Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2020-03-02


The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by wmoses.

In attendance were

        Student keyholders: mrittenb, bds, cela, npfoss, wmoses | gshay, kjchen, emmabat, alvareza, jnoguera, mtheng, yczeng

        Associate keyholders: asuhl, quentin, kenta, wqian94

        Members: mau, mitimmy, joshuaa, kyeb, vchuravy, dbopp | maximo, rdedhia, ivanaf

        Guests: Tate

Administrivia:

        wmoses: Wash your hands. Coronavirus cancelled my conference. We allocated $200 for Purell and tissues. Also, there will be an EC meeting Friday from 4-6. All are welcome to join. Emma and I talked to the ITGC about SIPB-WISP. We are the first students to talk to them and they seemed receptive.
        
        dbopp: CPW events were submitted. The number of volunteers for everything but the server room tours seems good, let me know if you want to help.
        
        wmoses: If you want to help Darius organize SIPBW, talk to me and Darius after the meeting.
        
        dbopp: We have one event Thursday and events from 3-night on Saturday and Sunday.
        
Project Reports:

       npfoss: CourseRoad - we save whether semesters are open are closed and have better form inputs. They are not on the live site yet, but are coming soon to courseroad.mit.edu near you.
       
       emmabat: Have you doubled the space between you and courseroad?
       
       cela: Hyades continues. Most stuff builds. 
       
       emmabat: This is your horrifying Russian doll build system?
       
       cela: I found more bugs in Basil.
       
       quentin: How many have been fixed upstream?
       
       cela: None.
       
       kenta: I've been hacking on LXC, it works on Debian Buster. Come ask me if you have questions.
       
       dbopp: I'm in a class working on LXC right now.
       
       kenta: I work for BlueSpec, and they've open sourced their compiler. I will put it in an Athena locker.

Other:

        cela: From the CDC: Wash your hands before, during, and after preparing and eating food, treating someone who is sick, blowing your nose, touching an animal, handing pet food, open wounds, touching garbage. Wet your hands with clean running water, apply soap, lather hands on back, between finger, scrub hands for at least 20 seconds (Happy birthday twice), rinse your hands well, dry hands with a clean towel. If you don't have access to soap and water, use hand sanitizer, although it's less effective.
        
        emmabat: Your hands should feel actively wet with hand sanitizer.
        
        cela: It needs to get everywhere. You are washing your hands, not clapping.
        
        wmoses: Back to administrivia. We haven't had a food mob in a while -
        
        npfoss: No one responded to my message, so I ate dinner before the meeting!
        
        wmoses: I am proposing one for next week. I want to allocate $200 for food.
        
        emmabat: We got some new members by covering all the food.
        
        wmoses: New members and current student members will be covered.
        
        emmabat: Seconded.
        
        wmoses: Motion to whiteballot.
        
        npfoss: Seconded.
        
        wmoses: Motion passes.
        
        wmoses: I think we should have a project fair. If you like or maintain a project, talk to me after the meeting.
        
        cela: The coronavirus may be coming to a country near you. Stock up on more food than usual - 1 to 3 weeks. We do not expect a loss of food infrastructure, but if there is community wide isolation you can go out less. We can mitigate how quickly people all get sick. This is especially important for medical infrastructure, because if too many people are infected at once we might not have the capacity to treat them all.

npfoss: Don’t stock up on masks because most don’t work and the ones that work are needed by people treating patients. 

cela: Unless you are a health care provider or sick, you don’t need a mask and should not buy one because there is a shortage. 

npfoss: Let’s order lots of Soylent! 

wqian94: The coronavirus can transmit over WiFi. The stock markets are bad, so the President said something, and the stock market dropped more. 

wmoses: We are now in Other Other. 

Other Other:

emmabat: Some people in my lab got stuck in Denver. 

alvareza: Super Tuesday is sooner than you think! Vote! 

npfoss: Don’t vote for Pete or Amy, they dropped out. 

quentin: I suggest Vermin Supreme.

kenta: I used up the last black toner for the printer. The boxes are empty. We should get more. 

[discussion of where to get more toner]

cela: I mentioned the airdrop thing last week. I tried again but the transaction has not completed, the blockchain appears to be slow.

wmoses: I did it and it was fast.

vchuravy: If you want to work on climate science and want a job, talk to me. My project is hiring software engineers.

kenta: Do you have supercomputers?

vchuravy: Yes.

The meeting was adjourned at 19:55.

        Minutes taken and submitted by mrittenb.