- A new paper, “BasicBlocker: Redesigning ISAs to eliminate speculative-execution attacks,” was shared (arXiv:2007.15919), proposing a hardware-level redesign of instruction-set architectures to remove the micro-architectural side channels exploited by Spectre/Meltdown-style attacks.

- Ken Shirriff’s latest blog post on reverse-engineering the Intel 8086’s ALU from high-resolution die photographs was circulated, along with its Hacker News discussion thread, offering detailed insights into 40-year-old chip design techniques.

- Participants discussed practical browser workflow hacks for resource-constrained video-conferencing: the need for a “panic button” Chrome/Firefox extension that instantly bookmarks or suspends all tabs so Google Meet can run unhindered, and the fallback of launching an incognito Chrome instance from the command line.

- The channel’s logging bot had been offline, prompting calls for an automated script to back-fill missing IRC logs and preserve the community’s long-running technical archive.

- No substantive debate or additional links beyond the above were recorded in this session; most traffic consisted of routine joins, quits, and nick changes.