Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2026-07-13 The meeting was called to order at 19:35 by hng. In attendance were Student keyholders: hng, xy, turino14, colclark, psvenk, dtemkin, smith141 Associate keyholders: asuhl, rgabriel, scj643 Members: dsisson, ilyag Guests: recant Administrivia: hng: xy, what did you change in the office? xy: The Nixathena machines are back on, and BOSS-BABY is also back online. But that should probably be in project reports. dtemkin: Are there any new allocations that need to be made, since it's a new fiscal year? turino14: Also keep in mind, we still have an allocation for the new office head, which we haven't bought yet. Project Reports: xy: hyades maybe continues. about a month ago i proposed something new with hyades and we are waiting to get a server for that. we also want to get a wildcard sub-subdomain for it similar to what we already have for scripts and xvm but this is a rather unusual request so we have to ask is&t. if that doesn't work out we also have sipb.cloud which we got a few years ago for this purpose. ilyag: ark continues dsisson: hwops is not doing much right now because people are away turino14: i am almost done setting up the virtual machine for rocket team which contacted us last week. we don't have space to give them a physical server but a vm seems to meet their needs dtemkin: Hydrant and CourseRoad continue eom turino14: There were also some thoughts about possibly reviving Minecraft, and expanding it as a pterodactyl.io management server possibly as VMs in Proxmox. I got a backup of the Minecraft MIT server. Other: psvenk: I like the new office! It feels more intimate. recant: I'm curious about what you guys are working on. hng: Who wants to give the long spiel? [various]: you do it hng: SIPB is MIT's historical computing club that has been around for many decades, starting with doing a lot of timesharing work and maintaining a lot of SIPB's fundamental infrastructure. Historically, www.mit.edu was run by SIPB, and we have continued to maintain a lot of MIT's fundamental infrastructure. As the times change and [redacted], we have moved to providing more high-level services while maintaining our infrastructure services. That includes the course planner that MIT students use to plan out their courses over four years. We have a list of projects on the board, which also includes providing free software alternatives to common proprietary services, such as PeerTube [for YouTube], Mastodon [for Twitter], and Lemmy [for Reddit]. We also have some people interested in exploring some generative AI stuff. In general, it's an interesting place to explore the facets of computing that members would like to explore, and we maintain a lot of the infrastructure that MIT has been relying on for a long time. We have good relations with cruft, such as these two guys over here [points at dtemkin and psvenk]... dtemkin: Oh wow... hng: ...we also worked on Debathena, which is a distributed computing system. rgabriel [in chat]: I haven't processed that dtemkin and psvenk are cruft recant: I'm not actually a student; I'm just doing research for the summer at the Ragon Institute. I completed my freshman year at Caltech. smith141: How did you find us? recant: You guys are famous! scj643: We have a Wikipedia page! [various]: :o asuhl: I'm cruft from 10 years ago. The office looks very different in terms of of furniture, but otherwise it seems pretty similar. smith141: How was it before? asuhl: There was a long table... [various]: Well, that's how it was just a couple of weeks ago, back in our day asuhl: There was also a gap for the couch here [points at the area in front of where the projects whiteboard is now] smith141: We do have some online renderings / models if you would like to peruse them. Other Other: scj643: Pokémon Pokopia is addictive asuhl: Another thing I find hilarious is hitting a computer [hng's thinkpad] with a gavel. That was not a thing back in my day. ilyag: what is this? ilyag: some sort of dampening device scj643: Nintendo Switch 2: get it before September if you're planning on getting it, since it gets $50 more expensive then. asuhl: If anyone has questions about cryptopgraphy, I'm a cryptographer and love rambling about cryptography. rgabriel [in chat]: does sipb want a nintendo switch 1? ilyag [in chat]: do you have one? rgabriel [in chat]: yes ilyag [in chat]: does it have games? rgabriel [in chat]: no hng: Do we have opinions on crufting this device for the office? smith141: If we do, I want to make sure that this is clearly "SIPB's" Nintendo Switch rather than some random person's Switch that they left in the office. Maybe we could have a frame or something. hng: I am very hesitant about having devices that connect to proprietary online services, especially for non-essential services that phone home all the time. xy: Joke suggestion, but we could install Nixathena on it. [heated discussion] hng: I am not opposed to having devices to experiment on, etc., but I think not connecting it to the Internet is a reasonable compromise. ilyag: We could put it in a Faraday cage smith141: I hear your concerns; I'm not as knowledgeable about the differences between proprietary and open-source software, but SIPB is also the people who are in it. hng: sipb has stood for a certain set of principles for a very long time... ilyag: We could also have some sort of time-sharing policy for this. psvenk: speaking of connecting things to the internet, i was recently setting up a windows 11 machine. apparently the only way to do it is to run a keyboard shortcut and to open the command prompt and run a specific binary to run it in a special override mode. then after rebooting the machine you can click "I don't have internet". but this has now been patched. you now have to remake the ISO. :,D scj643: or you can run your own active directory :D psvenk: :,D [more discussion of why setting up windows is unserious] The meeting was adjourned at 20:06. Minutes taken by psvenk, hng, dtemkin and submitted by psvenk.