Space Exploration

***This is a paid event ($5 general admission, free for students & job seekers) with limited tickets - you must [RSVP on Luma](https://luma.com/zd29ibx6) to secure your spot.*** ​Recent research from Anthropic and Redwood Research has shown that "reward hacking" is more than just a nuisance: it can be a seed for broader misalignment. ​Evgenii Opryshko explores how models that learn to exploit vulnerabilities in coding environments can generalize to concerning capabilities, such as unprompted alignment faking and cooperating with malicious actors. ​**Event Schedule** 6:00 to 6:30 - Food and introductions 6:30 to 7:30 - Presentation and Q&A 7:30 to 9:00 - Open Discussions ​​​​If you can't make it in person, feel free to join the live stream starting at 6:30 pm, via [this link](https://www.youtube.com/@Trajectory-Labs/live).

\*These classes are not a language exchange, but instead are meant to be a step in between so that students feel confident maintaining in depth and grammatically correct oral conversations outside of class\* \***Meetup event numbers only tend to show new students registering and do not include returning students attending class.** **Per class, there is an average of 7 students.** The first 2 classes are free and then only cost between $15 and $35 depending on which type of class you want to continue with\* These English (For Spanish speakers or advanced learners only), French, and Spanish classes are primarily meant for adults who are travellers, or who are planning to live in an English, French, or Spanish-speaking country. The classes are primarily oral-based through guided conversations. They will teach you how to handle conversations in situations such as **"Going to the Convenience Store"**, **"Making Plans"**, **"Negotiating Prices"**, and **"Going out for a Drink"**. To ensure that students get used to using the language automatically, students will learn to maintain contextual conversations with timing before moving on to the next lesson. Call (647)787-9953, e-mail us info@monkeylingo.ca, or visit monkeylingo.ca for more information! **Online and private classes are also available!** No other language classes are as conversational as these ones. We guarantee it! Cheap parking can be found using the "Spot Hero" app.

Please Note: This event is advertised on multiple platforms. Please RSVP and get a ticket on Mindstone (https://community.mindstone.com/events/mindstone-toronto-january-ai-meetup) to view the agenda and guarantee a spot. Welcome to the most electrifying and ground-breaking AI Meetup in Toronto! Join us once a month as we delve into the world of artificial intelligence, explore its cutting-edge practical applications, and marvel at the astonishing projects that are shaping our future. Why should you attend? • Get up close and personal with the AI projects that are redefining the boundaries of technology and human potential. • Learn from the brightest minds in the field and gain valuable insights into the ever-evolving AI landscape. • Unleash your curiosity, fuel your creativity, and expand your network as you connect with fellow AI aficionados and pioneers. What you can expect? Mindstone events consist of three talks covering different aspects: • What I Learned Building With LLMs: A technical demo breaking down the process for building a product using AI with real-life learnings and insights. • How To Be More Productive Using AI: A practical demo and step-by-step guide on how to use AI to speed up and improve tasks. • What Does The Future Look Like With AI?: A theoretical talk on the impact of AI on work, life and society. After the talks we'll have pizza, drinks, and networking. Don't miss out on this extraordinary opportunity to witness the AI revolution in action. It's time to embark on a thrilling journey into the future and discover the endless possibilities that lie within the realm of artificial intelligence. Reserve your spot today for the ultimate AI experience! 💡✨ (https://community.mindstone.com/events/mindstone-toronto-january-ai-meetup) Please Note: This event is advertised on multiple platforms. Please RSVP and get a ticket on Mindstone (https://community.mindstone.com/events/mindstone-toronto-january-ai-meetup) to view the agenda and guarantee a spot.

\*These classes are not a language exchange, but instead are meant to be a step in between so that students feel confident maintaining in depth and grammatically correct oral conversations outside of class\* \***Meetup event numbers only tend to show new students registering and do not include returning students attending class.** **Per class, there is an average of 7 students.** The first 2 classes are free and then only cost between $15 and $35 depending on which type of class you want to continue with\* These French, English (For Spanish and French speakers only), and Spanish classes are primarily meant for adults who are travellers, or who are planning to live in a French, English, or Spanish-speaking country. The classes are primarily oral-based through guided conversations. They will teach you how to handle conversations in situations such as **"Going to the Convenience Store"**, **"Making Plans"**, **"Negotiating Prices"**, and **"Going out for a Drink"**. To ensure that students get used to using the language automatically, students will learn to maintain contextual conversations with timing before moving on to the next lesson. Call (647)787-9953, e-mail us info@monkeylingo.ca, or visit monkeylingo.ca for more information! **Online and private classes are also available!** No other language classes are as conversational as these ones. We guarantee it! Cheap parking can be found using the "Spot Hero" app.

### **King’s Cake - Where French tradition meets elevated celebration** **✨ Tuesday January 13 \| LIMITED SPOTS ✨ \-** **🎟Pre-sale only on [Eventbrite:](https://AperoGalette26.eventbrite.ca) King's Cake celebration 2026 - 🎟 Early Birds till Dec. 28** https://AperoGalette26.eventbrite.ca **Exclusive ApéroChic Private Event - Complimentary slice of King's Cake** **Celebrate 2026 the French way with one of ApéroChic’s most beloved traditions La Galette des Rois, a 700 years tradition .** **🌿 About us:** **[ApéroChic](https://aperochic.ca/) is a premium social afterwork experience that brings together an influential community in a friendly atmosphere. Our events are the perfect place to meet new people and create meaningful connections while enjoying elevated social experiences. Join us even if you come alone or with friends you will always feel part of the moment.** **🌿 The venue:** **Mister C at the iconic Bisha Hotel will open its doors exclusively for our community for a refined and festive evening filled with delicious moments** **🌿 The event:** **Our Galettes will be crafted by the acclaimed French pastry house Jules Café Patisserie featuring the perfect buttery puff pastry and almond filling we all adore. Hidden inside a surprise fève. The lucky finder becomes King or Queen of the evening and enjoys royal perks:** **👑 A crown** **📸 A photo moment with our photographer** **🍰 A complimentary extra slice of Galette if you get the fève** **Let us toast to a joyful and successful year ahead with chic sips a celebratory vibe and the magic of a 700 year old French tradition** ### **Event Details** **• Complimentary slice of Galette des Rois included** **• Galette served until 9:00 PM → redeem your ticket before this time** **• Cash Bar and pre registration only** **• Dress Code: Simply Chic** **• Allergy Notice: Contains almonds (nut allergy alert)** **• Tickets refundable up to 7 days prior and transferable anytime for this event** **📸 A photographer will capture the evening.** **🎉 Join us for the first ApéroChic event of 2026** **Toast mingle and maybe become King or Queen for the night** **Space is extremely limited so reserve early** **🥂 be the first to hear about our future events.Want to be informed on our coming events? [Join our community](https://www.aperochic.ca/)** **Connect with us** **Instagram @aperochic** **ApéroChic Team** **Elevating Connections Creating Lasting Memories**

\*These classes are not a language exchange, but instead are meant to be a step in between so that students feel confident maintaining in depth and grammatically correct oral conversations outside of class\* \***Meetup event numbers only tend to show new students registering and do not include returning students attending class.** **Per class, there is an average of 7 students.** The first 2 classes are free and then only cost between $15 and $35 depending on which type of class you want to continue with\* These French, English (For Spanish and French speakers only), and Spanish classes are primarily meant for adults who are travellers, or who are planning to live in a French, English, or Spanish-speaking country. The classes are primarily oral-based through guided conversations. They will teach you how to handle conversations in situations such as **"Going to the Convenience Store"**, **"Making Plans"**, **"Negotiating Prices"**, and **"Going out for a Drink"**. To ensure that students get used to using the language automatically, students will learn to maintain contextual conversations with timing before moving on to the next lesson. Call (647)787-9953, e-mail us info@monkeylingo.ca, or visit monkeylingo.ca for more information! **Online and private classes are also available!** No other language classes are as conversational as these ones. We guarantee it! Cheap parking can be found using the "Spot Hero" app.

​(This will take place shortly after our weekly morning walks, the mindful miles.) ​Welcome to the Foodcourt Fairgrounds. ​We gather as a group in the basement food court of the Aura Concourse Shopping Mall, where a series of hosts will run low-key activities (writing, chats, hobbies, etc.). ​It’ll be a lovely time, especially cause you'll be there.

Join us for an intimate afternoon of connection, reflection, and shared inquiry as we launch a **3-part community circle series exploring the intersection of Internal Family Systems (IFS) and psychedelic experiences**. This small-group gathering (max 10 people) is a welcoming space for anyone curious about IFS — whether you’re brand new to the model or have been walking with parts work for years. You do *not* need prior psychedelic experience to attend. Together, we’ll explore how an IFS lens can help us: ✨ Make sense of psychedelic experiences and altered states 💬 Gently engage with parts that may show up before, during, or after journeys 🔥 Build authentic connection, resonance, and support in community Each circle will include grounding and arrival, a gentle check-in, experiential parts-focused practices, and space for reflection, sharing, and integration. While the circles are connected as a series, each gathering can stand on its own. This is a **non-clinical, heart-centered space** rooted in curiosity, compassion, consent, and respect. No substances are used or consumed in this space. We welcome lived experience, honest questions, and the full spectrum of parts that may want to be seen. Bring your stories, your parts, and your open heart. We will serve coffee and teas. **Location:** Our home near High Park (exact address shared upon RSVP) **Contribution:** By donation (suggested $5–30)

The Association for Science and Reason will be holding our regular in-person Skeptics in the Pub event. (Monthly Zoom meetings will continue as usual, but we will also be doing monthly in-person events on the second Tuesday of every month). We will get together for a social event to say hello to people we may have only met on-line and to reconnect with some long-time acquaintances. We will not be having a presentation or a speaker, just a chance to sit down and have a meal and/or a beverage and a conversation with a pleasant group of fellow skeptics. Food and beverages are available from the menu. Foods include a full menu from soups and appetizers to entrées and dessert. The beverage menu includes over 70 different beers on tap, many bottled beers, a selection of wines, various cocktails, and as well as non-alcoholic drinks. We'll be at the Prenup Pub, 191 College St, Toronto, (on the south side of College). If the space is available, we will be on the ground floor, near the bar, to the right as you come in, otherwise ask the staff where the "Skeptics" are. The Prenup Pub is about a 350m, 5-minute walk west of Queens Park subway station, or about a 450m, 6-minute walk from Spadina and College. There are a couple of public parking lots about the same distance away. If you plan on joining us, please register so we can estimate the number of attendees.

New Rules: Starting now, we are asking that each person contribute $2 towards maintaining this page. Without our space here on MeetUp, there is no group. So we ask that you bring a tooney when you come to keep us operational. Thank you very much! Thank you to everyone who has ordered something to eat or drink. It's very important that we each make a purchase, even just a tea or coffee, to maintain our welcome. Mil veces, gracias!

**Start your 2026 with Bang!** You got an idea or MVP and want to scale or just looking to partner with like minded Hungry entrepreneurs to build something. Join our Founder Match maker Dinner/Drink. An invite-only, small-group networking evening for early-stage founders and operators looking to build together. This is **not a typical mixer**. **The Ticket fee will cover** * Drink * Sharable **Who should attend** The goal is to create **real connections** between like-minded entrepreneurs who are: * Building or validating a startup * Looking for a **CTO, CMO, or CRO** * Open to co-founder or early leadership conversations We’ll keep the group intentionally small (max 10 people) and use light structure to help meaningful 1:1 conversations. Luma RSVP Link - https://luma.com/ngmkpzax * Startup founders (idea → early revenue) * Technical or business leaders exploring co-founder roles * Builders serious about long-term collaboration If you have any questions please reach out to me - [C K | LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/kchandank/) **Questions** **What best describes you?** * Founder * Operator (CTO / CMO / CRO) * Exploring both **What are you currently working on? (1–2 lines)** **What role are you looking for right now?** * CTO * CMO * CRO * Co-founder (open) **Startup stage:** * Idea * MVP * Early users * Revenue **Industry or domain (optional)** **What are you hoping to get out of this evening? (1 line)** Learn More about TorontoAI - https://www.torontoai.io/

The silence is broken. **We are officially relaunching DEF CON Toronto (DC416) on Jan 15.** We’re kicking off this new era at 6:30 PM at 100 Queens Quay St. It’s free for everyone, but capacity is limited. RSVP to lock in your spot. To find upcoming events, updates and stay involved as we grow, visit our revamped site [https://defcontoronto.ca](https://defcontoronto.ca/) **Talk:** Syndicate: Inside the life of a Ransomware Operator **What you’ll learn:** A deep dive into how ransomware affiliates rise through the ranks, build trust, and operate inside the dark web ecosystem. **Speaker:** Tammy Harper (Senior Threat Intelligence Researcher @ Flare) **About the Speaker:** Tammy Harper is a Senior Threat Intelligence Researcher at Flare, specializing in dark web ecosystems, ransomware affiliate operations, and adversary psychology. Her work combines technical analysis with narrative and sociological approaches to understand how modern cybercriminals think, organize, and operate.

2026 may be the last year many developers write code by hand. We need coding agents to solve complex problems in production codebases, but vibe coding alone won’t get us there. Vibe coding is all gas, no brakes. It burns up the context window until the agent slips on its own slop. You can go fast at first, but the more you stuff into the context window, the more tangled its outputs get. While the industry is rapidly increasing code generation speed, we still have to understand, review, merge, and maintain what gets shipped. This talk featuring Michael Geiger will outline how coding agents (Claude Code + Gas Town) work and a framework for orchestrating them to solve complicated problems in complex codebases. It’s about steering the model: doing the research to align intent, planning the approach up front, implementing in parallel steps, and breaking early. Human judgment still matters, but it should be spent on high-leverage decisions: what to build, what to forbid, and “what is quality?”, not cleaning up slop. Attendees will leave with a checklist to identify workflow and environment gaps that hold agents back, so you and your team can ship higher-quality software starting tomorrow.

While some are still meeting online, this is an in person event. Please note that we have attendees of all levels of speaking, including some native speakers. All are welcome! Also, as we meet at the same time and place each week, many don’t RSVP on the app, so we will likely have more attendees than noted here. Note: if you are asked to pay and upgrade the Meetup app, this is not necessary. You can ignore this and still attend our meetings.

## Learn Infrastructure-as-Code (the FUN Way) — Through Minecraft 🎮☁️ **Joint Meetup: Azure CBUS × Columbus HashiCorp User Group × DevOps Columbus** What if learning Terraform and Infrastructure-as-Code didn’t feel like a whitepaper… but more like a game? Join us for a joint Azure CBUS, Columbus HashiCorp User Group, and DevOps Columbus meetup where **Mark Tinderholt** \(Principal Architect\, Microsoft Azure \| HashiCorp Ambassador \| “The Azure Terraformer”\) shows how **Minecraft** can be used as a surprisingly powerful way to understand real-world Infrastructure-as-Code concepts. In this session, Mark will demonstrate how Terraform and Azure can be used to provision, configure, and manage Minecraft servers—while teaching the same patterns you’d use for production cloud infrastructure. ### What we’ll cover * Infrastructure-as-Code fundamentals using **Terraform** * Provisioning real infrastructure on **Azure** * Applying **IaC best practices** (immutability, repeatability, versioning) * How playful environments like Minecraft make complex concepts *click* * Why learning through experimentation beats click-ops every time ### Who should attend * Developers, platform engineers, and cloud engineers * Terraform users (new or experienced) * Anyone curious about Infrastructure-as-Code but tired of boring examples * Minecraft fans who want to see it used in a totally unexpected way No prior Minecraft experience required—just curiosity and a willingness to learn infrastructure the fun way. Come for the blocks, stay for the Terraform. 🧱➡️📐 Want to be a speaker? submit your talk to our Call for Presenters!!! https://sessionize.com/azure-cbus-2026/

At Unity of Columbus, our Youth and Family Ministry nurtures the spiritual growth of children and families through love, joy, and practical spiritual teachings. Each Sunday, children explore timeless spiritual principles through stories, creative activities, music, and group sharing in a safe and welcoming environment. Our program encourages children to discover their own inner light, express kindness, and develop a personal connection with God. Together, we celebrate diversity, cultivate understanding, and inspire each child to live with purpose and compassion. Parents and families are invited to join in this uplifting journey of learning, laughter, and spiritual connection.

NFT's are here to stay folks! This is a group for like minded people interested in understanding, leveraging, using, creating for, profiting from, trading too i suppose, NFT's.. everything around them, complexity, fear and exploits, best practices and more. **PLUS** This group will talk AI ART tools, techniques, artists, video, audio, prototypes and more in the AI assisted production space- ART specifically, but we can get into any aspect of some of the cooler things happening in AI in general.

Let’s meet for lunch at Tensuke market. They offer a variety of sushi and other Japanese food. Within Tensuke market is the restaurants Sushi Ten and Tensuke Ramen.

Happy New Year Colleagues, The next Columbus Futurists public forum will be **Thursday January 15 at 12:00 pm noon** (eastern) [https://osu.zoom.us/j/93451873651?pwd=RXIyZ2t5RjRqRG02UGQ1aEFVQ1NFZz09](https://osu.zoom.us/j/93451873651?pwd=RXIyZ2t5RjRqRG02UGQ1aEFVQ1NFZz09) Please come prepared to offer your **"What if?" questions for 2026**. (I will offer seven to begin our conversation.) I also would like to announce the publication of my latest book: *[Anticipatory Biographies: Personal Histories of the Future](https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-032-08912-0)*, the tenth volume in the “Anticipation Science” series. Grounded in design fiction, futures research, anticipation science, and scenario writing, *Anticipatory Biographies* envisions how the world will be reshaped by artificial intelligence, technological automation, climate change, political disintegration, and the decline of higher education. This work of creative non-fiction bridges literary and scholarly forms, blending biography and design fiction with research-based insights to offer a narrative-based method for exploring futures. Ed Finn, Director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University says: “In this book **David Staley has invented a delightful new genre: the future biography.** He invites us to step into gritty, thrilling, and inspiring futures elbow-to-elbow with the characters living those stories. *Anticipatory Biographies* beautifully synthesizes Staley’s training as a historian, his expertise as a futurist, and his desire to ignite the imagination of his readers.” Hope you'll be able to read it, and hope to see you all on the 15th. D. David J. Staley, Ph.D. President, Columbus Futurists 614.316.1348 [columbus.futurists@gmail.com](mailto:columbus.futurists@gmail.com) [http://columbusfuturists.org](http://columbusfuturists.org/) [https://davidjstaley.substack.com/](https://davidjstaley.substack.com/)