• A 1996 experiment in evolvable hardware was discussed where an FPGA evolved to discriminate audio tones using only 37 of 100 logic gates; five gates were physically disconnected yet disabling any one broke the circuit, suggesting exploitation of on-chip electromagnetic coupling and analogue grey levels rather than purely digital logic.  
• Links to the original paper (archived Sussex page and CiteSeer PDF) and a modern open-source “evolvable_motherboard” GitHub project were shared to encourage replication.  
• Participants debated version-control best practice for collaborative hardware projects, recommending per-user feature branches (e.g., git checkout -b $USER/fire) to avoid merge conflicts when the upstream repository is active.  
• Recent machine-learning papers were spotlighted, including “Adaptive neural compilation,” “Programming with a differentiable Forth interpreter,” “One-shot learning with memory-augmented neural networks,” “Deep learning without poor local minima,” and “Learning hand-eye coordination for robotic grasping with deep learning and large-scale data collection.”  
• The NASA JPL C coding standard (linked) was circulated, with skepticism voiced that the publicly released excerpt omits critical guidance on fixed- vs floating-point arithmetic.  
• A short blog post on the mathematics of balancing a laboratory centrifuge was shared as practical lab-bench reference.  
• Bitcoin Core’s roadmap for Segregated Witness (SegWit) next steps was posted, keeping the channel abreast of protocol-level developments relevant to decentralized funding or DAO-style research projects.