- **Uplifting & comparative cognition**: Participants debated whether “uplifting” dogs to human-level intelligence would require them to re-learn locomotion; it was argued that quadrupedal walking is intrinsically easier and that human neonatal helplessness is driven by bipedal pelvic constraints rather than learning complexity.

- **Proton-beam lithography as a China workaround**: fenn asked why China couldn’t leapfrog EUV restrictions by deploying massively-parallel proton-beam lithography; nmz787 countered that electron-beam lithography has decades of process maturity and that any new particle system must still survive tool-building, process optimization, fab integration, and high-volume yield ramps.

- **Minimal-genome evolution experiment**: kanzure shared a new Nature paper showing that the synthetic Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn3B minimal genome can evolve higher fitness over 2,000 generations without regaining the deleted “streamlined” genes, demonstrating that extreme genome reduction does not preclude adaptive potential.

- **MEMS e-beam array modeling**: kanzure requested Verilog code to represent “a few million e-beams on a MEMS device”; GPT-4 produced a simple single-beam controller snippet (sprunge.us/iCyz6k) deemed “close enough” for further hacking.

- **Ethics of human-animal communication**: ml3 linked to dog “talking button” training guides and suggested that even modest advances in human-animal communication at current animal intelligence levels will raise ethical concerns; kanzure and fenn argued that withholding such communication capabilities is the greater moral failure.