• A paperbot in #lesswrong is distributing the 2011 paper “High-resolution, low-cost laser lithography using a Blu-ray optical head assembly,” highlighting a route to sub-micron photolithography for DIY micro-fabrication.

• Participants compare open-source browser architectures: Mozilla’s Servo employs a copy-on-write DOM and tiled rendering for parallelism, while Google’s Blink engine is noted as a WebKit fork.

• The Gates Foundation is repeatedly cited as the most accessible large funder for open-source bio-hardware; anecdotal evidence suggests $100 k grants can be secured with minimal bureaucracy, provided the final product is priced for low-resource markets and IP remains with the grantee.

• A DIYbio mailing-list proposal seeks Gates funding for “bacterial contraception via rectal–vaginal microbiome transfer,” illustrating how reproductive-health framing is used to align with foundation priorities.

• Channel members debate why grid-tie solar inverters remain expensive, attributing costs to true-sine filtering, wide input-voltage tolerance, non-consumer markups, and losses from partial shading despite bypass diodes.

• A concrete pitch emerges to establish a low-cost, open-source biohackerspace in Pakistan using 1980s-era equipment to demonstrate that “30-year-old technology is better than nothing” for diagnostics and research, explicitly targeting Gates Foundation support.