- A new, fully trustless setup for Zcash’s zk-SNARK parameters has been published by Zooko Wilcox et al., eliminating the long-standing “trusted-setup” requirement that previously underpinned the currency’s privacy guarantees.  
- Peter Todd is reportedly still skeptical of the new construction, though no detailed counter-arguments were quoted in the log.  
- kanzure shared a 2020 arXiv paper proposing ant- and pheromone-inspired routing algorithms for scalable, low-latency payment-channel networks (https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.01374).  
- The open-source, high-performance RISC-V processor “XiangShan” from the OpenXiangShan project was highlighted, with links to its GitHub repo and Hacker News discussion (https://github.com/OpenXiangShan/XiangShan, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35312960).  
- Leukapheresis—the selective removal of white blood cells from blood—was looked up and briefly discussed as a potential experimental or therapeutic technique.  
- Eliot Higgins’ viral Midjourney-generated images depicting Donald Trump’s fictional arrest and prison escape were examined; participants noted the technical leap in photorealistic synthetic media and debated whether “Fibonacci spiral” has become the new prompt hack akin to “trending on ArtStation.”  
- A side conversation compared Midjourney output to earlier Deep Dream imagery, concluding that contemporary diffusion models are in a qualitatively different class of fidelity and control.