I imagine that would be found in the associated paper, but I’m not sure if it’s been published yet. I’m having trouble finding it.
Parent Paper: Baetzel, J. (2026). Statistical Characterization of Inter-Channel Redundancy Structure in the Kodak Lossless True Color Image Suite. Per-Image Principal Component Decomposition of PCD0992.
Yep, I've found Gemini to be the best LLM at most tasks that are not coding. Sometimes Opus wins for engineering, but Gemini holds its own there as well. I also used Gemini to assist me with understanding the details of my (pre-revenue) C-Corp taxes this year. It did a pretty good job walking me through each question I had and raising concern about things I might have overlooked. I validated everything against reliable sources, of course.
Gemini missed on some nuances about the paperwork processes of Delaware. Gemini repeatedly assumed I could do something instantly via an online portal that actually required either snail-mail or the use of an intermediate who actually had API access to Delaware's systems. In the end, these processes took a couple days, and while I got things done in time, I wish I had not taken questions of process at face value, and instead wish I had kicked off the taxes at the end of February rather than week before they were due.
Many cities/towns in the USA have small power plants in them (typically associated with a University, large hospital system, or central business district) which "sell" not just power, but also hot water, and steam. The steam is typically used to heat buildings. Google for "$CITY steam tunnels" or "$CITY CHP plant" to find these in your area.
San Francisco has[0][1][2][3] at least five combined heat and power plants that generate electricity and also sell steam to neighboring buildings via 72,000 feet of pipes.
I worked at a privately-owned for-profit "factory" in Santa Monica whose primary product was chilled water (their other product was warm water). They built pipelines to nearby large buildings and sold chilled water to them.
My favorite video that walks through fusion energy design/sizing/cost equations is also a lecture by Dennis Whyte: https://youtu.be/KkpqA8yG9T4?si=U8xaAAvjdnt6yqr8 It’s a really engaging lecture - I’m normally pretty put off by 100-minute lectures on YouTube but this one was both very easy to follow and perfectly scoped. Can highly recommend it - the learnings from it are timeless fundamentals that really make fusion power design and economics accessible.
The big takeaway is that better magnets reduce reactor size by the 4th power, and energy output and cost by the cubed power. Finding a material for the magnets which doubles their strength would reduce the size of the reactor by 94% and the cost by 88%.
A possible conclusion one could make is that with regular advancements in magnets it’s very possible that the first operational commercial fusion reactors will be relatively low-cost compared to current and planned fusion reactors, and even though they may begin construction after the next generation of super-sized fusion reactors - they might be finished and operational before their “predecessors” with inferior magnets have completed being built.
Some Sci Fi authors have made the point that the first interstellar space ship is likely to be greeted at their destination star by human immigration control officers boggling at their long superseded sublight ship.
This is also one of the reasons ITER is such as bad project. It's so big, slow, and had to be planned so far ahead that it "locked in" older superconducting tape technology that has been superseded.
How would AI help achieve commercial fusion? You first need to identify the blockers. These almost all entirely boil down to "how do we precision machine large pieces of hard metal?", "how do we assemble facilities with untold process channels?", "how do we capture neutrons without making a prohibitively massive machine?", and "how do we make metal that doesn't melt?".
Now, AI might have a chance at supercharging material research and making miracle materials that help address the blanket and first wall challenges, but honestly those are roadblocks we're not even running into yet. AI can not and will not fix issues related to organizing labor and supply chains and suddenly make megaprojects have a 100% success rate for on-time and on-budget. It's just not going to happen.
So are these problems intractable? Of course not. It's just not what the chatbot is well suited for. Anyone saying otherwise is selling something.
But when you have nothing but the perfect host for the infection, in incredibly massive proportions as far as the eye can see, a little bacteria goes a long way.
Are you saying it looks like a "monoculture" to you too?
Maybe there's not really accurate terminology for this.
Either way we do have to allow more often for the occasional passerby who is fully convinced that adding all that tonnage of glyphosate for so many recent years was a supernatural event, and not the result of any human initiative :\
On top of all that natural disaster, it wouldn't take as much of a straw to break the camel's back. Or the other way around; on top of all the industrial excess, the same natural disaster can have a more devastating effect.
Or maybe it's not thought to be premature at all, but long overdue.
If somebody was thinking that though, you figure they would leave a comment to that effect.
For anyone not aware, the most proximate cause of the disappearance of "Florida Orange Juice™ " is the Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus bacteria. Monoculture is often blamed, but the bacteria affects all citrus trees - oranges, limes, lemons, grapefruits, pomelos, etc.
According to the article, the reason why the bacteria was so quickly fatal for Florida orange trees is that their roots were weakened by a sequence of major hurricanes and by many years of excessive pesticide use.
These are all contributing factors. Mono cultures mean a single problem with pests can rapidly spread. Using pesticides means you wipe out a lot of the local wild life; including any predators that might go after the insects that spread the pests. And if you grow the exact same variety of the same produce, they are all going to be vulnerable to the exact same thing at the exact same time. Using more pesticides just adds to the problem and eventually pests become resistant anyway.
A solution here could be growing a larger variety of produce, using organic farming practices, crop rotation, etc. Pests tend to specialize in specific things and most pests have natural predators. So, if you stop killing those they'll help keep outbreaks in check. And if you rotate crops, you take away the food source for the pests. And if you grown a variety of different things, it won't all get sick at the same time.
In the past, "monoculture" was used to describe things like "one particular variety of banana"[0] - e.g. the Gros Michel banana fell to fungus and was replaced by the Cavendish banana, which was not susceptible to the same fungus but is now also falling to a similar fungus, and will be replaced by another banana variety. In fact, they're not just the same species but closely related cultivars - both part of the AAA banana cultivar group (triploid cultivars of Musa acuminata).
The article in Time Magazine puts it succinctly:
> There’s a name for this situation: monoculture, the practice of fostering just one variety of something.
In the case of bananas (and many other crops, plants, decorative trees, etc), a diversity of varieties would have minimized the spread and impact of pathogens, while providing a more diverse selection of nutritional content and flavor for consumers. But that doesn't seem to be the case for citrus trees.
I don't think that "monoculture", as it has been used or the past 50+ years, is the appropriate concept to apply to this citrus greening. Perhaps we could criticize something else - like tree density? Or perhaps monoculture is the problem, but in a much broader sense - maybe a grove with 10% citrus trees, 10% corn, 10% soybeans, 10% berries, 10% apple trees, etc...would create a biome that was hostile to the citrus greening bacteria in such a way that it couldn't thrive and spread. We have no data to support that hypothesis at this time though.
Citrus isn't one species but hybrids of citrons, mandarins, pomelos in Citrus genus. It isn't like cabbage that produces multiple cultivars. Citrus genus is supposed to be diverse cause they do hybridization in wild.
Parent Paper: Baetzel, J. (2026). Statistical Characterization of Inter-Channel Redundancy Structure in the Kodak Lossless True Color Image Suite. Per-Image Principal Component Decomposition of PCD0992.
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