Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice, of course. And The flower of propriety is beauty in thought and action. After that it goes a bit wacky but it is good that far. Not something my younger self would have liked. It is perhaps a little early but I wonder if the lack-of-concern for gender is a dig at, or a reaction to, some of the modern wokeness? Anyway, none of that is what I wanted to say, which was really to natter about fusion for a bit, since it is in the news and I really ought to write at least something in February.So how about Magnetic control of tokamak plasmas through deep reinforcement learning? This seems dead impressive to me, but what do I know. Having trained it up, it was run on the Tokamak à configuration variable and seems to have done well. Something like this - by which I mean, more intelligence rather than just more power - seems to me the kind of kicking that fusion needs, if it is ever to go anywhere. Or in a different way, as Paul Graham said, Another sign that fusion is really coming this time is the sense that there's a race happening. One never felt that in the days when fusion was perpetually 30 years in the future. Not that there isn't rather a lot still to do, like actually extracting energy; and a fair chance that solar will just supply what we need before fusion is finished.
Notes
1. The picture is Winter Landscape by Valerius de Saedeleer via TF. A gloomy sort it would seem.
Crescat flora!
ReplyDelete