- Discussion of decentralized Wikipedia alternatives: eudoxia lamented Wikipedia’s centralization; kanzure pointed to gmaxwell’s 2004 writings explaining why fully decentralized consensus systems are technically hard and still require admission controls.  
- Archival project in progress: eudoxia scripted the download of every page image of the North-American XB-70 Valkyrie interim flight manual from avialogs.com and plans to OCR the scans into an open HTML edition.  
- SourceForge preservation question: kanzure quoted gmaxwell asking whether ArchiveTeam or the Internet Archive had attempted a full mirror of SourceForge’s 430 k projects, noting that many are the last remaining copies of software needed to read obsolete data formats.  
- Medical-device safety debate: archels highlighted that revision 3 of standard EN 60601 raised the maximum allowable earth-leakage current for medical equipment from 500 µA to 5 mA and requested a copy of the standard.  
- Prediction-market landscape: gwern summarized that real-money markets are limited to small IEM contracts, NZ’s iPredict (US users barred), and overseas bookies; Truthcoin/Augur alpha runs on Ethereum but faces regulatory and consensus-design hurdles.  
- maaku and andytoshi critiqued Truthcoin’s design: original whitepaper proposed a Bitcoin sidechain; current Ethereum port (Augur) inherits floating-point PCA in block validation and weak adversarial-model arguments.  
- DIY bio-automation discussion: maaku asked about “makerbot-for-bio” hardware; kanzure recommended Opentrons liquid-handling robots and provided links to DIYbio transcripts, project lists, and a “genetic-modifications we should make” wiki.  
- Austin maker-space coordination: neals and andytoshi, both in Austin, complained that ATX Hackerspace is too far north and began planning a new central-Austin monthly meetup, scouting affordable venues east of I-35.  
- Crowdfunding signal: kanzure and heath posted the Counter Culture Labs Kickstarter for a community biohacking and citizen-science lab space.