- A triple-inverted-pendulum balancing robot was highlighted as an impressive control-systems demo (YouTube link: https://youtu.be/I5GvwWKkBmg).  
- Discussion linked to a Hacker News post about “EDA software guy” (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40899646) that claims to optimize individual transistors at the layout level.  
- Participants speculated the optimization uses heavy-duty analog simulation techniques—non-equilibrium Green’s functions, finite-element electric-field modeling, and topology optimization—rather than simple rule-based sizing.  
- The software is reportedly so compute-hungry that it would require either a large FPGA cluster or a ~$100 k supercomputer, illustrating the “state-space explosion” problem in nanometer-scale device optimization.