- Transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS) experimentation: FourFire plans to self-experiment with the foc.us Go Flow stimulator, and the group recommends the developer edition for better control and safety.  
- Existential-risk debate: participants split on whether super-intelligent AI is a real threat; Houshalter argues rapid, exponential compute growth could yield dangerous AGI within decades, while Diablo-D3 dismisses such concerns as philosophical speculation.  
- Physical limits of computation: Seth Lloyd’s 1999/2000 papers on thermodynamic and quantum bounds to computation, Anders Sandberg’s “physics of information-processing superobjects,” and Scott Aaronson’s survey on NP-completeness and physical reality are surfaced as canonical references.  
- Brain emulation logistics: discussion of satellite-borne emulators running at 1 s per week wall-time, the energy cost of evacuating Earth via scanned minds (citing Kragen Sitaker’s 2001 analysis), and the latency problem for emulated minds lacking real-time I/O.  
- Neurotechnology reading list circulated: cerebellar circuits as Bayesian state-estimators, neural dust ultrasonic power delivery, soft-material neural interfaces, pHluorin-based synaptic vesicle reporters, and dual-color glutamate/calcium imaging constructs.  
- Open-access paper index: kanzure released a curated 8 448-paper collection at http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/index.2016-01-06.txt and floated the idea of an annual “review of everything I have read” meta-research tool.  
- Laser micro-fabrication: nmz787_i is building a GRBL-driven laser cutter for micro-lithography; Laser Origami (CHI 2013) technique for gravity-assisted 3-D acrylic folding is proposed for transparency-film micro-structures.  
- RNN and deep-RL resources: links shared include Karpathy’s “Unreasonable Effectiveness of RNNs,” Graves’ LSTM tutorial, the awesome-rnn GitHub list, Nervana’s deep-RL primer, and TensorFlow white-papers.