- SAMSON (samson-connect.net) was introduced as a mature, open-source molecular-engineering platform that offers Python scripting, Blender-compatible neuron-visualization tools, and an extensive plugin ecosystem—yet it remains little-known within the community.  
- A detailed technical discussion examined calcium-chloride brine as a low-cost, non-corrosive medium for solar-driven thermal storage and dehumidification, with calculations showing ~10× lower mass than ice for equivalent cooling and multi-day energy buffering.  
- Participants compared commercial whole-body MRI services (ezra.com, prenuvo.com, ~US$3 k) and explored the feasibility of arranging sub-US$2.5 k head-to-toe scans in Argentina while debating vendors’ willingness to release raw DICOM data.  
- Recent preprints shared include a high-throughput CRISPR screen of transcription-factor combinations (bioRxiv 2022.12.20.521091) and a light-sheet microscopy atlas of the complete mouse-eye vasculature (bioRxiv 2022.12.20.521194).  
- Whisper-based pipelines (whisperX for forced alignment with wav2vec2 and whisperer for dataset normalization) were evaluated; early tests showed good Japanese phoneme alignment but poor English performance.  
- GPT-J (6 B-parameter open-source transformer) and the decentralized-training paper “GPT-JT” (arXiv 2206.01288) were highlighted as accessible GPT-3-class models, despite some project links being offline.  
- Japan’s US$1 T nuclear-revival plan prompted debate on over-building solar, shifting industrial loads to midday, and the absence of consumer appliances that negotiate with the grid.  
- A critique of “slow-down-AI” advocacy argued that pressuring alignment-concerned researchers to leave the field removes their influence rather than improving safety, likening it to early Bitcoin abstention regrets.  
- Caliptra, an open-source silicon Root-of-Trust block being mandated for future datacenter chips, was introduced via OpenCompute specifications and SemiAnalysis coverage.