Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2025-03-31 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by psvenk. In attendance were Student keyholders: psvenk, rgabriel, dtemkin, innaavo, alwinfy, turino14, skylarh, nmorgan, anhad Associate keyholders: petey Members: tarang, johnm2, scottyph, monicav, guoj1112 Guests: Jacob Spunt, sunjing, wyf, kaclark Administrivia: psvenk: So there are two forms that the ASA wants us to fill out. Today was the ASA GBM. They want us to fill out our re-registration form as well as to register for CPW Midway. It's due on Sunday. [filling out the form and corresponding conversation] anhad: I ordered the shirts, they should arrive by CPW -- design I showed earlier with the updated projects list. Originally I had purple and black shirts, but they said it might take longer and cost more so I just did the [??] shirts. innaavo: Before break, I sent out a spreadsheet where you can sign up to be there for an event, so please do that if you haven't, but regarding the Python bee, we're thinking of having a raspberry pi as a prize, because we have money to spend now. Would ppl want to spend ~$120 on a raspberry pi kit with everything you'd need? psvenk: Is that an allocation? innaavo: First, is this something we want? dtemkin: It'll get the kiddos in. innaavo: Motion to allocate. turino14: Seconded psvenk: Motion to white ballot dtemkin: Seconded [motion to allocate $124.09 for a raspberry pi kit passes by white ballot] turino14: Something I was thinking the other day. You know the only place we have the calendar is at the bottom of the SIPB website. Wouldn't it be nice to have at the front of our room a set of all our meetings and projects? That way they can know to show up. rgabriel: That's nice. [more discussion] psvenk: Going to the raspberry pi, the event says there will be pies, but does not specify the raspberry variety. I'll try to get it changed. psvenk: We have a dinner this friday, right? turino14: Yeah! psvenk: Where do people want to go? Friday at 6. tarang: What's our budget? rgabriel: I think we allocated $500. psvenk: We allocated $500?????????? I don't remember that. innaavo: Yes, we did. It says here that you did. innaavo: There is a Korean BBQ place. Koreana. I've been there with one of my friends. I like it. psvenk: Are there vegetarian options? Jacob Spunt: They have plenty of them. tarang: What kind of stuff? Is it vegetarian or just made with a vegetable base? Jacob Spunt: They have tofu, kimchi, all that stuff, vegetables, whatever you expect. They have a whole page with no meat. psvenk: the difference between vegetable base and vegetarian is that there may be hidden traces of meat innaavo: This is just one dish. There are seven other dishes that don't have an oyster sauce. psvenk: this other dish is deep fried. we don't know what it's fried *in* psvenk: actually it *is* labeled as vegetarian despite having the oyster sauce tarang: I know there's a sauce that has a meat name but is actually vegetarian. johnm2: There may be vegetarian versions of it. dtemkin: It is on the vegetable entry but not listed as vegetarian. We can also just call and ask. psvenk: I also know that when we went to Yamato II, I had exclusively appetizers, and it was still very good. alwinfy: My bad. psvenk: Nah it was good. Jacob Spunt: You can never go wrong with Felipe's. dtemkin: It's very busy though. psvenk: We can try to reserve. psvenk: Anyway, I'll start an email chain about dinner. turino14: Did we want to discuss about DormCon? dtemkin: IS&T has'nt been printing out ID cards for the incoming class years. DormCon has tried and apparently the problem is not with ResLife or OFY, it's specifically IS&T who doesn't want to print them out because "the mobile IDs are good enough". They told us to contact Jag and Olu. DormCon has worked with Jag and SIPB has worked with Olu. I made a group chat with people in both groups' execs. Does anyone have any opinions? dtemkin: They are CharlieCards, so we'd also miss out on that. dtemkin: What they did last time is that since people needed the cards for swim test, so they made everyone line up and then the ID cards ran out. dtemkin: I think obrown is Jag's boss. Jacob Spunt: Are MIT IDs valid as legal IDs? In some corporations or universities, your ID can be federally recognized if it's from a reputable source. I knew a friend who did an internship for New York State. Those IDs are federally recognized, like a driver's license or a passport. monicav: One time I lost my ID at the airport and they let me get on with just my MIT ID. But maybe it won't be possible anymore if/when the REAL ID requirement starts being enforced in a couple of months. [talk about charliecards] psvenk: We've gotten pretty derailed. Any more to say about ID cards? tarang: They're cool. dtemkin: I hate the new design. Project Reports: rgabriel: Matrix continues. I just upgraded some software because there was a flaw. psvenk: A flaw? rgabriel: Some security vulnerability kaclark: Is matrix like that "DIY discord" thing? alwinfy: That's mattermost. rgabriel: Maybe that was too loose of a question. What's Matrix? kaclark: How do I join? rgabriel: Go to matrix.mit.edu, sign in with Touchstone. You can use it to message other people at MIT or the world. psvenk: It's like a federated, FOSS Discord. dtemkin: And Mattermost is open-source Slack. turino14: HWOPs continues, except it won't this week, because there won't be a meeting on Friday because of SIPB dinner. We might still have the FPGA meeting if we have time; we'll figure it out. skylarh: Eventful continues, progress has been made on getting it prepared for CPW on the technical side of things. I've made a page where the schedules will actually be displayed and set it up so that the server will be the one handling all of the translations with all the schedules from the different sources that will need to be thrown together. Now I just have to talk to people and get the schedules. ghost of almonds: LLMs continues. I'm busy with qualifying examinations, so I've been very slow with the ORCD collaboration. But the LLMS-DEV-1 server is up and ready for use by MIT students. rgabriel helped me find the rest of the 2 T hard drive, and now we have neat multimodal & multilingual models. I'm waiting until mid-April (after quals) to announce it somewhere, maybe as a blog post on the SIPB website. I also intend to render some documentation about how to use the LLMs effectively, like the API, and a cursory overview of what models are available. dtemkin: IS&T purchased ChatGPT for all faculty recently, so this could be a nice alternative to that for students, staff, etc. rgabriel: The (uncontested) UA president candidate put buying OpenAI Pro as part of her platform. I talked to her and said some people have objections but SIPB has our own LLMs as an alternative, and scaling them is an alternative worth funding. dtemkin: I talked to Alice. monicav: SIPB FPGAs continues. I'll just do a brief overview again: We're trying to make it so that MIT students can freely rent out FPGAs, write Verilog, and upload their bitstream to real hardware. I just brought in a dev board made by LambdaConcept with a Lattice ECP-5 FPGA, and hopefully we can get that plugged into the sipblink computer in the server room so people can start flashing it and testing out if the website works. wyf: Question about the LLMs. Are the conversations logged? alwinfy: You can retrieve conversations you've had before, so yes. tarang: Do you want them to not be logged? Are you doing nefarious things? psvenk: Do you have anything to hide? wyf: Yes. dtemkin: Hydrant continues. The Lit department is spamming us right now. They're very passionate about the order in which the subtitles appear. We should work on letting ug admins submit class change overrides soon. If anyone wants to help out with that, let us know before fall. please. so many overrides... nmorgan [in chat]: Project Rprt: ark continues, made progress over the break with designing a custom chat model for langchain, currently implementing tool calling logic guoj1112: ARK continues. I was hosed over the past week so I was not able to contribute, but I do have a pull request in the works. Other: turino14: We are adding blogs to the SIPB website including a blog for SIPB55 and also a nice post from xy. I was also looking into the newsletter. I'll be contacting more of you for more information. Eventually, hopefully, by the end of the semester, we can have the first newsletter. Let me know if you'd like to help me! innaavo: At the library, tomorrow, I will pick up the book we bought. tarang: Since we have people who are new, how did you hear about SIPB? kaclark: I was looking into the history of Athena and I realized this was the group that was really involved with it. I thought it sounded cool and saw that y'all still have meetings so I came. psvenk: is it all that you expected? kaclark: it's more [laughter] psvenk: that was the correct answer wyf: I learned about it during the CPW events Other Other: psvenk: The end of spring break is sooner than you think. rgabriel: Spring break is sooner than you think! alwinfy: You are not allowed to say that! innaavo: April fools is sooner than you think. alwinfy: I tried telling psvenk to run this meeting backwards, as a joke. Don't think he picked up on it, though. guoj1112: Today is Trans Day of Visibility. turino14: On Saturday we had the largest, ever recorded, temperature difference between Boston and New York! It was 35 degrees in Boston, 80 degrees in New York. dtemkin: The 2029s are sooner than you think. dtemkin: Seaport flooding is sooner than you think tarang: Not to cut off the chain of sooner than you think's but I have a presentation in class, and if anyone has a PCB circuit board looking thing that's about an inch by 2 inches that I can hold up to the presentation, please talk to me skylarh: the next "is sooner than you think" is sooner than you think. johnm2: Propaganda is sooner than you think The meeting was adjourned at 20:20. Minutes taken by guoj1112, tarang and innaavo, monicav and submitted by rgabriel