Needed a dose of good news, so I went looking. Here is one source I found: www.goodnewsnetwork.org . And their news items tagged with Canada. www.goodnewsnetwork.org/tag/canada/ If you know of other sources of a good (or balanced) news diet, do let me know!

Worthwhile read on why robotics AI, LLM-based AI, and autonomous vehicles each have unique paths to adoption. And why robotics is among the hardest.

77/ South Korea's President: “South Korea must swiftly transition to renewable energy.” “Relying on fossil energy is extremely dangerous for the future. We do not produce these resources ourselves, and chasing imports has led to the current crisis.” www.chosun.com/english/nati...

“The power lie is a different kind of deception. People already know it’s not true, so there is no way to contradict it, to persuade people otherwise. The appeal is that, as a believer, you can be part of it, sharing the power by accepting the falsehood is true.” — @caroloff.bsky.social #UrbanTruth

💡#DYK? Vehicle emission rules don’t just limit the pollution spewed from exhaust pipes — they determine which vehicles Canadians can buy. And right now, with a weaker standard, companies have less reason to import lower-emissions options. But it doesn’t have to be that way. 👇 buff.ly/xID8CsE

“If you care about the bottom line, budgets & taxes, then you should care about urban biking, because it’s a money saver. It’s ironic when so-called fiscal conservatives attack biking, when their efforts just show a lack of understanding of math.” — @brenttoderian.bsky.social with @modacitylife.com.

I wrote a reference checker to see if papers I am reviewing have hallucinated references. It's a ghastly problem. PDF-to-structured-text is still an open problem. Reference formats can vary and some are hard to parse. Even when references are correct, there can be sloppiness.

Passenger train + dedicated cycle path to Whistler would be such a game changer.

Fossil fuel companies are the best-represented group at the UN conferences on climate change, with more lobbyists attending than representatives from any nation. This year, a new global conference began with the mission of outgrowing fossil fuels. No fossil lobbyists allowed. US did not attend.

ARC-AGI-3 is out, GPT-5.5 and Opus 4.7 are below 0.5% It tests how well models adapt to novel situations. They must explain themselves. Common failures: - True on task, wrong world model - wrong abstraction level What will models be like when this is saturated? arcprize.org/blog/arc-agi...

An in depth analysis of France's decision to migrate away from Windows www.youtube.com/watch?v=mScK...

NVIDIA researchers published "MotionBricks", real-time 3D character animation for games and robots: Project: nvlabs.github.io/motionbricks/ Check out that demo video... very impressive!

@davidebybc.bsky.social @timhodgson.bsky.social @mark-carney.bsky.social Canada should skate to where the puck is going (energy demand in markets in 2-10 years), not where it is at this second. Electrification, solar, wind, batteries.

They can ice skate now

"(Here in Canada) oil and gas, which is largely foreign-owned, largely U.S.-owned, aren’t doing their part. (Instead)...increasing our emissions and ...demanding that Canadian taxpayers pay the bill for cleaning up the pollution they cause and building pipelines they won’t risk their own money on.”

A unitree h1 (2023 version) just broke the human speed record for the 1500 meter run. This is a huge milestone for humanoid robots. Capabilities have advanced really fast. The capabilities of the hardware that is already being scaled are nowhere close to tapped out.

Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen 🇨🇦 after return from beyond the Moon, a beautiful grateful short speech. #CanadaStrong #UnCanadaFort #MerciCanada #ViveLeCanada

AI finally lets us see Raphael's The School of Athens the way Raphael obviously intended it, illustrating the delicate dance and subtle conflicts between Plato and Artistotle.

📣 Registration for #uai2026 is now open! Join us in Amsterdam 🇳🇱 this August 17-21 for cutting-edge research on uncertainty in AI. early-bird rates available 🐦 students welcome 🎓 Secure your spot 👉 auai.org/uai2026/registration

Global solar additions reached record 511 GW [613 GWp with 1.2 Wp/W,ac ratio] in 2025, says IRENA www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/02/g... - and much more ahead: doi.org/10.1016/j.en... ; doi.org/10.1016/j.rs...

Brent Crude now at USD $116/barrel. Anyone know the current price of sunlight, wind or water? 🧪🔌💡☀️💨💧🔋 oilprice.com

Worth reading — a compilation of climate records being broken. The media is the message — keep climate in the public conversation.

Interesting and promising. I’d also gladly choose an algo feed that has some bias towards good news and positive sentiments.

My most popular Sora video was “elaborate regency romance where everyone is wearing a live duck for a hat (each duck is also wearing a hat), a llama plays a flute, prestige drama” I am not sure why OpenAI has decided their compute has more valuable uses & is discontinuing Sora. Really a mystery.

What do people mean when they talk about world models for robots? Why are world models so exciting? New blog post talking about the ~3 kinds of world models, what they do and why they matter: itcanthink.substack.com/p/will-world...

The Associated Press getting on board. "The war in Iran is exposing the world’s reliance on fragile fossil fuel routes, lending urgency to calls for hastening the shift to renewable energy."

Spring has arrived in Vancouver (goodbye atmospheric river)!

One week left to apply to the Reinforcement Learning Summer School (Milan, 3-12 June 2026). Don't miss this opportunity to dive deep into RL foundations and learn about the most recent applications! rlsummerschool.com/application/

Feeling overwhelmed by all the recent developments in video understanding? What used to require dozens of modular computational workflows involving SLAM, feature tracking, optical flow, camera calibration, multiview geometric constraints, and resnet backbones is now... (1/3)

"For sale: metaverse, never used."

I made a video about fascism in America. Not as an insult. As a clinical diagnosis --> www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDf2...

Make it stick.

Map from Flightradar24 -- spot the two conflict zones

Life and evolution never cease to amaze…

Reflex robot shoveling snow

A list of robot benchmarks and datasets and some notes on them! A quick blog post to give some color to my last few posts on how robot policy evaluation is done Benchmarking robotics is an interesting topic with still no good answers. open.substack.com/pub/itcanthi...

🚨The most important graph in the world has another year of data, and it doesn't look good!🚨 NASA CERES satellites measure how much sunlight Earth absorbs and how much heat is radiated back to space. The difference is heat accumulation, which has more than tripled!

Every few months, I write an updated, idiosyncratic guide on which AIs to use right now. My new version has the most changes ever, since AI is no longer just about chatbots. To use AI you need to understand how to think about models, apps, and harnesses. open.substack.com/pub/oneusefu...

Not ai not cgi - real robots

"OH but they cant do anything useful" here's the same robot building its own actuators

Let’s see, which clean energy technology holds the most promise?

“Favourability of the United States now sits at a record low — second only to Russia.”

How Canada and allies can stand up to Trump and other great-power bullies The latest from the Globe's business commentary, by Fen Osler Hampson, Tim Sargent: www.theglobeandmail.com/business/com...

Want to learn about the latest in robotics research? Like, the real cutting edge, right from researchers? In addition to our youtube channel, I post notes and information about new RoboPapers episodes on Substack here: robopapers.substack.com

😂

nice blog post about a humanoid robotics startup failure: ruixu.us/posts/six-th...

Carbon is the New Metal. Will Canada Compete? Alberta, Canada are a global leader in the emerging advanced materials industry, but could be eclipsed by USA and China without more investment and policy support. markhamhislop.substack.com/p/carbon-is-...

This older piece from Anthropic's CEO on developing a creator-compensation economic model is incredible to see. Disagree with some things, but it's fantastic to see this level of thinking at the intersection of ethics and profit. Source: www.courtlistener.com/docket/69058...