- Remote ADHD assessments have become cheap and widely available in the U.S. thanks to emergency pandemic rules that allow telehealth prescriptions for Schedule-II stimulants.  
- Participants discussed the practical difficulty of custom CPU design: HDL is straightforward, but securing access to modern process nodes and funding the long iteration cycles is the real barrier.  
- A detailed technical exchange explored whether a graphite photocathode / thermionic device could act as an energy source; the consensus is that without a temperature or work-function differential it can only function as a detector or thermometer, not a generator.  
- Geoengineering was framed as primarily a political rather than engineering problem: current cost estimates (tens of billions per year for solar radiation management) deter any single actor, and policies actively block some approaches such as ocean fertilization.  
- A low-tech atmospheric CO₂-capture scheme using soda-lime chemistry was proposed and cost-modeled at ~US$100 per tonne, dominated by energy costs; this is an order of magnitude below current commercial offerings (e.g., Climeworks at US$1000/tonne).  
- Participants lamented that most academic work on carbon removal focuses on policy rather than engineering, leaving a gap for practical, cheaper solutions.  
- Software engineers in the channel expressed frustration at lacking credentials or domain expertise to pivot directly into geoengineering R&D without returning to university.  
- Links referenced: Hacker News discussion on geoengineering (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27663968), the soda-lime capture proposal (https://is.gd/caco3capture, archived at https://archive.fo/Jd24z).