- A participant reported running a nanopore MinION that produced 14 million reads ≤3 kb plus millions of 10 kb+ reads under “very poor” conditions, calling the torrent of novel sequences “the future and it is GLORIOUS” and promising to release the data publicly.  
- Discussion of open-source-style SEM hacking framed as “treating SEMs the way we treat 3-D printers,” i.e., full documentation, re-engineering, and community-driven improvement.  
- AWS scraping strategy: to defeat aggressive rate-limiting, kanzure suggested using a single EC2 instance with multiple elastic network interfaces instead of dozens of separate instances; streety weighed the cost/benefit of extra IPs versus extra VMs.  
- kanzure and nmz787_ were coordinating a purchase of lab equipment (SEM or similar) via an active auction with three days left, pending final shipping questions.  
- Vium (now part of Recursion) was highlighted as a “Transcriptic-for-mice” platform that automates standardized mouse phenotyping and drug testing in sensor-rich cages.  
- kirka re-appeared after a four-year absence, now a full-stack JS developer, and pitched browser-based grid computing via WebAssembly/WebWorkers so any PC or smartphone could donate cycles by simply opening a webpage.  
- Self-improving algorithms debate: kirka noted that two decades of skepticism about recursive self-improvement have been undermined by recent demonstrations including Schmidhuber’s OOPS and Meta-Learner papers (arXiv:1611.05763, 1611.02779).  
- GWAS links shared: memory, longevity, brain-structure, fasting, and freckle-associated SNPs were mined from the EBI GWAS catalog and added to the diyhpluswiki list of candidate human genetic modifications.  
- Senolytics were flagged as the longevity intervention “popular this year,” with a 2017 review paper (“The fountain of youth by targeting senescent cells?”) linked for background.  
- nmz787_ attempted live-streamed electroporation experiments but was thwarted by a dead GoPro battery; prep work was completed and the test postponed until after travel.