- Google and Amazon are shipping petabyte-scale data-transfer appliances (Transfer Appliance and Snowmobile) to sidestep bandwidth limits, reviving “sneakernet” for cloud-scale workloads.  
- Stanford’s Kwabena Boahen delivered a seminar on neuromorphic chips, arguing that nanoscale CMOS failures can be tolerated by brain-inspired, mixed-signal architectures; slides and prospectus are at https://web.stanford.edu/group/brainsinsilicon/.  
- Intel’s internal neuromorphic program and IBM’s TrueNorth-derived convolutional-network chip (reported by Ars Technica) were discussed as practical near-term neuromorphic hardware, with debate over whether sub-millivolt switches are feasible for energy-efficient logic.  
- Participants disagreed on the status of Moore’s Law: Intel insiders claim 7 nm and beyond are still on track, while outsiders cite rising NRE costs (~$500 M at 3 nm) and slowing cadence as evidence of effective stagnation.  
- Intel’s Compute Card modular PC concept was highlighted as a potential building block for open, upgradeable laptops and clusters.  
- Apollo, an open-source autonomous-driving stack from Baidu, was announced on Hacker News; its GitHub repo is https://github.com/ApolloAuto/apollo.  
- A $500 hobbyist LiDAR kit (SLAMTEC SDP-Mini RPLidar platform) was shared as accessible hardware for robotics and mapping projects.  
- Desktop Metal raised $115 M to commercialize metal 3-D printing for rapid prototyping and low-volume manufacturing.