February 2026

Hi everyone! I’m a postdoc at UC Berkeley running the Sensorimotor AI Journal Club. Last year, I organized an RL Debate Series, where researchers presented and defended different approaches to RL and agency. We recently had our finale session, featuring all 6 presenters for a final debate and synthesis: Watch the recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKSPT8-yyBk Read the summary write up: https://sensorimotorai.github.io/2026/01/08/rldebatesfinale/ ———- This semester, we are continuing with a fantastic line up of speakers, covering Brain-inspired Architectures, RL Dogmas (building […]

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Following our report last week that Verizon is forcing people to wait 35 days for phone unlocks after paying off device installment plans, Verizon is apparently trying to eliminate the inconvenient delay. But Verizon hasn’t confirmed the plan to Ars, and a statement to another news outlet did not provide any timeline for implementing the change. As a refresher, the latest version of Verizon’s device unlocking policy for postpaid customers imposes a 35-day waiting period when a customer […]

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2026 is looking like a pretty good year for affordable electric vehicles. There’s a new Nissan Leaf that starts at a hair under $30,000 (as long as you ignore the destination charge). We’ll soon drive the reborn Chevrolet Bolt—with a new lithium iron phosphate battery, it also has a price tag starting with a two (again, ignoring the destination charge). And the closer you get to $40,000, the more your options expand: the Hyundai Ioniq 5, Chevy Equinox […]

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In a lawsuit filed Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency was accused of abandoning its mission to protect public health after repealing an “endangerment finding” that has served as the basis for federal climate change regulations for 17 years. The lawsuit came from more than a dozen environmental and health groups, including the American Public Health Association, the American Lung Association, the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), the Clean Air Council, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), the Natural Resources […]

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This week, Apple released the first developer betas for iOS 26.4, iPadOS 26.4, macOS 26.4, and its other operating systems. On Tuesday, it followed those up with public beta versions of the same updates. Usually released around the midpoint between one major iOS release and the next, the *.4 updates to its operating system usually include a significant batch of new features and other refinements, and if the first beta is any indication, this year’s releases uphold that […]

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The generative AI industry has undergone a significant transformation from using large language model (LLM)-driven applications to agentic AI systems, marking a fundamental shift in how AI capabilities are architected and deployed. While early generative AI applications primarily relied on LLMs to directly generate text and respond to prompts, the industry has evolved from those static, prompt-response paradigms toward autonomous agent frameworks to build dynamic, goal-oriented systems capable of tool orchestration, iterative problem-solving, and adaptive task execution in […]

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Archival storage poses lots of challenges. We want media that is extremely dense and stable for centuries or more, and, ideally, doesn’t consume any energy when not being accessed. Lots of ideas have floated around—even DNA has been considered—but one of the simplest is to etch data into glass. Many forms of glass are very physically and chemically stable, and it’s relatively easy to etch things into it. There’s been a lot of preliminary work demonstrating different aspects […]

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