Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2023-05-29 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by colclark. In attendance were Student keyholders: amigdal, bds, colclark, huydai, psvenk, rgabriel, toomas Associate keyholders: almonds, asahteck, markchil Members: '() Guests: annliu22 Administrivia: [discussion about administrivia vs. other vs. other other] toomas: We named the gavel. psvenk: But the minutes for that meeting have not been posted. almonds: We need the minutes. Who recorded the minutes? wmoses? bds: Yes, it was wmoses. huydai: The main things were that we renamed the gavel as the "Fuzzball Whacker" and we allocated $300 for LEDs. toomas: SIPB rave! almonds: Well, this isn't the rave. toomas: The LEDs are part of the rave. asahteck: The SIPB rave is indeed happening. Will be shipped to 3-458. huydai: Any time we order stuff for the summer, it's best to route it to some direct place instead of the warehouse. asahteck: Can attest. When everything was virtual due to covid, we shipped everything to my house. I can offer my apartment (address TBD) if necessary. colclark: Who's going to be responsible for the cloud-connected CO2 detector? almonds: I see that as under doorpi, so I guess me. amigdal: Congratulations on your promotion. toomas: We will not increase your pay. amigdal: We will *double* your pay. bds: For any integer, we will multiply your pay by that integer. huydai: Also, for the CO2 meter, I was doing some research. Apparently it's easy to get a cloud-connected one but not easy to get a simple one that you can program. But I found another one, which I put on the sheet [for allocations], which seems to be more easily programmable. almonds: Sure; should we talk about that now? Also, I have another sensor (not CO2) that just straight-up gives data without need for an app that I used in a class I taught this Spring. amigdal: How much does a live air intake covid sensor cost? toomas: The moment covid is detected in the office, it automatically goes into lockdown. amigdal: The door immediately closes. amigdal: We need a spinny red light. "Do not enter room if alarm is flashing." toomas: "Do not exit room if alarm is flashing." huydai: We can have it activate power to a certain power outlet when the sensor input exceeds a certain threshold, so that a fan starts going off if the sensor is activated. huydai: The microphone arrived. It's kind of cool because the top looks kind of like a fuzzball. colclark: Is there a canonical fuzzball size? almonds: No, and I don't want there to be. bds: Gain or lose mass based on the state of the environment. rgabriel: What if we make fuzzball canonically able to grow and shrink as they please? huydai: annliu22 put a proposed design on Mattermost. Any thoughts? colclark: I wanted to make the letters "SIPB" bigger. almonds: Could we have sipb.mit.edu above/below? bds: I think that would be more useful than the actual lettering. psvenk: It would be nice if it were kind of discreet but not hard to read if you have looked at the poster for more than a few seconds. almonds: Also, at the dinner, we talked about having regular dinners over the summer. huydai: How many people would be here over the summer? [at least 7 people in meeting raise their hands] colclark: Sure, but it's up to y'all to organize it because I won't be back for a bit. huydai: Would you be back the third week of June? colclark: I'll be back June 12th Project Reports: colclark: Hydrant continues. Registrar's office ghosted me for 4 days. I'll give them a couple more days. almonds: dormdigest is making progress. I think we should move towards sorting bugs on the frontend. I'm finishing up some bugs on the backend as well; e.g., parsing. Not all emails work with my ~flawless~ system, as I have discovered, so I'm working on it. amigdal: People should write better emails. huydai: Sometimes the senior sales mess us up a lot. psvenk: A lot of people on MIT Confessions agree with anti-senior sale sentiment. amigdal: It should all just be free! almonds: That would certainly get rid of everything. colclark: Any other project reports? almonds: Speaking of dormdigest, I see how LLMs can help our dormdigest project. We can even call it a subproject of dormdigest. psvenk: Everything is getting subsumed under everything. amigdal: We need a dependency graph of projects. And it needs to be cyclic. rgabriel: Bootstrapping. amigdal: The "B" in SIPB stands for "bootstrap". almonds: As promised last meeting, I got some numbers about different hardware choices -- with RTX 4090, we can expect 30 tokens/s, so about 20 seconds or so for a Python file to put it in perspective huydai: When we met with IS&T, they said that we should talk to the ORCD [Office for Research Computing and Data] team about this. They seem to be in charge of all of MIT's research computing needs, and they should be able to give us help with configuring things. Anyway, for this, we should be able to buy an RTX 4090, upgrade the RAM and PSU on our existing build, and make it work. almonds: Do we have a link that we can open and vote on? huydai: I just added it to the spending sheet. colclark: To be clear, this uses hardware currently in the office, right? So we can't start until next semester. almonds: This is true. colclark: But we do have the money. almonds: Do we have enough to build a new PC? huydai: Do we have time to work on this over the summer? almonds: I think so; I should certainly have more time over the summer than in the fall. almonds: Also, is it fine to order from Newegg and not Amazon? bds: It just gets a little more complicated because you'll need to submit an RFP and use that, and you need Newegg to accept MIT's tax-exempt certificate. amigdal: You can submit a tax-exemption application to Newegg. How long it takes is apparently 2 business days (according to Newegg). asahteck: There is a mild concern recently with regard to buying computer parts from Amazon; people sometimes get fake parts or misdeliveries. But we are MIT and have our own Amazon distribution center, so this shouldn't be as much of an issue. If needed, I can help front money with my adult credit score. rgabriel: What about Micro Center? colclark: Also, we could get a prebuilt instead. psvenk: That might be hard given that this graphics card is already nearly $1800, so a prebuilt with that sort of graphics card might be hard / expensive to get. amigdal: We might also want to get a rack-mounted machine instead of a desktop, depending on how you want to use it and where you want it to be. kenta: Another option is to rent a GPU from AWS or something in the meantime. rgabriel: And we have the credits for it. colclark: I am also building a desktop right now which should be powerful enough to house this temporarily. And it has a new power supply, so don't worry about the sketch Stata dumpster power supply. almonds: From Newegg, though, not Amazon? colclark: And is anyone willing to front this? asahteck, could you do it? asahteck: Sure [discussion about GPU cost and variants] colclark: Motion to allocate $1900 for a graphics card. rgabriel: Seconded [passes with 8 in favor, 0 opposed] almonds: [comparing different models] colclark: Sounds good. I'll check if my computer will work, and asahteck will deal with ordering. colclark: Motion to allocate $440 to buy almonds the stuff they want rgabriel: Seconded [passes unanimously] colclark: Where are we shipping this? asahteck's office? asahteck: Yes, I have an office over the summer with the 2.00B instructor; I'll let you know after the meeting. rgabriel: XVM may continue. I was reading about Xen and I was amused and disturbed by the fact that they use a FUSE filesystem to store config. So, I may work on XVM depending on time/energy. Other: '() Other Other: toomas: This will probably be my last in-person SIPB meeting. rgabriel: Where are you going? toomas: Taiwan over the summer and Wisconsin after. toomas: I should diminish and go to the west. asahteck: The Midwest. How mid is it? toomas: How mid? I think it's all right. amigdal: It can get cold in Wisconsin. toomas: I don't know; the weather here was fine for me. amigdal: It gets colder. bds: Boston has the benefit of being near a large body of water. toomas: I guess there are lakes in Wisconsin, but that makes sense. Anyway, it'll be fine; I'm from up north. psvenk: End of the semester is sooner than you think. The meeting was adjourned at 20:10. Minutes taken by psvenk, almonds and submitted by psvenk.