- Vernor Vinge’s short story “Marooned in Realtime” was cited as the closest match to a tale about immortal humans trying to contact a civilization near the Milky Way’s center.  
- IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) was introduced with its white-paper; participants criticized it for ignoring speed-of-light latency and lacking incentives for persistent storage.  
- Paperbot demonstrated continued access to pay-walled PubMed papers via libgen.org, although a later attempt to fetch a Nature Reviews Drug Discovery article failed when libgen was unreachable.  
- VerbNURBS, an open-source JavaScript NURBS library (https://github.com/pboyer/verb), was showcased alongside the Flood editor (http://floodeditor.com/) and CadQuery for FreeCAD scripting; curve-surface intersection is now supported but surface-surface intersection is still missing.  
- A newly purchased Elan Cybra stenography machine will be reverse-engineered to open its proprietary USB protocol for use with the open-source Plover steno software.  
- Participants debated whether anabolic steroids cause “roid rage,” with one citing a friend’s post-steroid violence while others argued the effect is culturally mediated rather than pharmacological.  
- A headhunter from Orion International was recruiting ex-military avionics engineers for SpaceX, emphasizing security-clearance backgrounds and 80-hour work weeks.  
- DIY resources shared included lcamtuf’s “Guerrilla guide to CNC machining, mold making, and resin casting” (http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/gcnc/) and cycloidal-gear design notes (http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/cycloid/).  
- IRS rules allow U.S. developers to expense or amortize software-development costs over 36 or 60 months, with potential first-year bonus depreciation—relevant for open-source project accounting.