BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Most people who try meditation for the first time expect their mind to go quiet. Instead, it does the opposite: replaying conversations, drafting grocery lists, or wondering whether the oven is still on. This is not failure. According to Kirat Randhawa, a meditation instructor for Alo Moves, the moment…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM The Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade did not simply write a letter. For 58 days, CAFT ran protests at Etsy offices and affiliates across 17 cities, including a disruption of Etsy’s own presentation at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in San Francisco in March. The…
ViewsML wants to make it easier for clinicians and scientists to extract insights from human tissue samples outside the laboratory with the help of AI. The Vancouver-based startup announced today that it has closed $4.9 million CAD in seed funding to execute on that vision and commercialize its platform. ViewsML is developing AI models designed…
The Canadian Strategic Missions Corporation (CSMC) has won grant funding for two projects that could one day help humans live and operate on the Moon. The Kitchener-Waterloo-based space and defence tech company has been awarded $1.2 million in federal funding to build manufacturing capacity for its nuclear microreactor, which is intended to power facilities both…
Liam Gill leads the Capital Program at MaRS Discovery District, the largest innovation hub in Canada. In 2024, MaRS-supported companies raised 13 percent of all venture capital deployed in Canada. The cracks in Ontario’s foundation are no longer just metaphorical, they are visible in our crumbling overpasses and felt in the quiet desperation of our…
In February, I spoke with Vitaly Pecherskiy, co-founder and CEO of StackAdapt, and something clicked in my head about the way AI has changed B2B software development. You might not be familiar with the company by name, but you’ve likely engaged with their works, “With AI, it should bring down the barriers to how you…
Enterprise AI company Cohere recently released an open-source version of Cohere Transcribe, an AI model that can generate text from audio in real time—meant to be useful for meetings, note-taking, and even capturing audio over the whir of a blender, according to co-founder Nick Frosst. The company’s first foray into speech-to-text transcription currently sits atop…
Few tech CEOs are willing to get genuinely heated on a podcast. Jensen Huang is apparently one of them. During a nearly two-hour sit-down with interviewer Dwarkesh Patel posted on April 15, 2026, the Nvidia CEO found himself in a tense back-and-forth about whether the United States should be selling advanced AI chips to China…
If you’re on Anthropic’s Pro Max 5x plan and wondering why your quota vanished before lunch, you’re not imagining things. A growing number of users are reporting that their Claude Pro Max 5x quota is being exhausted in as little as 1.5 hours — even during moderate usage sessions — and the pattern points to…
A Dutch journalist mailed a postcard to a warship. Inside it was a €5 Bluetooth tracker. For the next 24 hours, that tracker quietly broadcast the location of HNLMS Evertsen — a $585 million Dutch air-defense frigate operating as part of a NATO carrier strike group in the Mediterranean — to anyone paying attention. No…
