- **OpenGL vs proprietary graphics stacks**: Extended debate on whether OpenGL was ever truly “open,” framed as a historical power play by Silicon Graphics to displace the earlier open PHIGS standard, and how Apple, AMD (Mantle) and nVidia (CUDA) are repeating the pattern by deprecating OpenCL/OpenGL in favor of Metal/Vulkan/CUDA to lock in developers.

- **Vulkan as next-gen compute substrate**: Discussion of Vulkan (plus MoltenVK shim for Apple platforms) as the emerging cross-vendor API that can run GPU-accelerated neural-network code on low-end mobile GPUs; noted that even Mali chips now expose Vulkan/OpenCL, but coding is verbose (~600 lines for a triangle).

- **ANGLE & Khronos portability initiative**: Microsoft’s ANGLE project (OpenGL ES → DirectX translation layer) cited as an example of the industry trend toward software shims that let every API run on every driver, although skepticism expressed about Khronos’s budget to finish the job.

- **Spiroligomers for peptide stability & nanopore sequencing**: ACS paper on all-hydrocarbon stapled peptides shared, plus a YouTube talk claiming spiroligomer nanopores for DNA sequencing; links to “Clasp” (Common Lisp on LLVM) presented as a tool for molecular metaprogramming.

- **Ethical framing of CRISPR & PGD**: Twitter threads and STAT coverage of CRISPRcon Boston highlighted—panelists warned against casual use of “democratization,” argued widespread affordable pre-implantation genetic diagnosis could obviate germline editing for most diseases, and addressed fears of gene editing as “weapon of mass destruction.”

- **DIY bio & cost barriers**: Hacker News comment about training glass-blowing apprentices across institutions to solve lab-equipment bottlenecks, plus links to cheaper prototyping resources (CEBL blog) and private-placement life-insurance structures for funding longevity research.