- OpenAI is criticized for abandoning its founding goal of democratizing AI; instead it has centralized control and is lobbying to restrict individuals from running large models on their own hardware, raising concerns about trustworthiness for future AGI deployment.  
- A forthcoming book, “The Culture: The Drawings by Iain M. Banks,” due November 2023, is highlighted as potentially more interesting than Tolkien’s Silmarillion because it will visually canonize the Culture’s ship designs and technology.  
- Neuroscientists are urged to contribute to machine-learning interpretability research, framed as a natural extension of their expertise in understanding complex biological networks.  
- A Carl Shulman interview is shared covering biological computing, clanking replicators, and scenarios where AI or expert humans remotely operate other humans via AR/haptic feedback to diffuse skills and decouple high-skill labor from high-rent locations.  
- Discussion explores practical remote-body applications: expert mechanics or soldiers could tele-operate novices through haptic suits, enabling knowledge transfer and allowing experts to live in low-cost regions while working on-site in expensive or remote areas.  
- A blog post (finbarr.ca/llms-not-trained-enough) argues that smaller LLaMA models (7B/13B) were under-trained relative to the 30B/65B versions, implying public models may be artificially capability-limited.  
- Links to two policy/security papers are circulated: one on the biosecurity implications of benchtop DNA synthesis devices (NTI.org) and another on space governance (TheSpaceReview.com).  
- A YouTube episode from The Thought Emporium attempts to grow animal cells on plant leaves as a scaffold for “meat leaves,” but only achieves surface adhesion rather than true integration.  
- Conversation debates whether “enough” people are focused on existential risk; one participant claims Nick Bostrom’s emphasis on x-risk has diverted talented researchers like Anders Sandberg from building technology toward writing philosophy.  
- Practical biohacker commerce appears when a participant orders Nebula Genomics 30× whole-genome sequencing for $175, weighing lifetime vs annual subscription pricing against the risk of service discontinuity.