# Key Points from IRC Log

• A paper on "Highly Multiplexed Subcellular RNA Sequencing in Situ" was shared, discussing techniques for RNA sequencing at the subcellular level, with a related discussion about spatial resolution requirements for DNA sequencing in neural tissue.

• Ken Shirriff's blog post "Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day" was shared, along with a link to die-shots of the Bitfury specialized Bitcoin processor, demonstrating the extreme contrast between manual and hardware-accelerated cryptocurrency mining.

• A discussion about secure chip manufacturing explored the challenges of creating trustworthy hardware, including the threat of dopant-level trojans that can be hidden in semiconductors, with references to papers on detecting such trojans using scanning electron microscopy.

• Participants discussed the feasibility of DIY semiconductor manufacturing at 50-100μm process sizes, suggesting that while far from state-of-the-art, such capabilities could enable creation of verifiable trusted hardware for basic computing tasks.

• Several security and development tools were shared, including sslsnoop (for SSL traffic analysis), tmux plugin manager, and CasperJS (for web form automation), with a brief discussion about the challenges of web scraping.

• A discussion about CNC machines and 3D printers on Kickstarter concluded that most crowdfunded manufacturing equipment has limited utility, with the value depending heavily on specific use cases.