# Key Points from #hplusroadmap IRC Discussions

• Participants explored neurochemical approaches to increasing intrinsic motivation, discussing substances like modafinil (which affects dopamine transporters), B vitamins, cordyceps, and experimental compounds like 5-MeO-DALT, with detailed technical discussion about the nucleus accumbens and neurotransmitter mechanisms.

• The channel maintains "paperbot" and "papermonk" tools for scientific literature management, with developers optimizing HTML parsing performance by replacing jsdom with cheerio (achieving ~8x speed improvement) and refactoring code architecture for better maintainability.

• Technical debates occurred around SKDB (a package manager for physical objects), specifically whether geometry intersection code was necessary for hardware compatibility, highlighting challenges in open-source physical computing infrastructure.

• Community biolabs like BioCurious were discussed as facing financial sustainability challenges despite their importance to community science, with one user sharing their work on liver cell lines in minimal medium before being removed from their lab.

• Discussions about cryptocurrency infrastructure revealed how regulatory actions against services like Dwolla and Mt. Gox created practical challenges for the emerging technology ecosystem.

• The group debated documentation formats for scientific work, with arguments against Markdown due to its lack of formal specification and context-sensitive parsing challenges, despite its widespread adoption.