- The channel is building “agx-get,” a non-root package manager for the SKDB open-source hardware repository that downloads and validates self-contained YAML packages describing physical artifacts (chairs, engines, etc.) and their functional relationships, energy flows, and unit constraints.  
- A companion tool called “autospec” will parse these YAML graphs, instantiate Python objects for each part, and perform multi-level validation: zeroth-order unit checks via GNU Units and higher-order ODE-based checks to ensure energetic consistency across mechanical, chemical, and electrical subsystems.  
- Future plans include “agx-make,” a genetic-algorithm-driven optimizer that will take validated package graphs and automatically select concrete parts satisfying user constraints (e.g., “chair --comfiness=5 --woodType=mahogany”) while minimizing mass, cost, or energy jumps.  
- Participants dissected Henry Markram’s 70-minute Google talk “The Emergence of Intelligence in the Neocortical Microcircuit,” highlighting his shift from spike-centric to dendrite-level analog computation, the use of automated patch-clamp robots to feed ion-channel data into cortical simulations, and the proposal to send an alien civilization a complete “build-a-human” blueprint.  
- Markram’s “intense world syndrome” model of autism was discussed, attributing the condition to weakened GABAergic inhibition at minicolumn borders, causing excessive sensory amplification and restricted behavioral repertoires.  
- A debate compared ASIC vs. FPGA substrates for neuromorphic hardware: FPGAs offer reconfigurable logical connectivity without physical wiring explosions, while ASICs risk costly refabs for every model change.  
- The group explored using Git (with partial-clone support) as the distribution backbone for SKDB, allowing users to pull individual hardware projects while maintaining stable vs. development branches akin to Debian.  
- Existing open-source tools—GNU Units for dimensional analysis, Cellerator for ODE generation, and Git for version control—were repeatedly cited as proven components to integrate into the SKDB toolchain.