• The U.S. Senate passed a bill that increases funding for Biden’s “Cancer Moonshot” while simultaneously weakening FDA drug-testing requirements, raising questions about safety-vs-speed trade-offs in medical innovation.  
• A new AWS service called “Snowmobile” was highlighted: a 45-foot ruggedized semi-trailer that can physically move up to 100 PB of data to Amazon’s cloud, complete with a paramilitary security escort, illustrating extreme approaches to bandwidth bottlenecks.  
• Japan has begun orbital tests of a magnetic tether designed to de-orbit space debris, offering a scalable method for cleaning low-Earth orbit.  
• Discussion of Bitcoin mining profitability concluded that current ASIC-based mining is marginally profitable, but kanzure claims to have devised a scheme that would re-enable CPU mining by guaranteeing fractional payouts proportional to hashrate, though it remains unimplemented and unannounced.  
• Ethereum was mentioned as the most profitable GPU-mineable cryptocurrency at the moment, with debate over whether free solar energy could make even low-yield CPU or GPU mining worthwhile.  
• nmz787_w and abetusk revisited an open-source CAD-to-G-code workflow: extending rasterized solid-model slices back into clean vector toolpaths was judged messy; they considered ray-tracing “LIDAR-style” within each slice to reconstruct precise line segments instead of fitting lines to pixelated boundaries.  
• George Hotz’s “Comma Neo” open-source autonomous-driving platform (video linked) was shared as a low-cost alternative to Tesla’s Autopilot, emphasizing hacker-friendly hardware and software stacks.  
• Recommended low-cost SDR hardware for beginners: $9–22 RTL-SDR USB dongles (with heat-sunk tuners preferred for stability above 1.5 GHz) paired with GNU Radio for 1–2 MHz real-time spectrum analysis.