- Electro-active polymer hydrogels can exhibit emergent memory and learn to play Pong without any living neurons, as shown in a 2024 paper (https://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/ai/physical-intelligence/Electro-active%20polymer%20hydrogels%20exhibit%20emergent%20memory%20when%20embodied%20in%20a%20simulated%20game%20environment%20-%202024.pdf).  
- FinalSpark now offers API access to living neuron “blobs,” enabling cloud experimentation with biological neural networks.  
- Discussion of BCI trade-offs: 8×8 electrode arrays are considered insufficient; optical sensing offers better spatial resolution but at higher cost; growing retinal organoids around micro-fiber optics or micro-electrodes was proposed for high-bandwidth input.  
- Training biological neural circuits remains unclear—one approach randomizes inputs as “punishment” when the Pong ball is lost, but participants worry this is little more than “circuit-bending a glorified autocomplete.”  
- Local LLM tooling: Qwen2.5-coder ≥3 B parameters recommended; VS Code + Continue.dev + Ollama cited as a productive stack.  
- MedLlama3-v20 disappeared from Hugging Face (404) but is still mirrored on Ollama (https://www.ollama.com/ahmgam/medllama3-v20); it appears optimized for multiple-choice medical questions.  
- Interest expressed in creating an “encyclopedia of Llama 3.2 latent space” to map and interpret model internals.  
- Shared link to Kording’s essay arguing that the brain performs something akin to gradient descent (https://medium.com/@kording/why-i-believe-that-the-brain-does-something-like-gradient-descent-27611c491205).