Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2024-03-04 The meeting was called to order at 19:33 by innaavo. In attendance were Student keyholders: alwinfy, innaavo, aabreu, jmvidal, colclark, turino14, psvenk, arjunjb, rgabriel Associate keyholders: almonds Members: vex, fpx, lkronman, scj643 Guests: aryanj Administrivia: innaavo: Welcome to the SIPB meeting. How's everyone doing? [various]: Chill jmvidal: I'd like to make an allocation for $800 for SSDs for the SMR innaavo: Seconded [motion passes 8-1] almonds: Colin why? colclark: No reason. psvenk: Why are you on the zoom call? colclark: I'm sick. almonds: I would like to make an allocation for $60 for a torque screwdriver so we can screw and unscrew the server rack screws, and also the little CPU screws that need a particular torque value. The one we're looking at you can set the torque. psvenk: Seconded innaavo: Motion to white ballot alwinfy: Seconded [motion passes by white-ballot] innaavo: I wanted to talk about CPW again. So I sent out a When2Meet about 2h ago - fill that out if you could, it's for a showcase/Q&A of all the projects. What events should we do definitively? We definitely want server room tours, the project room tours - anything else? A party or something? jmvidal: Generally there's a Python bee, and a SIPB party on Saturday? psvenk: I can do Python bee. Assuming nobody else wants to. jmvidal: I can do the SIPB party. How long does it run? [various]: Until we're done. innaavo: When should we start? alwinfy: We generally start hackathons at 6:30, and go arbitrarily late. innaavo: Would we want the project showcase to be separate? That way we have four total. alwinfy: What I was thinking was we kind of put our best foot forward for the project report, have the parents all ooh and ahh, and then we can take a more casual tack for the party. almonds: I think this is a pretty good spread of projects. innaavo: There's also a document on the Mattermost in the CPW channel - it's got some ideas on it, I'll clean it up tonight, but you should put your name down as a contact if you know you're going to be there. almonds: HWOps would like to allocate $10 for nuts and bolts for the server rack. jmvidal: Seconded innaavo: Motion to white ballot turino14: Seconded [passes by white-ballot] alwinfy: I was considering making a discretionary fund for HWOps? Just to reduce allocations, so we can pull from the pool rather than having to allocate every time. [various]: I think it's fine as-is Project Reports: aabreu: DormDigest continues. It's an email parser that puts all the dormspam on a calendar view for ease of view. almonds: We use regex right now, and we're planning to use our LLMs to make things more accurate, with regex as a fallback. aabreu: SIPB Docs also continues. I think, for each project, if you're on the database for it (go to the SIPB website and click on Projects), you should be able to edit it and add onboarding steps and who to contact - we'd like a little more description than what we have right now. Add something a new member can do so that new members can get involved. alwinfy: I talked to huydai who created the Projects DB, and now anyone on the EC should have ACL access. If you're on the EC and you are interested in that, you can help clean up / write project descriptions. psvenk: Hydrant & CourseRoad continues. I fixed some issues with some majors that should now have the requirements correct (they weren't before). vex: SIPB Tor continues. We had some connectivity issues, so we'd like to go visit to check things out. Hit me up if you'd like to go Wednesday or Thursday or Friday. almonds: Where? vex: It's a secret building above the Macy's above downtown Boston. You'd have to get background checks to go, but it's really cool. [various]: I'd be interested almonds: LLMs continues. scj643: Vault is on pause for the time being, until I can get machine/IP permission. jmvidal: HWOps continues. Still getting rid of old stuff. Meetings Friday 17:30. Other: psvenk: I have a project proposal - as some of you may know, since Elon Musk took over Twitter it has not been possible to use the Twitter dot Com website to view timelines in chronological order. Which poses a problem for those of us who are extremely online and would like to keep track of certain accounts without signing in. For several months, there's been an alternative (faster, more featureful, JavaScriptless) frontend, Nitter, to not have to go through all the bad things of Twitter dot Com. psvenk: About a week ago, Musk went further and killed what makes public Nitter instances possible to work at scale. I'd like to run a SIPB Nitter instance for MIT. almonds: How would this work? psvenk: We'd use proxy guest accounts. As long as it's not too high volume, it'd be fine. psvenk: This would of course be differentiated from the hypothetical "SIPB Twitter" accounts for outreach. That'd be bad. lkronman: Would we want kerb auth? psvenk: We'd probably want auth, because otherwise non-MIT students would try to access it and probably get us taken down. innaavo: What resources would you need? psvenk: It can probably start on XVM. innaavo: Do we need to do something official? alwinfy: Nah just add it to the DB innaavo: I noticed we've some stickers and shirts and stuff. alwinfy: Merch! Merch! Merch! Merch! Merch! Merch! Merch! innaavo: Do we want to do more? For CPW, perhaps? almonds: I'd like stickers. aabreu: Who did the shirts? psvenk: annliu22 did the art, and I placed the orders. Talk to me after the meeting and I can put you in contact with her. rgabriel [in Zoom chat]: You can create a VM on lemonpepper.mit.edu Other Other: almonds: The next solar eclipse is closer than you think. In a month. It'll be fancy. innaavo: SIPB hackathon is next friday. The theme is St. Pi-tricks day. Friday 6:30. colclark: Can I borrow a server with a 3.5" hard-drive base for The Tech real fast? jmvidal: I think that's fine colclark: Thank you psvenk: Do we mean next Friday or this Friday? alwinfy: The Friday after this meeting. rgabriel [in Zoom chat]: Does anyone remember the "Barinsta" app? Third-party Instagram client from F-Droid, that was killed two or three years ago psvenk: rgabriel, do you remember Bibliogram? rgabriel: No psvenk: Web-based Insta client, also killed around this time. Author wrote a long blog post about how it's really untenable now. alwinfy: Some sad news that doesn't affect anyone but me: the IRC network Espernet is shutting down after several decades of operation. scj643: This affects me too. alwinfy: That means that if you're one of the few weirdos that still use IRC, there's one fewer IRC service. scj643: Freenode is long dead alwinfy: RIP Freenode psvenk: Libera.chat... The meeting was adjourned at 19:56. Minutes taken by alwinfy, innaavo, almonds, psvenk and submitted by alwinfy.