit of energy produced domestically carries a strategic value that goes well beyond its levelized cost. That value is resilience." https://www.semafor.com/article/05/05/2026/the-largest-energy-crisis-in-modern-history-is-only-beginning

• Post #1728362

  Whale watching in Monterey Bay last weekend. Three moms and their calves form pod CA51, plus Jimmy from CA50 hanging around, showing off a huge dorsal fin. The moms would surface and then the calves would surface right next to them. I found the calves chubby and cute (caveat: I'm not a sea lion). #NaturePhotography #California #Orca #Whale #PacificOcean

• Post #1410861

  Some of the 27 Hudsonian whimbrels I saw yesterday at Asilomar State Beach in Pacific Grove, California. There used to be just whimbrels, but ornithologists split them into Hudsonian whimbrels (Americas) and Eurasian whimbrels (Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia) in 2025. #birds #birding #California #NaturePhotography

• Post #878804

  Huh, Google is getting into neutral atom quantum computing, too, in addition to its earlier superconducting qubit approach. https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/research/neutral-atom-quantum-computers/ #QuantumComputing #Google

• Post #878802

  University of Arizona making more noise about commercial fusion energy. https://research.arizona.edu/news/powering-future-u-accelerates-fusion-energy-commercialization #FusionEnergy #Arizona

• Post #878801

  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" #AI #style #StyleBook #Google #Gemini

• Post #878800

  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 #MacOS

• Post #878799

  "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." https://cacm.acm.org/blogcacm/model-collapse-is-already-happening-we-just-pretend-it-isnt/ #AI

• Post #878798

  I washed the solar panels after sunset tonight. The colors show why people on movie sets water down the roads for night scenes. #solar #sunset #California

• Post #757884

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

• Post #757883

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/116245461673902827 I found it pretty cringe too. Uncanny valley. Didn't like the unmodified video either for the most part, either.

• Post #757882

  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

• Post #757880

  How long for a protein to fold? 1 to 4 microseconds. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00755-x

• Post #757878

  Strong recommend: The Rest Is History's 4 podcasts on the Islamic Revolution in 1970s Iran. Laid the foundation for the present Iran situation. One closing point: the Russian Revolution is much better known, but the Islamic Revolution is vastly more relevant to world affairs today. 1 Fall of the Shah https://therestishistory.com/episodes/fall-of-the-shah-part-1 2 Rise of the Ayatollah https://therestishistory.com/episodes/rise-of-the-ayatollah-part-2 3 The Hostage Crisis https://therest...

• Post #685630

  Teachable moment: OpenClaw starts nuking email inbox of AI safety & alignment director at Meta Superintelligence: https://x.com/summeryue0/status/2025774069124399363 What they did: https://x.com/summeryue0/status/2025836517831405980 Semi-panicking to figure out how interrupt the process: https://x.com/summeryue0/status/2025804776739602921 Gained their trust: https://x.com/summeryue0/status/2025809946114420760 #AI

• Post #685629

  "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." https://www.semafor.com/newsletter/02/24/2026/semafor-energy-lessons-from-four-years-of-energy-war

• Post #685628

  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. https://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/1ra1oxm/hi_rfusion_im_brandon_sorbom_chief_science/ #FusionEnergy

• Post #685627

  Georg Cantor, pioneer of the mathematical concept of infinity —and plagiarist. How many of us have heard of Richard Dedekind? https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-man-who-stole-infinity-20260225/ #math

• Post #685626

  Sharing this in part because of the delightful term "presumed egg" Northern California’s first condor egg in 100 years reported in redwood tree https://www.sfchronicle.com/california/article/california-condor-21951147.php #birding #California

• Post #685625

  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 eerily flat moon — no shadow contours except a smidgen at the lower left because the sun was directly behind me as I shot. 1/400 sec, f13, 1120mm, ISO 200 #Moon #Astrophotography #Photography #Telephoto

• Post #685624

  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. https://spectrum.ieee.org/mangrove-lithium-refining-ev-bottleneck #EV #chemistry #startup

• Post #685623

  DOF stands for: