- A GoPro video captures the unboxing and transport of a Focused Ion Beam (FIB) microscope that will be installed in a personal garage lab, highlighting the ongoing trend of individuals acquiring high-end semiconductor and nanofabrication tools for open-source bio- and hardware hacking.

- Channel members rebutted Rick Falkvinge’s claim that “Bitcoin is suddenly unusable,” arguing that the criticism is technically unfounded and stems from conspiracy theories about SegWit, Lightning, and Blockstream; a curated list of counter-arguments was shared at https://0bin.net/paste/ZAgOmnN8dVSJuzSs.

- Researchers used CRISPR-Cas to encode a black-and-white digital movie into the genomes of living bacteria, demonstrating the feasibility of using living cells as durable, high-density data storage media (Nature, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature23017.html).

- A newly engineered dCas9-MQ1 fusion protein enables rapid, locus-specific CpG methylation in vivo, offering a programmable epigenetic editing tool that was validated by microinjection into mouse zygotes (Nature Communications, https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms16026).

- An arXiv paper (1707.03743) on “Learning Macromanagement in StarCraft from Replays using Deep Learning” was discussed as evidence that supervised pre-training on human replays is becoming a standard technique before reinforcement learning, a strategy recently popularized by OpenAI.

- A Russian developer reported earning only $12.50/hour for full-stack Angular 2 work, sparking debate about global wage disparities and the need for technologists to raise their rates; the same developer was offered $15/hour to contribute to an open-source GPU-heavy speech-recognition/ML project.

- Hardware provisioning for open-source AI experiments continues: one participant is assembling a 22-core workstation and asked about RAM requirements, but was told that current bottlenecks are GPU-bound and that the codebase is not yet packaged for external contributors.