- A Teardown Portland after-party at a local hackerspace brought together key open-hardware figures including efabless CTO Tim Ansell, John McMaster, and bunnie huang, but the second-day conference schedule reportedly contains “not much if any silicon” content.  
- Eli posted a short video advocating an immediate U.S. ban on funding gain-of-function (GOF) research in China and Iran, arguing that historically non-transparent regimes should never have received such funding; the video is at https://youtu.be/a8hy-kHEbBk.  
- Discussion of GOF broadened to claims that SARS-CoV-2 may have originated as an attempt to create an airborne, needle-free vaccine that accidentally leaked, with Eli citing former CDC director Robert Redfield’s assertions and a Dana Parish tweet thread (https://x.com/danaparish/status/1857119315603882141).  
- kanzure proposed a new model for academic publishing that ties eligibility for prestigious “Nature”-level awards to university membership in a collectively funded, fully open consortium, framed as a response to U.S. public-access mandates and commercial publisher capture (tweet: https://x.com/kanzure/status/1936917582075809960).  
- A side debate on historical genetic pacification referenced medieval Europe executing 0.5–1 % of each male generation and calculated this would reduce the heritable propensity for execution by only ~0.007 SD per generation, with questions about whether selection targeted criminality itself or merely the likelihood of being caught and condemned.  
- Links to open-source analog-circuit tools appeared: LiveSPICE (https://www.livespice.org/) for real-time circuit simulation and AccessAnalog (https://accessanalog.com/)—initially mistaken for a cloud analog-synthesizer service but noted for marketing “real VCOs that drift daily.”  
- Participants speculated that AI could be trained to emulate analog synthesizers perfectly by learning individual non-linear transfer functions rather than entire signal chains, potentially making “warehouse full of robots” claims indistinguishable from genuine analog hardware.  
- A $200 full-body liquid-cooling garment from Compcooler (https://www.compcooler.shop/products/full-body-cooling-garment) was shared as a practical biohacking tool for thermal management.