Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2023-10-23


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

In attendance were

        Student keyholders: alwinfy, colclark, huydai, psvenk

        Associate keyholders: almonds, jeffery, toomas

        Members: aabreu, arjunjb, figgis, guoj1112, jmvidal, ryang2, turino14, vish2004

        Guests: mhjkim, alianisl, yeabkal, yubzak

Administrivia:

        alwinfy: I spent $110 on snacks. Last week, I didn't make an allocation, so I would like to do that now.
        
        colclark: Want to allocate for next week?
        
        alwinfy: No; motion to allocate $110.
        
        colclark: Seconded; motion to white ballot?
        
        psvenk: Seconded
        
        [motion passes by white ballot]
        
        [introductions of new people]
        
        alwinfy: [overview of SIPB]
        
        colclark: November 24 is possibly the greatest day of the year because it's Black Friday. What if we do a SIPB excursion plus free food dinner on Black Friday?
        
        psvenk: Seconded.
        
        alwinfy: I was talking to rgabriel, and we decided that we would try to browbeat colclark into paying for another SIPB dinner.
        
        colclark: Does anyone want to do a SIPB dinner before then?
        
        alwinfy: [context about SIPB dinners]
        
        colclark: Any suggestions for restaurants?
        
        huydai: Traditionally we would do Chinese food, but we had a bunch over the summer and could do something else.
        
        colclark: How about we tentatively say the dinner is on 2023-11-03? People should think about places they want to eat and we can discuss at the next meeting.
        
Project Reports:

        colclark: AFS continues; AFS is the networked filesystem structure on Athena. If you've ever used an Athena dialup or Scripts, you've probably used AFS.
        
        psvenk: Hydrant continues. Meetings on Sundays at 18:00.
        
        alwinfy: We have some outstanding good first issues if you want to dip your toes in.
        
        ryang2: Hyades continues. We have got your build system back online. We meet on Mondays at 18:00. Hyades is "AWS at home"; we're aiming to provide computing services to MIT.
        
        huydai: DormDigest continues. We have been working on an RSVP feature, and we reached out to the OIDC people.
        
        alwinfy: DormDigest is a calendar that aggregates dormspam.
        
        almonds: LLMs continues. We meet Fridays at 16:00. We didn't do much last week because I'm hosed and sick.
        
        jmvidal: The goal is to make LLMs available to the larger MIT community without having to upload to a general cloud. In the future, this could evolve into something more MIT-specific, but at the moment we're still getting things set up on BOSS-BABY.
        
        huydai: Yes, we have a 4090 in that machine.
        
        alwinfy: There are examples of LLM outputs on the fridge.
        
        jmvidal: HWOPS continues. Last week we got the DormDigest server hooked up to the switch, but we can't access it yet because we haven't allocated a hostname yet. We'll get that sorted soon.
        
        alwinfy: The SSDs have indeed come in.
        
        colclark: I was going to ask if they are free and I can have them.
        
        jmvidal: No?
        
        colclark: What if I ask you as chair?
        
        jmvidal: Sure
        
        huydai: You're a previous chair; you can override him!
        
        jmvidal: Anyway, if someone wants a server set up inside the server room, you can talk to HWOPS. An example of something hosted in the server room is MIT Minecraft. We have meetings on Fridays at 17:30.
        
        alwinfy: If you're on the mailing list, you don't have to remember this information because you'll receive an email with the minutes.
        
        psvenk: That will be everyone at the end of this meeting.
        
Other:

        vish2004: There's an issue with Matrix where if you message someone about something that's not in a channel, it shows up in general. Has that been fixed?
        
        alwinfy: You should talk to rgabriel about that.
        
        huydai: We've talked about how the Zoom audio is not the best; we could add mics.
        
        alwinfy: petey talked about buying an Owl, one of those really fancy mics.
        
        huydai: We could allocate $500 for a 7-channel mixer and then $50 additionally per mic.
        
        colclark: Let's hold off on allocating until we have a total number.
        
        huydai: I could buy 15 podcast mics and have SIPB be a podcasting show.
        
        psvenk: We do have the table for it.
        
        huydai: SIPB could start a YouTube channel. We could have a Twitch stream every Monday at 19:30.
        
Other Other:

        colclark: My computer is now broken because it is missing its 4090. Motion to allocate $1900 so that I can play Genshin Impact at 120 fps again.
        
        alwinfy: Motion to black ballot.
        
        guoj1112: Halloween is sooner than you think.
        

The meeting was adjourned at 19:55.

        Minutes taken by psvenk, alwinfy, almonds and submitted by psvenk.