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...

Talks from the World Models Workshop, happening at MILA in Montreal!

Canada sent so many dedicated young people into the hellfire of Kandahar to help the United States. Now they ridicule us. JD Vance says he is tired of our "sob stories". Trump says they never needed us. Never again, America, Never again.

Time to start ditching US treasury bonds again. Only took a 3.3 billion divestment to remove the tariffs last time. A primer: Treasury bonds are loan agreements. Buyers are lending money to the issuer. Selling is basically "calling in the loan."

Appears this is also true for fascism.

You can't predict what he will say, what he says doesn't predict what he will do, what we do is largely irrelevant (except for predictable rants at unpredictable intervals) and the US government has no influence. Just get on with doing what fits with our interests and values.

Nuclear proliferation. No one is talking about it but it's definitely an issue that Greenland highlights. Every middle power in the world from Germany to South Korea to Brazil now has an incentive to secretly develop nuclear weapon capability.

Regardless of what you think about AI, this is a thought provoking read.

Limx dynamics built a modular robot- legs which can function as arms.

Carney: "American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods, a stable financial system... this bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition... recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as a weapon. Tariffs as leverage ... "

The Patrick Henry Winston Outstanding Educator Award went to Alan Mackworth (@alanmackworth.bsky.social UBC) and David Poole (@davpoole.bsky.social UBC). At #AAAI2026, they'll be giving a talk "The Essence of Intelligence is Appropriate Action..." Sunday Jan 25 8:30AM @aaai.org @hadihoss.bsky.social

It was time to build this weekend (with LEGO).   Thanks to Ambassador Harris for the gift. Solidarity with Denmark. 🇨🇦🇩🇰

One of my favorite findings: Positional embeddings are just training wheels. They help convergence but hurt long-context generalization. We found that if you simply delete them after pretraining and recalibrate for <1% of the original budget, you unlock massive context windows. Smarter, not harder.

WATCH: One of North America’s dirty city-building secrets that we don’t talk about enough is the AWFUL ELEVATOR OLIGOPOLY that leads to elevators and their maintenance being RIDICULOUSLY expensive here compared to the rest of the world. Kudos to @uytaelee.bsky.social & @sightline.org for this video.

Seems to good to be true, but if so, would be a real breakthrough.

In 2024, I rose in Senate QP to ask why the Govt of Canada was still using X for official communications. Today, they are still there. What exactly will it take to break the spell?

If you care about such things -- this is also probably the first time I've seen a chinese startup do a demo i'm not sure a top american company (generalist or physical intelligence) could do.

We are hiring a Postdoctoral Fellow with a computer science or engineering background to lead the technical development and real-world implementation of autonomous mobile robot assistants in long-term care settings. Learn more and apply: www.postdocs.ubc.ca/ad/58967

For better-or-worse, quite a decent volume of robotics-related news on LinkedIn. Testing a cross-post: www.linkedin.com/posts/steve-...

Human level dexterity is absolutely not gated by hardware

My friends in Austria sent this and I can't stop watching...wait for the end. 🤗💜

Hello Jimmy Ba, care to comment?

Solar panel cleaning robot

Another incredible video from Veritasium, all about the extreme lithography machines produced by ASML. The design & engineering required is simply insane! youtu.be/MiUHjLxm3V0?...

The final Calvin and Hobbes, which appeared in papers 30 years ago today.

What if you could train agents on a 𝗱𝗲𝗰𝗮𝗱𝗲 of driving experience in 𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝗮𝗻 𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗿, on a single GPU? Excited to share 𝙋𝙪𝙛𝙛𝙚𝙧𝘿𝙧𝙞𝙫𝙚 2.0: A fast, friendly driving simulator with RL training via PufferLib at 𝟯𝟬𝟬𝗞 𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗽𝘀/𝘀𝗲𝗰 🐡 + 🚗 youtu.be/LfQ324R-cbE?...

Physics, complexity, “more is different.” #ALife #complexity

After learning of their existence from His Dark Materials, my 11 yr-old daughter asked for a Crookes Radiometer for Xmas. I now regret every moment in which I didn’t have one in the house.

Found under the christmass tree, very nice lego set for a computer graphic programmer 😉. Customized it a bit with a powerful LED.

another robot highlight for 2025: man wearing humanoid mocap suit kicks himself in the balls

READ THIS: Still probably the best #ChristmasEve tradition I’ve heard. Iceland definitely does Christmas well — my Reykjavik clients had funny comments about this! Are you planning to curl up with a great new book on cities this #Christmas? Share your pick with us using hashtag #UrbanismBookClub!

Hi RL Enthusiasts! RLC is coming to Montreal, Quebec, in the summer: Aug 16–19, 2026! Call for Papers is up now: Abstract: Mar 1 (AOE) Submission: Mar 5 (AOE) Excited to see what you’ve been up to - Submit your best work! rl-conference.cc/callforpaper... Please share widely!