- The Allen Institute for AI was dismissed as “GOFAI” focused on text extraction and NLP, while the Allen Brain Institute was praised for more advanced work, highlighting a split between symbolic and modern deep-learning approaches.  
- Participants argued that automation already performs “the vast majority of work,” just not in anthropomorphic robot form, and traced modern retirement schemes to Bismarck’s 19th-century loyalty-buying measure set three years past life expectancy.  
- DIY and open-source biohacking tools discussed included OpenPCR, LightBulb PCR, Transcriptic’s robotic cloud lab, and the overarching “read/write/copy DNA” paradigm as the core goal of grassroots biohackers.  
- A new arXiv paper (1411.3140) was shared showing that Spanish regions with more diverse mobility, earlier daily rhythms, and better grammar in 145 million geo-located tweets exhibit lower unemployment, suggesting social-media “fingerprints” as cheap economic indicators.  
- Hardware and open-design projects promoted included the USB Armory (minimal design to limit supply-chain attacks), Purism’s Librem 15 laptop, an open stenotype machine, and juri_’s upcoming 31C3 talk on ImplicitCAD—a Haskell-based, purely functional CAD system for programmatic solid modeling.  
- Microfluidic design workflows were debated: KiCad’s PCB-centric model versus FreeCAD/ImplicitCAD/OpenSCAD, with SVG proposed as a 2-D interchange format for grey-scale lithography masks and CadQuery integration shown for exporting KiCad DSN files to the open-source FreeRouting autorouter.  
- Brain emulation versus abstract AI was weighed, with consensus that whole-brain emulation is computationally wasteful and that simpler organism-level intelligences (e.g., mouse-scale) plus language hacks may be a pragmatic near-term target.  
- Media and talks circulated included Cory Doctorow’s “war on general computation” (28C3 & DEF CON 20) and Jeremy Howard’s TEDx on machine-learning-driven unemployment, alongside critiques of Chomskyan linguistics for misdirecting AI research.  
- Practical workflow tips exchanged: k2pdfopt for reflowing PDFs on e-ink readers, TMSU for tag-based file organization (despite debates over its Unix path hijacking), Snappy Ubuntu Core for transactional cloud deployments, and strategies for retroactively tagging thousands of bookmarks.