- China’s TMSR-LF1 has become the world’s first continuously operating thorium-containing molten-salt reactor, achieving initial criticality on 11 Oct 2023, full power on 17 Jun 2024, and confirmed Pa-233 production on 8 Oct 2024; observers note the milestone is less about thorium itself than about proving long-duration molten-salt operation.  
- A participant reported that an 8-year-old NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti purchased for $800 in 2017 is now unusable for modern AI workloads because it lacks bfloat16 support, highlighting the rapid obsolescence of consumer GPUs in open-source ML experimentation.  
- Bryan Bishop shared a link to his “Lab Buddy” project page (https://diyhpl.us/~bryan/projects/lab-buddy/), an open-source hardware/software system aimed at automating and logging wet-lab procedures for biohackers and DIY biologists.