• A Turing Church essay on “The Extropian Roots of Cryptoeconomics” was shared, prompting commentary that the Extropian movement still trades largely on the 1994 “Meet the Extropians” Wired article as its signal achievement.  
• The UC Berkeley RDI “Zero-Knowledge Proofs Workshop 2022” page was circulated, highlighting ongoing open-source cryptographic research relevant to privacy-preserving transhumanist infrastructure.  
• A debate unfolded on the scientific status of “nuclear winter”: maaku argued that the original soot/black-carbon mechanism has been largely disproven and that the concept survived mainly because it conveniently reinforced anti-nuclear sentiment; pasky countered that peer-reviewed literature still treats the topic as unresolved, with both sides citing publication bias and lack of decisive data.  
• Discussion of AI-generated art centered on Stable Diffusion backlash: artists’ complaints, the difficulty of rendering human hands, and the use of negative-weight prompts (e.g., “not deformed, not bad anatomy”) to improve output quality.  
• A 47-minute YouTube essay titled “The End of Art: An Argument Against Image AIs” was linked, together with its full transcript, as a focal critique of generative-art systems.  
• Congressional efforts to label “unsafe AI” were mocked; participants noted that policy makers worry about copyright-violating or obscene images while remaining permissive toward lethal autonomous weapons.  
• Curated prompt repositories were shared as practical resources: PublicPrompts.art (open prompts), PromptBase.com (marketplace for vetted prompts), and examples of Midjourney achieving photorealistic editorial-style food photography.