# Key Points from #hplusroadmap IRC Discussion (Feb 6, 2015)

• The Amsterdam Futurists Society showed increased activity, reflecting growth in organized transhumanist communities across Europe.

• Thync's commercialization of transcranial stimulation technology for mood alteration was discussed, with the company actively recruiting alpha testers in San Francisco with $50 compensation per session.

• Participants debated terminology around mind transfer technologies, arguing that "whole brain emulation" (WBE) is scientifically preferable to "mind uploading" as it avoids dualistic philosophical assumptions.

• Montana's Senate passed a "right to try" bill supported by the Goldwater Institute, allowing terminally ill patients to access experimental treatments by bypassing federal restrictions.

• Technical challenges of direct-to-consumer genome sequencing were analyzed, particularly the problem of coverage variability (0-1000x by region) that complicates personal shotgun sequencing and assembly.

• A neural image captioning system combining CNNs and RNNs for generating natural language descriptions of images was shared (github.com/karpathy/neuraltalk).

• The SENS Research Foundation announced acceptance of Bitcoin donations, expanding funding options for their anti-aging research initiatives.