- Neosensory’s $1 k “Buzz” wristband translates sounds into spatiotemporal haptic patterns for the deaf; participants argue an iPhone’s $10 LRA-based Taptic Engine could do the same job for far less, suggesting the high price is driven by FDA/FCC overhead and small-scale manufacturing rather than hardware cost.  
- Discussion of haptics broadened to the general concept of giving humans new synthetic senses (infrared vision, arbitrary data streams) and the trade-off between turnkey “training-wheel” accessibility devices versus open, high-performance DIY solutions.  
- A deep dive into the origin and meaning of “mesa-optimizer” revealed that the term was coined in the 2019 paper “Risks from Learned Optimization” (Yudkowsky et al.); the prefix was incorrectly claimed to be Greek for “below,” whereas μέσα actually means “inside” and μέσος “middle,” sparking debate over whether the neologism obscures more than it clarifies.  
- Participants contrasted “selection” (search-like, enumerative) and “control” (irreversible, moment-to-moment) as alternative AI-safety ontologies, with side critiques that standard deterministic optimizers such as gradient descent do not cleanly fit either category.  
- Shared links: Neosensory science page, iFixit teardown of Apple’s Taptic Engine, Nature Biotechnology paper on a new reflective multi-immersion microscope inspired by Schmidt telescopes, and Alignment Forum resources on mesa-optimization.