- Custom ASIC fabrication has become dramatically cheaper: a complete 65 nm mask set plus first wafers now costs ≈ $500 k, and brokers offer small experimental runs for only $2 k–$5 k, opening the door for open-hardware and darknet-radio projects to design their own silicon.  
- Tempo Automation is building “Electronics Factory,” a desktop robot that etches PCB traces, dispenses solder paste, places SMT/SMD components, reflows, and tests—described as a “MakerBot for electronics” and positioned as a more complete alternative to the SMT-only FirePick project.  
- Channel members explored the concept of a personal exocortex based on exhaustive lifelogging: automatically archiving every IRC/IM conversation, storing local copies of every web page visited, and creating searchable full-text indices to defeat link rot and memory limits.  
- A scraper script (google-web-history-scraper.py) was shared to extract Google Web History as a partial lifelog source, sparking debate over Google’s default opt-in policies and the incompleteness of its record compared with a fully DIY archive.  
- Participants expressed willingness to pay $100–$500 per month for a search API that supports true regular expressions and special-character queries, highlighting a gap in current commercial offerings.  
- Recent transcranial stimulation literature shows that electrical stimulation of the fusiform gyrus produces vivid face-distortion percepts (“your face metamorphosed… features drooped”), adding to the toolkit for non-pharmacological cognitive experimentation.  
- A Frontiers paper catalogues direct electrical stimulation of the human cerebral cortex and subcortical nuclei in awake subjects, evoking experiences such as “gothic architecture in 3-D,” “female genitals,” and persistent auditory hallucinations of music, and draws parallels to complex partial seizures.  
- A second linked paper (a38bafdfd38ca571cdfc0b421c2abb34.pdf) documents similar experiential classes arising from both surgical intracranial stimulation and weak extracranial magnetic fields, reinforcing the idea that external field patterns can replicate seizure-like qualia.  
- The discussion likens these findings to classic LSD research and references the TV series “Through the Wormhole” as a popular-science touchpoint that covered comparable magnetic-brain-stimulation results.  
- Practical DIY cryonics logistics were raised, with an inquiry about locating “cells alive” freezers in the Bay Area for low-cost biological sample storage.