• A participant is prototyping a long-life piezoelectric motor rated for 3–5 k hours, experimenting with chrome contact surfaces and friction-reducing coatings to achieve picometer-scale micro-stepping for ultra-precise actuation.

• The group discussed the practical hurdles of using BRL-CAD for open-source hardware design, including 64-bit-only binaries, missing mged executables, and the need to manually patch Makefiles with “-lXi” to enable compilation.

• MIT’s open-design community claims to host individual projects exceeding 100 GB each, sparking debate over why Subversion is preferred over Git for such large repositories and what datasets justify that size.

• Brainstorming session on low-tech countermeasures against autonomous robots: spraying sensors with fast-setting epoxy or paint, exploiting IR camouflage, and noting that real-world “Transformers” would require nuclear power and advanced heat-dissipation surfaces.

• A historical anecdote from late-Communist Hungary revealed that typewriters were registered and personal computers were illegal, framing today’s open access to technology in former Eastern-Bloc regions.

• Participants debated whether open-source hardware should be marketed to skeptics by emphasizing its impact on the developing world, alongside a proposal for a conlang that encodes every number as a structured, pronounceable “universal address” to overcome natural-language barriers to mathematical thinking.

• The Inuit language (or a similar language) was cited as having no nouns—only processes—prompting discussion on how linguistic structures shape cognition and mathematical reasoning.

• gene offered to share unit passwords and test files for an upcoming “thinking machines” programming class, while kanzure noted that spontaneous pirate songs on his dorm floor had inadvertently revealed hidden CS knowledge among residents.

• Practical Linux troubleshooting dominated the latter part of the log: kernel panics on Debian, experiments with Ubuntu’s USB-creator GUI, and an unexpected wmii window-manager installation, culminating in a frozen system that underscored the fragility of development environments.