Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2025-07-14


The meeting was called to order at 19:35 by psvenk.

In attendance were

        Student keyholders: psvenk, innaavo, colclark, rgabriel

        Associate keyholders: kenta, almonds

        Members: Kshitij, guoj1112

        Guests: '()

Administrivia:

        psvenk: Our budget was confirmed to be increased - it is 19k now, permanently, instead of 11k. Also, I made the Namecheap purchase (will reimburse soon).
        
Project Reports:

        almonds: LLMs continues. I added models and sorted them alphabetically. There are some issues with people trying to sign in for the first time; not sure why it's happening but will investigate.
        
        colclark: Hyades is still paused; we're going to get back at it again in the fall, trust.
        
        guoj1112: Hydrant continues. I'm working on adding automated tests to the frontend. I'm starting with the lib directory, and next will probably be the UI components.
        
        guoj1112: Ark continues. I've started trying to work on some UI mockups, so that we won't have an ugly UI anymore. The current UI works but it's kind of bad.
        
        psvenk: For Hydrant, I saw that you mentioned a cyclic dependency graph -- what did you mean?
        
        guoj1112: lib/state.ts depends on lib/utils.tsx and vice versa. The reason why TypeScript isn't complaining about it is that TS allows you to do file-level circular dependencies as long as the actual variables are not defined in terms of each other, but I think this sort of file-level circular dependency will lead to headaches anyway, so that's a natural thing to start to work on if we want to do refactoring. Anyway, that's something for another time.
        
Other:

        kenta [in chat]: I successfully installed Debian on my computer using debootstrap not the Debian Installer.
        
        colclark: Do we have any early orientation events? Sometimes we have micro-lecture events. In my year, we did evening lectures one or two times. 
        
        psvenk: Question is what is the nature of these events?
        
        colclark: It would be something that would be beneficial to have. One was using Athena, another was how to use a terminal. And a Git one. 
        
        psvenk: We might get better turnout in the beginning of the year for frosh who haven't taken a class at MIT yet. How do we get people to do those, though? People are doing summer things, and people might not be on campus and might not be on campus on time. 
        
        colclark: Move-in is the 29th, so we could have a decent crowd for that Monday. 
        
        innaavo: How would we pub this? Most frosh will not be on dormspam yet. 
        
        colclark: We have email lists from CPW midway and the midway during REX. 
        
        colclark: OFY is doing First Year Exploration. It's made for majors, I think, but we can try to jump in on that too.
        
        psvenk: Could you forward the email to me?
        
        colclark: Sure, I'll send to sipb-ec
        
        psvenk: Great; thanks
        
        kenta [in chat]: If you cannot do mass publicity at the beginning of the year, it might make things less intimidating for the speaker/instructor.
        
        psvenk [in chat]: Oh, good point
        
        guoj1112: The MIT NANDA conference is happening today and tomorrow, and I attended it. It's about creating a network of AI agents that can talk to each other.
        
        Kshitij: What's their selling point?
        
        guoj1112: They're creating a platform for AI agents to talk to each other.
        
        psvenk: So it's a botnet... without a human controlling it... we could say it's in the sky, and call it... Skynet!
        
        Kshitij: I think some people are actually working on a Skynet.
        
        psvenk: Why am I not surprised...
        
Other Other:

        '()
        

The meeting was adjourned at 19:57.

        Minutes taken by innaavo, psvenk and submitted by psvenk.