Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2024-02-26 The meeting was called to order at 19:33 by innaavo. In attendance were Student keyholders: alwinfy, jmvidal, psvenk, innaavo, nmorgan, aabreu, rgabriel, turino14 Associate keyholders: almonds, jeffery, petey Members: scj643, yubzak, vex, almurph, dtemkin, guoj1112 Guests: tarang, johnm2 Administrivia: innaavo: For CPW, I've put a google doc in the Mattermost - please take a look . I've a lot of ideas, but I don't know what to do; Obviously we want to do the server room tours, maybe a Q&A inside to see what's going on. We also want food (to lure people in; it's the primary draw.) We can also do like a hackathon/pizza party or something like that. aabreu: Not sure this goes in Project Reports, so - I talked to huydai, he's in charge of the Project DB. innaavo: How's the server coming along? almonds: We have two builds . For now, we would like to make a $4000 allocation for build — don't worry about the GPU; we can just use the 4090. Any discussion before we allocate $4000? alwinfy: It's a lot of money. innaavo: I think we have enough funds - even accounting for CPW and everything else. alwinfy: Welcome new people! [blurb about SIPB] almonds: We're buying the parts for the server, rather than buying it prebuilt - so if anyone's interested in learning how to build a server or anything like that, hit me up after the meeting. almonds [to rgabriel]: How much money do we have? rgabriel: A lot! almonds: I propose an allocation for $4000. psvenk: Seconded. innaavo: What time do HWOPS and LLMs meet? almonds: HWOPS meets on Fridays at 17:30, and LLMs meets Fridays at 16:00. jmvidal: Building the server would also be a good idea for a hackathon event, if we want to do anything like that. alwinfy: [explains what a SIPB hackathon is] almonds: We need to order the parts if we want to have the server for a hackathon. aabreu: Would you be willing for the server to be a CPW event? almonds: That would be cool! aabreu: Would you be willing to delay [the server], in that case? almonds: No - I kinda want to get moving on it. innaavo: We could get started on it, and leave it unfinished. Or build it, take it apart, and reassemble it for CPW. almonds: Or maybe it could be an excuse to build a second server. [motion passes 9-0] alwinfy: Big money! alwinfy: rgabriel, have you ordered the chargers? rgabriel: I've made a Micro Center requisition but they haven't cleared yet. psvenk: As some of you may have noticed, I've purchased more snacks! [general approval] psvenk: Let me know in the Shopping List if you want anything in particular. alwinfy: [explanation of Mattermost] rgabriel: I would like to allocate $25 for a mobile phone to run postmarketOS on psvenk: Seconded [various]: Only $25??? innaavo: Motion to white ballot almonds: Seconded [motion passes by white ballot] innaavo: Do we have any social media? I saw that we have a Twitter account from a while ago, and LilBasedGod follows us. rgabriel: The login for the Twitter is on AFS. I don't think we have any other social media, though. scj643: Don't we have a Mastodon account on our own? innaavo: Right, but... [laughter] psvenk: Social media for nerds. psvenk: I think we should have a Tumblr presence. innaavo: We actually do have an Instagram! [shows sipb1969 on instagram] innaavo: Do we want to have a presence? [general assent] alwinfy: I think it could help our reach almonds: I think [re: hackathon] we could have one as early as next week (2024-03-08). innaavo: Do we want to have a theme? [general assent] innaavo: Maybe St Patrick's Day (2024-03-15). psvenk: That's also the day after Pi Day. almonds: St Pi-tricks day. alwinfy: Oh god almonds: We should do it just because it makes you cringe. innaavo: How much do we usually go for? alwinfy: About $80-100 for the bulk food, about that much again for snacks. Maybe a bit more if we want, what's the word alwinfy: Pie, pie is what I was thinking about. psvenk: Do we want to get, like a pizza pie? alwinfy: I dunno, I don't know if Chicago style is a good idea. psvenk: I'm a deep-dish fan. alwinfy: I know you're a deep-dish fan. psvenk: How? alwinfy: You told me just now. Anyway, I don't think the general MIT community necessarily agrees with you. psvenk: The way you said that seemed to imply that you already knew this about me. I haven't been open about my deep dish fandom with anyone in this room before today. alwinfy: Show of hands, actually: Who prefers deep dish? [a few raise their hands] johnm2: I want to be eating cheesecake out of the pan. Project Reports: almonds: LLMs continues. We wanted to put an OrangePi in the server room to redirect to different machines depending on the requested LLM, and it would also run a speech-to-text service (WhisperAI, it's open source) which I think the OrangePi's kinda perfect for. However, the OrangePi works for one or two boots but stops working at random, so I think we're gonna scrap that and put the router proxy server onto an actual rack server. rgabriel: Do you want a VM? almonds: We could use that, yeah. almonds: SIPB LLMs is our self-hosting open-source large language model project, kinda like ChatGPT, Claude, etc. We'd like to make large language models available to researchers/students/professors at MIT. So far we have one good GPU, maybe as a next step we could partner with someone to get more resources. We did just make an allocation for another beefy server, too. Meetings Friday at 16:00. petey [in chat]: Has anyone on the LLM project talked to former SIPB member / OpenAI technical staff member Chelsea Voss? (https://csvoss.com/about/; csvoss@mit.edu) almonds: Oh, we haven't, thanks! alwinfy: [points out BOSS-BABY with GPU] It's sticking out of the machine. It doesn't fit. nmorgan: Extra airflow! scj643: More dust! nmorgan: Hyades continues. (It's supposed to be next-gen computing infrastructure. Kind of like AWS but for MIT students, so students can host bare-metal servers in the 'cloud' to run websites, projects, code, whatever they almonds: What about VMs? nmorgan: I'll have to talk to the ten-year-old project managers about that. psvenk: Your project managers are 10-year-olds? nmorgan: I haven't seen them yet, so maybe! Probably not, though. nmorgan: Scripts 2, basically! Everyone gets to run servers. Meetings at 16:30 Tuesdays. vex: SIPB Tor continues. We have 5 SIPB members with server access and the BU legal clinic on our side. No meetings scheduled, but we do have a Mattermost channel, and we'll also set up a field trip to the Boston Internet Exchange next week. psvenk: Can anyone go? vex: Yeah, we have a locked Mattermost channel called SIPB Tor, we can add you. rgabriel: Matrix continues. It's basically like a decentralized chat service. We host one at matrix.mit.edu. We're also building a platform for people to join groupchats for a given class. Meetings Monday at 18:00. aabreu: I wasn't there for the meeting, but DormDigest continues. We take dormspam and turn it into a calendar view, to simplify looking at what's happening and when. Meetings Sundays at 1. And a cool, possible next step is to use SIPB LLMs to parse the emails a bit more accurately and intelligently. almonds: Yep, and the site is . innaavo: Maybe we should dormspam a bit about that. It's been a while. psvenk: Hydrant continues. CourseRoad continues. nmorgan: Introductions? alwinfy: None necessary, I hope. psvenk: [explains them anyway] aabreu: I think that might be a cool CPW event - set up stations in the office for projects, and let people look around. innaavo: Yeah - I think it would have to be a timed event, with people setting up and the prefrosh coming in and looking around. I could send out a When2Meet. jmvidal: HWOps continues. We manage the Server Room next door, in what was the old Athena Cluster - meetings Friday 17:30. Generally anything hardware is handled by us - direct questions to me. nmorgan: ARK continues. It's a work in progress and recruiting new members - come see me after the meeting. It's trying to be a replacement for smartphones - Automated Resource Knowledge, like an AI knowledgebase that can be customized and personalized via an intelligent database memory store. We're gonna need some innovative ideas for natural language and interfacing with other platforms. We've already got code in the works, so if you're interested come talk to me after the meeting. Other: '() Other Other: guoj1112: The end of the spring semester is sooner than you think. innaavo: 2028s are sooner than you think. [petey: oh god] guoj1112: There was another moon landing. scj643: I now have a ham radio license. almonds: What frequency? scj643: Technician-class, so 200 and 400 MHz. The meeting was adjourned at 20:09. Minutes taken by alwinfy, almonds, innaavo, psvenk and submitted by alwinfy.