- **DIY chemical synthesis & instrumentation**: A link to a detailed synthesis route for modafinil/adrafinil (http://www.erowid.org/archive/rhodium/chemistry/adrafinil.modafinil.html) was shared, alongside a curated list of open-source / DIY analytical instruments (http://heybryan.org/instrumentation/instru.html) covering spectroscopy, chromatography, and biological assays.

- **Debate on AI take-off limits**: Discussion centered on whether an AI “foom” is constrained by physical manufacturing limits (disk space, fabs) versus the claim that super-intelligence can recursively overcome such bottlenecks via compression, persuasion of humans, or novel fabrication techniques.

- **Critique of MIRI / SL4 discourse**: Participants expressed skepticism toward Eliezer Yudkowsky’s group, citing over-reliance on Bayesian goal-hierarchies and “AI-in-a-box” thought experiments while ignoring hardware ceilings and open-source development realities.

- **“Automating Innovation” presentation**: kanzure prepared a talk titled “Automating Innovation” (slides later posted at http://heybryan.org/ia.html) that merges incubation theory, attention-augmentation systems, and the SKDB open-hardware knowledge-base to create a non-“statistical-inference” path to accelerated R&D.

- **Brain-mapping bottleneck**: Frustration was voiced over the lack of publicly available, granular 3-D brain maps; the Allen Human Cortex atlas only offers “temporal” vs “visual” cortex, prompting calls for better ontologies and coordinate systems for neuronal data.

- **Neuro-augmentation networking**: Kevin Koym (http://kevinkoym.com/), former neurofeedback researcher and founder of Bootstrap Austin (http://www.bootstrapaustin.org/wiki/index.php/Welcome_to_Bootstrap), approached kanzure for possible collaboration on brain-augmentation ventures.

- **Kosmophone gamma-ray instrument**: A local Austin project (http://www.kosmophone.com/) that couples a 3–7 MeV gamma-ray spectrometer to a MIDI synthesizer was highlighted as an example of unconventional open-hardware science-art.

- **Automated surplus-equipment crawler**: Proposal to extend the autoscholar script into a web-crawler that continuously monitors Craigslist, eBay, and local surplus stores for cheap lab gear, combined with GPS-tagged driving routes for in-person scouting.

- **Chance hardware finds**: A $18, 10-gallon 125 PSI air tank and a maroon office chair were evaluated for lab use; the chair was serendipitously the exact one listed on Craigslist minutes after being spotted in a garage.