- nmz787 is laying out the mechanical constraints for a microfluidic lab-on-chip device: locating reagent inlets that must simultaneously seal with o-rings and keep salty fluids away from electrical I/O pads; the first prototype will be fabricated through Efabless ChipIgnite (Skywater 180 nm or 130 nm) yielding 100 QFN dies of 2.92 × 3.52 mm each.  
- To protect the wet-etched layers, gold or platinum metallization is being considered for the entire fluidic stack rather than simple pad plating, because the design embeds multiple wet layers with routed wires between them.  
- A discussion of modern IC economics notes that mask-set costs have exploded with additional process layers, so even a single-person design on a multi-project wafer now incurs almost the same mask cost as a large-team chip; nmz787 adds that at Intel, mask generation has been a separate division for ~50 years.  
- kanzure shared the Nature paper “Autonomous chemical research with large language models” (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06792-0) and, separately, a PLOS Biology study showing that a chemosignal in human female tears reduces male aggression, jokingly suggesting it as an additive to pepper spray.  
- Additional links circulated include 23andMe’s engineering blog post on their “Genetic Datastore” architecture, a Sam Altman essay “What I Wish Someone Had Told Me,” and a Discord-hosted image whose content is not described.