- Open-source EDA ecosystem has expanded dramatically in the last five years; F4PGA now supports not only Lattice iCE40 but also Xilinx 7-series and other low-cost FPGAs, while OpenLane and Magic provide full open-source ASIC flows.  
- Reconfigurable-computing research from the 2000s showed how to treat FPGA regions like a software heap, dynamically allocating and de-allocating gates at runtime—an approach that was abandoned because mainstream FPGAs require full-bitstream reconfiguration.  
- A 1-bit ternary LLM could be implemented on FPGAs using massive gate counts or high-bandwidth memory; a 2013 Virtex-7 (~50 M gates) would need thousands of chips to hold a modern model, suggesting the need for alternative training algorithms beyond gradient descent.  
- Analog in-memory computing for ML is yielding encouraging results: model weights can be realized directly on analog hardware without retraining on the original dataset, contradicting the long-held belief that device variation would make this impossible.  
- Mythic AI’s 15-year lack of a shipping product is cited as evidence that current transformer architectures may be too redundant to benefit from analog power savings; discussion pivots to spiking neural networks (SNNs) and tree-structured weight storage in multi-state SRAM cells.  
- nMigen (Python) and Chisel (Scala) are recommended HDL generators; Berkeley Analog Generator (BAG) 2.0 is the go-to open-source tool for analog layout, though Cadence still dominates commercial flows.  
- Yosys remains the only viable open-source synthesis tool, but it is notorious for excessive RAM usage—some users report >64 GB for modest designs—due to retaining transformation metadata and subgraph-isomorphism caches.  
- A Center for AI Safety infographic is mocked for advocating a “clumsy lobotomy” approach: banning even precise questions about AI capabilities under the banner of “security,” illustrating broader community skepticism toward AI-safety maximalism.  
- OakVar (https://github.com/rkimoakbioinformatics/oakvar) is highlighted as an open-source alternative to Promethease for personal genome interpretation.