• Metformin was discussed as a potential cognitive enhancer and COVID-19 prophylactic, but participants noted long-term use may impair cellular regeneration and cause gastrointestinal side effects.

• The Gemini protocol was criticized for failing to solve TLS certificate trust issues and for amateurish design; participants suggested scraping and reformatting web content instead of building a new protocol.

• Julian Assange’s early open-source contribution “Surfraw” was highlighted—an early CLI tool for querying web search engines—illustrating how prominent figures once wrote practical shell utilities.

• A startup proposed dual-licensing an MIT-licensed project so non-commercial users keep open-source access while commercial users pay the startup, prompting debate over license ethics and feasibility.

• nmz787 and spouse reverse-engineered proprietary FIB (Focused Ion Beam) workstation software on an old Windows XP Pentium machine, bypassing a time-wasting function call using Ghidra and a debugger.

• kanzure recommended publishing disassembly snippets and suggested techniques such as excising license-check functions or writing wrapper programs that jump directly to the application’s “real” main routine.

• Participants shared links to a symbol dump and disassembly listing at http://gnusha.org/~nmz787/pdf/smi3200/disasm/ to aid further reverse-engineering efforts.

• nmz787 floated the idea of injecting a Python DLL into the FIB software and repurposing an unused GUI button to trigger custom automation scripts.

• The channel exchanged a 2000-era “R.U. a Cyberpunk?” infographic, with members tallying how many definitions applied to them and noting the satirical fashion choices depicted.