Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2025-04-21 The meeting was called to order at 19:40 by psvenk. In attendance were Student keyholders: turino14, alwinfy, rgabriel, dtemkin, psvenk, nmorgan, anhad, amigdal Associate keyholders: almonds, scj643 Members: monicav, tarang, johnm2, ilyag Guests: '() Administrivia: psvenk: CPW happened. We had a lot of interested prefrosh however on Friday the events that we had were not very well attended. The workig hypothesis for that is that there was unfortunate timing clash with other events that were happening Friday that was not the case last year but on Sat and Sun we got a good number of prefrosh! So overall good turnout, good quantity of food proportionate to the number of people. Any thoughts? alwinfy: Python bee was pretty good this year! johnm2: I think Python Bee went pretty good. Is there a way to add descriptions and stuff that would catch pre-frosh's eyes better? I think that's what kept attendance down ex. poker club had steaks for everybody -- we can't do that but we do need something in the name or event description to grab people's attention. anhad: In my experience often having a clickbait title or description i.e. withholding some info helps get people to come. psvenk: In general, I agree. But we had similar descriptions this year and last year. But it is good to keep in mind. It is somewhat my fault due to last minute planning. We will be more intentional with the descriptions next year rgabriel: I think it is a gap in the timeline from when we submitted the descriptions we didn't know how the events were going to be. monicav: I do think naming the food ahead of time sounds good. But did someone have to go in person beforehand to see if the vegetarian options were good? psvenk: We didn't have to go in person. We just needed to check if there were vegetarian. There were. It was mostly about vegan options that we needed to make sure, and there also were. psvenk: We would like to make some keyholder nominations. alwinfy: I'd like to nominate tarang and johnm2 for keyholdership. psvenk: Seconded. tarang: I accept. johnm2: I accept. turino14: I would like to nominate monicav for keyholdership. monicav: Yay! nmorgan and almonds, simultaneously: Seconded. monicav: I accept. psvenk: Timing of election will most likely be May 5th. Let us know if that doesn't work for you. psvenk: I would like to make a $390 allocation for CPW's Salonikis. Please pass it, otherwise I will embezzle money and there will be no more snacks. [motion to allocate $390 for Salonikis passes 9-0-1] ilyag: Motion to allocate $14 for dish soap and dish sponge. I got this one because it is hypoallergenic and fragrance free, so it is more than regular dish soap. [motion to allocate $14 for dish soap and dish sponge passes by white ballot] Project Reports: johnm2: SIPB Branding continues. Your propaganda ministers have plans for the rest of the year. One of them is OpenGrades pub by the end of the year as people finish up classes. We will also work on onboarding of new SIPB members, and the Confluence documentation, and updating it to have at least a minimum viable description of the projects, such as meeting times and brief summaries. tarang: Things are happening! Organizational stuff might be reshuffled. nmorgan: ARK continues. Working on finalizing tool calling for the open source models. turino14: HWOPS continues. The CPW tours went really well (about 30 prefrosh!). We are also thinking of getting new batteries for the UPS, so I will likely make an allocation next week, depending on how much budget we have left after CPW. almonds: This is on the order of how much? turino14: Each battery is around $600 and we need around 5 of them. We could buy them all at the same time, or if we want to be more conservative we can buy some now and some later. almonds: I've updated the Forgejo instance (forgejo.mit.edu). Also, there is a Forgejo instance hosted by SIPB if you didn't know. Y'all should use it instead of GitHub maybe. And maybe we should pub it. psvenk: Speaking of forgejo, there was a prefrosh who asked us why we're using GitHub and not something open-source, and I did say we have a Forgejo instance and said we can switch to that and that they can join SIPB and be the change they want to see in the world. alwinfy: This might be more administrivia, but at CPW we discovered we are out of functional batteries in the monolith. Are we looking to replace those? almonds: We have a ton of batteries in there. Are they all dead? nmorgan: I thought we had just allocated for them. [Let's test them.] Do we have a battery tester? anhad: These say March 2036 so they definitely should work. scj643: Then we probably just found a bad batch. monicav: FPGAs continues! We got into the SOLE office, but once there, Inna (very kindly!), checked everywhere and couldn't find the breakout board, so we're waiting on a replacement from Amazon now. scj643: This isn't the first time that happened. dtemkin: Hydrant continues. psvenk: Oh, does it? dtemkin: [vigorous nodding] Classes come out in three days so get hyped! We have a solid streak of 1 of getting classes updated the day that they come out. psvenk: I have a pset due that day :( Other: psvenk: Drop date is sooner than you think. It is the last date you can drop a class. ilyag: Also the date they are dropping the piano. almonds: Specifcally it's tomorrow. tarang: Things on the whiteboard are proving unerasable--fyi. johnm2: Yeah I had to use rubbing alcohol. alwinfy: Things in the whiteboard kept unerasing so we bought a cleaner. psvenk: I'm not sure if it is dry-erase? tarang: Dry erase definitely works on windows though. psvenk: I know at my elementary school they things like this and they only used wet erasers. Then again that was back when I did not have the functional capacity of an adult. Please don't make comments on whether or not I have those capacities now. scj643: Well, you're SIPB chair so you have proven yourself. dtemkin, tarang, etc: [sounds of doubt] Other Other: psvenk: Anyways, CPW is sooner than you think alwinfy: YOU CAN'T SAY THAT!!! OUR HORIZON IS 6 MONTHS dtemkin: Finals are sooner than you think. [other "sooner than you think"s] scj643: People at SwapFest should not sell their laptops to people who will probably sell them in bulk. I saw 1500 ThinkPads to a single person. nmorgan: Pollen really sucks. almonds: Steer Roast is sooner than you think! turino14: OpenAI is trying to buy Windsurf for $3B. The meeting was adjourned at 20:01. Minutes taken by tarang, almonds, alwinfy and rgabriel and submitted by rgabriel.