- A New Yorker article (22 Oct 2018) profiles Anthony Levandowski, the former Google/Waymo self-driving-car engineer now at the center of a civil trade-secrets lawsuit with Uber and a possible forthcoming criminal case; Levandowski has also founded a “singularitarian church.”  
- Discussion of the Levandowski case prompts a participant to note that his talk at BioHack the Planet was “so boring I didn’t even bother,” illustrating community skepticism toward high-profile transhumanist figures.  
- kanzure shares a detailed web page (http://stevengoldfeder.com/projects/circuits/sha2circuit.html) that presents a full gate-level circuit diagram for the SHA-256 hash function, useful for hardware-level cryptography and zero-knowledge proof research.  
- Multiple links and videos are circulated covering micromanipulator hardware: a four-axis hanging-joystick oil-hydraulic micromanipulator (MTK-1), a Leica IVF micromanipulation setup guide (PDF), and the observation that commercial units still rely on RS-232 serial control via HyperTerminal or TuTTY.  
- Participants question why many micromanipulator axes lack motorized control and note the devices’ surprisingly large physical footprint, suggesting a gap for smaller, DIY-friendly designs.  
- nmz787 proposes creating a “fiver-like” bounty platform for larger open-source biology projects, speculating that elementary-school protractors and dollar-store parts could be combined into low-cost micromanipulator kits.