# Key Ideas from #hplusroadmap IRC Discussions

• Participants debated the tension between open-source principles and commercialization in DIYbio, specifically regarding Pearl Biotech's gel box being sold without sharing schematics, highlighting a fundamental conflict in the biohacking community.

• The group explored cognitive enhancement concepts including "cognitive scaffolding" and "intelligence amplification," drawing on William Ross Ashby's work and Andy Clark's theories of distributed cognition and extended mind.

• Detailed technical discussions centered on SKDB, a package management system for physical objects that aims to represent protocols, processes, and machines in standardized formats that could generate both assembly and execution instructions.

• Participants analyzed how to computationally model human physical capabilities, including biomechanical constraints like force vectors, degrees of freedom, and lifting capacities in different positions, to determine if someone could feasibly build something with available tools.

• The conversation examined PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) as a case study for representing biological protocols in a computational framework, focusing on how to encode constraints like temperature, timing, and volumes.

• Participants debated the philosophical distinction between processes (what happens to materials) versus sequences of instructions (what a human or machine does), with implications for modeling complex systems.

• The group discussed motion planning and inverse kinematics solvers to find minimum energy paths for movements, referencing academic resources including "Interactive reach planning for animated characters using hardware acceleration."