Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2025-01-13 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by innaavo. In attendance were Student keyholders: amigdal, colclark, dtemkin, innaavo, nmorgan, psvenk, turino14 Associate keyholders: '() Members: anhad, bzelnick, ilyag, guoj1112 Guests: nbhakar Administrivia: innaavo: We talked about election dates during the EC meeting. We need to schedule keyholdership elections as well as EC elections. We were thinking, because the default date in the constitution for EC elections is February 10 [the second meeting of the spring semester], we would need to have keyholdership elections before then, or else push back both elections. I'll email to sipb-private to it, but in the meantime, exec elections are coming up sooner than you think(tm). innaavo: Next thing, Berkeley club (OCF). Does anyone want to take charge of emailing them? turino14: I can draft the email. innaavo: Great; we could just ask them how they get their funding, etc. turino14: So the meeting with OCF is to talk about NVIDIA / corporate funding in general? turino14: I was thinking if we could have a social with them or something like that? psvenk: How do we have a social when we're on opposite coasts? *Discussion for virtual social (COVID-core) occurs* innaavo: Fireroad can be project reports innaavo: Anhad, take it away anhad: We have one PowerEdge R410, let me know if you're interested what's inside the computers but what are you all interested in. Here is what is available: Full height server rack with doors and sides SMC Tigerswitch 10 gigabit network switch Bluearc NAS system (2 file servers with FPGA accelerators, 2 2U racks of drives), used to be CSAIL's top of the line primary storage Replacement power supplies and IO cards for the Bluearc drive racks. 4U 8 GPU, 2 CPU server. GPUs are NVIDIA Tesla m2050, not sure about the rest. 2U cluster machine (consists of 4 independent servers housed in 1 chassis. Each machine has 2 CPUs with a bunch of cores, 10 gigabit networking and something like 50gb of ram but I'm not certain.) nmorgan: I did notice that the stuff there is kind of dated, but so are things in the SMR innaavo: Are you all proposing we should take it? anhad: If you want it, you can have it. We don't need it anymore. People aren't doing computing anymore in MITERS, so we think you would make better use of it. innaavo: <3 turino14: We really appreciate the donation! Everything looks pretty good and we can probably make use of everything except for the server rack (we already have a lot of server racks) anhad: That's the worst to move, fine with me *logistics discussion occurs, will continue after meeting* psvenk: Cluedumps have started! We have had good attendance at some of them, at others less good attendance. Was thinking about publicity? Perhaps be more diligint about bumping dormspam. turino14: Especially about event tomorrow with Harvard professor! (How Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) let governments and business share sensitive data while protecting privacy.) innaavo: I got boba for it! *general happiness and relief and excitement* psvenk: Do we need to allocate more money for cluedumps? Lots happening this week, turino14 you're running one do you want anything other than pizza? What are you thinking turino14: Would be nice to have an RSVP innaavo: We can make one, send it in the dormspam bump psvenk: We could have a unified RSVP for all cluedumps for headcount purposes? I can do that [discussions about food options and catering locations, such as Chipotle bowls, sandwiches, Carolicious catering, and Saloniki] ilyag: The sipb iap website promises that the cluedumps are on the SIPB calendar, but they aren't psvenk: I'll fix that innaavo: They are on the MIT Events Calendar, though! dtemkin: :o nmorgan: rgabriel proposed a server building event this Friday? turino14: Can be in SMR and have food in office, more of a SIPB social + server building innaavo: I like free food during IAP for people! Let's make it a social >:D, this Friday? turino14: Yep! From 4-7 to not conflict with Cluedumps nmorgan: How much do we want to spend on this? [discussion about food and timing] dtemkin: Motion to allocate $120? psvenk: Maybe more like $150? [more discussion about food and timing] psvenk: Motion to allocate $700 for all events next week up through January 21st innaavo: Seconded! [motion passes, 8-1-2] innaavo: speaking of allocation, I motion to allocate $20 to get cleaning products, gloves, and sponges to clean the fridge. I will do it:D psvenk: Seconded! ilyag: I can help with that. innaavo: Actually, I would enthusiastically prefer to do it by myself! innaavo: Motion to white ballot turino14: Seconded [motion passes by white ballot] turino14: Motion to allocate $175 for shark upright deluxe vacuum cleaner. It's the #1 on Amazon, very good ratings! anhad: It seems legit. psvenk: Seconded innaavo: Motion to white ballot psvenk: Seconded [motion passes by white ballot] guoj1112: hello SIPB innaavo: We have an organization called Sandia National Labs who work with the Department of Energy on nuclear stuff; they want to do a technical talk with us. We should reply to them relatively quickly. [discussion ensues] innaavo: I will talk to them and try to get it set up for the beginning of February. Project Reports: psvenk: CourseRoad and Hydrant continue. We had a meeting with Venkat, the creater of fireroad, he answered our questions. There was discussion of doing a fireroad mobile app. But he basically said that we can do whatever we want with it. The SIPB repository now has all the Fireroad stuff. innaavo: Is he on the Mattermost? psvenk: This is our primary mode of communication. There are three ways of communicating. We love options. dtemkin: There's an effort to rewrite CourseRoad; we want to make it more mobile-friendly and faster. psvenk: He's too humble to say "I". [humor ensues] dtemkin: It's being rewritten, it's going. Right now I'm working on reworking the logic because every single JavaScript framework likes to reinvent how signals works. The goal is to keep it compatible and get user feedback like "here's a new version, what do you think? yay!" I think it's good, I think it's working well. psvenk: How close are we to feature parity? dtemkin: You can log in. Getting your roads works. The data storage is the same including getting it from local storage because it stores the entire class listing in your local storage and I don't know why but we'll work on that. I still have to implement the tree bullshit. innaavo: Sounds like you're doing a really good job. And I want to circle back to the fireroad thing; my friend nbhakar is interested in working on a new app including a lot of that functionality, maybe hydrant, opengrades, dormsoup. dtemkin: I believe rgabriel was interested in that. dtemkin: We can start by all meeting during the Hydrant/CourseRoad meetings on Sunday at 18:00 and go/split from there? nbhakar: Is that in this office? psvenk: Yes, but I will be joining via Jitsi during IAP. innaavo: It's cold outside innaavo: anyways, other project reports? turino14: HWOPS continues. Last Friday we put a bunch of all the Sun microsystems computers in a box to fade away in time. Next Friday we will build the Ark server. Sunday from 4 to 7. [redacted] psvenk: Anything else? [bzelnick bumps psvenk] bzelnick: In other news, SIPB Discord (IdentiBot) continues. It's been reborn. Actually it's been completely killed and I wrote a new one. I wrote a bunch of new stuff because the way I was managing cookies was ???. psvenk: there was a project called Interstellar that did that and rgabriel is trying to revive it question mark? psvenk: Just to be clear, is everyone fine with Fireroad being a SIPB project right? [general agreement that Fireroad is a SIPB project] guoj1112: It's now project #26. turino14: SIPB Docs, I made a Confluence page. Hope is that this are becomes a place for anyone to get documentation and a place for collaboration. Go crazy! I will be pubbing/spamming more this week. It would be nice if y'all could put links to existing documentation. More feedback on ways to organize is appreciated! amigdal: It's making me log in, so it's not externally accessible turino14: Here it is: https://wikis.mit.edu/confluence/display/SIPBDOCS/SIPB+DOCS turino14: The idea is to unify the fragmented landscape of documentation on AFS, etc. for SIPB projects. bzelnick: How would I go about adding a page for the Discord project? It says I don't have access. turino14: Are you logged in? turino14: We have weekly meetings on Fridays at 16:30, but not this Friday because of the server-building social. aabreu: DormSoup continues. We met last Wednesday; it was our first meeting since coming back from break. nmorgan: On the topic of cluedumps, for the debate next week, we have enough optimists and not enough pessimists. So, I plan on putting a poster up. guoj1112: I can argue either side. psvenk: I feel like most people you'll find who are passionate about AI are going to be optimists, since pessimists are more likely to be passionate about other things. Other: innaavo: Elections are sooner than you think. dtemkin: Puzzle hunt is sooner than you think for anyone who's doing that. innaavo: What team are you on? dtemkin: I'm on the discord servers for two different teams... Other Other: innaavo: Can you believe the fires? In California??? guoj1112: I went to the Joint Mathematics Meetings. There were a lot of talks. But otherwise, nothing much else to say. ilyag: I saw Bruce Schneier the other day. The meeting was adjourned at 20:28. Minutes taken by dtemkin, psvenk, guoj1112 and submitted by psvenk.