# Key Points from IRC Discussion

• Participants discussed CAD software development, focusing on "verbnurbs" as a CAD kernel that should align with cadquery, with debate over Python versus C++ implementation approaches.

• Open hardware projects were shared, including a wireless router project called "rooter" (stalled since 2013) and the HackRF open source software-defined radio platform.

• Field Programmable Analog Arrays (FPAAs) from Anadigm were discussed as a technology for creating guitar effects pedals, with technical documentation shared explaining their switched capacitor technology.

• The conversation highlighted the dysfunctional economics of academic publishing, where authors pay to publish and then pay again to access their work, while journals primarily filter for "importance" rather than accuracy.

• Participants explored the challenges of creating alternative academic paper access systems, debating distributed approaches that could distribute legal risk and avoid single points of failure.

• Technical resources were shared, including the Raft consensus algorithm (with visualization at thesecretlivesofdata.com/raft/) and discussions about security vulnerabilities in tools like GNU wget.

• Bitcoin mining economics were analyzed, noting that hashrate growth follows patterns related to bitcoin price and mining technology efficiency, with costs approaching equilibrium at roughly 1 BTC per BTC generated.