• The Biden administration’s 30 Oct 2023 Executive Order on AI establishes a new U.S. regulatory threshold: any model trained with >10²⁶ FLOPs (≈1 exaflop-year) must be reported to the federal government, and datacenters capable of >10²⁰ ops/s for AI training face similar disclosure rules.

• Participants debated whether the U.S. healthcare system is truly “capitalist,” noting that competitive markets, transparent pricing, and voluntary exchange are largely absent; LASIK was cited as a rare counter-example where a free market still functions.

• SciPhi-AI/library-of-phi, an open-source GitHub project, automatically generates textbooks by stitching together MIT OpenCourseWare content and Wikipedia articles using large-language-model assistance.

• Discord CDN links embedded in the logs expire after ~2 weeks; fenn outlined a plan to scrape and weekly-archive all linked media into WARC files to prevent future link-rot.

• Bryan Johnson’s tweet about self-experimenting with stem-cell infusions sparked discussion on the high cost of medical hardware (e.g., heart pumps) versus the nominal price of powerful consumer pumps.

• jrayhawk summarized key AI-safety concerns: mesa-optimization, wireheading, and the “stop-button” problem, while criticizing MIRI-style research as too academic and recommending practical work on corrigibility and interruptibility.

• Nootropic discussion covered dopamine-pathway precursors: phenylalanine vs. tyrosine, glycine as a methyl-sink for over-methylated catecholamine states, and the absence of L-DOPA from common stacks.

• juri_ is actively searching for a personally owned scanning-electron microscope in Europe; another user offered access to one in St. Petersburg.

• A New Scientist article reports that Ukrainian AI-enabled attack drones may be selecting and striking targets without real-time human authorization, raising immediate questions about autonomous lethal decision-making in current conflicts.