• Sci-Hub / LibGen compression debate: participants estimate the full PDF corpus is ~100 TB, but argue aggressive lossless (font-deduplication, stream re-use) and lossy (down-sampling scans, re-vectorizing graphics) compression could shrink it to ≤16 TB—small enough for a single consumer HDD and thus politically “desirable” to ordinary users.

• Practical compression ideas floated: OCR-ing scanned pages into clean vector graphics, building a tree-map tool to profile PDF stream sizes, and re-electroplating worn EDM wire with copper to recycle expensive consumables—analogous to rejuvenating carbon-fiber electrodes.

• Contacting Alexandra Elbakyan: fltrz wants to run bloat-analysis software on the dataset and persuade her that a 10× size reduction would boost grassroots mirroring; discussion of using Tox or email/GPG, plus speculation that .se/.tw domains might be Western honeypots.

• DIY wire-EDM innovation: fltrz proposes replacing conventional brass wire with 10 µm carbon-fiber tow electroplated with copper; the CF supplies tensile strength while the thin copper layer acts as the sacrificial electrode, allowing on-the-fly re-plating and dramatic cost savings.

• Open-source nanopositioning thread: interest in sub-nm flexure stages driven by ultra-cheap piezo elements (disposable-lighter cylinders, MLCC capacitors, piezo tubes); need for integrated interferometric or capacitive feedback; 3-D-printed flexure parts suggested for rapid prototyping.

• Historical reference: phreedom (Ukrainian maker) previously built EDM and interferometer hardware but had to abandon his workshop after the 2014 invasion; archived logs at diyhpl.us contain fabrication notes on PZT powder pressing and furnace setups.

• Miscellaneous technical links: diyhpluswiki commits add transcripts on Bitcoin P2P propagation and Stanford 2017 scaling talks; Dan Berard’s STM site shows home-built scan heads and MLCC piezo actuator experiments; Starship SN8 nose-cone stacking videos circulated as off-topic inspiration.