- A new open-source distributed web-crawler written in Python (https://github.com/ceciliazhou/distributed_web_crawler) was introduced; the group critiqued its reliance on BeautifulSoup as fragile and recommended gi.repository.webkit for more robust parsing of malformed HTML.

- Participants debated whether a 50 000-line C program could realistically serve as the seed for AGI, using the novella “The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect” as a framing device and weighing language-level trade-offs, system-call overhead, and code compactness.

- A thought experiment posited that a single modern human armed with Wikipedia-level knowledge could bootstrap digital civilization centuries early—proposing stone/wood Babbage engines, ferrite-core memory, and telegraph-level networks as stepping-stones.

- The paper “Stealthy Dopant-Level Hardware Trojans” (Becker & Ches 2013, https://people.umass.edu/gbecker/BeckerChes13.pdf) was circulated, highlighting how nanometer-scale transistor modifications can create undetectable backdoors in integrated circuits.

- Research in multivalued-logic systems biology (PLOS Comp. Biol. 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002421) and olfactory spectroscopy (PLOS ONE 10.1371/journal.pone.0055780) was discussed, with the practical tip that emailing authors directly is an effective open-access workaround for paywalled papers.

- The IRC bot Paperbot was demonstrated; it automatically mirrors paywalled PDFs via LibGen and diyhpl.us, and its source is available at https://github.com/kanzure/paperbot for bug reports and feature requests.

- Troubleshooting of pyjamas-desktop revealed that the package overwrites core Python files (`sys.py`, `os.py`), raising safety concerns; although it can be coaxed to run under PyQt4, participants judged its overall architecture “terrible.”