- A curated DIY-BIO reading list was posted, combining canonical texts (“Molecular Biology of the Cell,” “Molecular Cloning: A Laboratory Manual”) with an open-source biology primer and a downloadable archive of bio-books at http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/bio/books/.

- CRISPR patent fatigue was discussed alongside three key 2015 articles: the New York Times “CRISPR Quandary,” the New Yorker “Gene Hackers,” and Nature’s “CRISPR the Disruptor.”

- An arXiv preprint (1511.00083) from the Hawkins group argues that neocortical neurons use their thousands of synapses to implement a universal sequence-memory algorithm, offering a biologically grounded model for temporal pattern learning.

- Microbiome interventions were critiqued for lacking Bacteroidetes—the phylum repeatedly linked to leanness—with General Biotics cited as a startup attempting to supply these missing microbes.

- A 2015 CAD-survey blog post showed SolidWorks dominating at 22 % market share, FreeCAD at 2 %, and OpenSCAD trailing, prompting lament over low open-source CAD adoption.

- A Pacific Biosciences long-read sequencing workshop was announced for December 2–4 in Palo Alto at http://programs.pacificbiosciences.com/l/1652/2015-10-13/3fvlkr.

- AGI methodology debates pitted genetic-algorithm-trained neural networks (praised for universal function approximation) against critiques that they still lack explicit goals, planning, and hierarchical memory.

- The channel proposed an engineering-style “brain-dump” protocol—using sealed, time-delayed submissions from coworkers—to capture tacit procedural knowledge and avoid the technical omissions of conventional oral histories; a 20-minute sample transcript on SNARKs was provided at http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/scalingbitcoin/snarks/.

- Participants noted the poor state of handwritten-lab-notebook OCR (Evernote rated “poor-to-fair”) and cited Ralph Merkle’s lost 1980s Xerox compiler work as an example of knowledge that better brain-dump procedures might have preserved.

- A cost principle was articulated: for growing teams, technology-replication costs must fall below social-coordination costs, otherwise “an assembly line of Shakespeares at typewriters” becomes the cheaper route.