Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2018-10-22 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by alvareza. In attendance were Student keyholders: emmabat, alvareza, rsthomp, mtheng | nchinda2 Associate keyholders: dzaefn, kenta, merolish Members: wqian94, chrisxu, alokp, joshuaa, cvorbach, ivanaf Guests: kbejgo Administrivia: ivanaf: For IAP I'm going to be organizing a 6.006 lecture, Anne Hunter already approved. It's going to be like 6.006 but over IAP, using Python. wqian94: Sorry, I didn't catch that last word. Could you say it again? wqian94: Are you doing the whole month or just a few weeks? ivanaf: Just two or three weeks. wqian94: Yeah cos I was saying that if it's more than a few weeks he should talk to Anne Hunter [...] wqian94: Groups keeps crashing things, RT [?] has slight issues, are we responsible for any of this? Because if we are, I feel bad. [...] alvareza: I don't think either are of those are us. alvareza: Cel had sent out an email saying that there are some tables in the machine room, we have five or so tables that aren't doing anything, and hasn't been doing anything for the past few years, and she wants to put it on reuse, so if anyone objects [...] If you have any objections, please write a response to that email, or you can voice them now I guess. wqian94: Can we claim it now? Because reuse is kind of a dog-eat-dog world... alvareza: Cel asked me to bring this up during the meeting, but didn't say anything about [...] [you can ask Cel directly, I'm sure she won't mind]. alvareza: I guess if you want a free table, that's a perk of being in SIPB! So let me know if you have any feelings about the tables, but not about the chairs. alvareza: The EC is about to have a meeting soon, we're going to discuss the amendment and some of the comments, and on top of that we are going to approve the policy for cabinets [...] emmabat: I thought we decided the last EC meeting that it wasn't something that needed to be approved [...] alvareza: In that case, I'll have to let Lef know that... [discussion about the officiality of cabinet policies] alvareza: Speaking about committees, we recently had a member of the SIPB committee become part of a new committee to advise IS&T on infrastructure projects, [Michael] thank you for standing up to this, [...] If you have any comments about how IS&T [works on their infrastructure], please direct them to Michael. ... It's good to see that we're doing what we can to represent student interests in computing. kenta: Just to add on a comment, I served on a vaguely similar committee when I was a student, it was fun. [committee on high performance computing], we talked a lot about air conditioning, it was fun. alvareza: Speaking of committees, the ASA general body meeting is this week, which means that I'm going to a meeting that involves the rest of the ASA, if you would like to go to this meeting on behalf of SIPB and take my place, that would be great, I mean it would be great to have more people involved in committee work in SIPB, if [...] let me know and I can appoint you as our general body representative to the ASA, I think in the past, Pravina has actually done this, and [...] if you want to talk to other student organizations, and voice the concerns of SIPB to other organizations [...] so for example if you have feelings about Engage, this is a good place to talk about that, "hey I'm from SIPB and I have feelings about Engage". Anyway if you have these feelings and you would like to represent other people's feelings, let me know and [...] we definitely need to go to this, because otherwise we'd get fined. kenta: For reference, it's from 5pm to 6.15pm in 26-100. In the past they have had free food, if that is an incentive. alvareza: Yes, they have free food, and they have a lot of it. Most of the time it's pizza. Project Reports: wqian94: IAP classes are sooner than you think. And IAP too. joshuaa: We're only halfway done with this semester. alvareza: But it is sooner than you think. emmabat: There was a meeting by the ad-hoc committee about Stellar, there wasn't much [...], it was mostly Adam Hartz talking about catsuit, they specifically asked Adam Hartz [...] If you have any opinions about Stellar, if there are any [...] that you would like to replace Stellar, if you have any that you would like not to replace Stellar, let me know. [mentioning of canvas] emmabat: I will say that as a representative that on the student side it is not meaningfully better than Stellar. kenta: The posting form for IAP events is already online. Obviously if you're doing a SIPB event, coordinate with SIPB, Anne Hunter whatnot. But if you're doing [...] for other groups, you can [...] now! Other: kenta: This might be a bit ambitious, I was munging arount the office looking for ethernet jacks, and I came across a drtawer of master combination locks that seems to have lost their combinations. After this meeting I will show how to decode combination locks, I think I can do it? I've done it like once in my life. [...] emmabat: Or we can throw them all away. ...Everyone should know that these are incredibly insecure, I think this should be common knowledge. [...] use something else if you don't want it to get cracked. wqian94: How many of you guys know about moss? Moss measures software similarities, it's a wonderful software from Stanford that looks for code plagiarism. And this is how courses like 6.031 find out that you're not cheating. I've [...] over the past accidentally killed Moss servers by inundating it with too many requests, [...] and found that instead of C++ files you gave it Javascript you crash the server, also I accidentally changed the schema [...] luckily it was reversible. [... Harvard's honor code, because it's Harvard, it's all bureaucracy] kenta: As a point of information, C++ parsers are the largest, most arcane things in existence. It's not surprising that if you feed something that's not C++ to a C++ parser, it's not surprising that something breaks. wqian94: [...] someone tried uploading Valgrind. They compiled their source code with Valgrind, and uploaded the whole thing to the grading server, and caused it to run out of disk space. Other Other: emmabat: It's cold. Winter is sooner than you think it already started. What are these lies about winter not starting until December 21st. wqian94: I went to Seattle this weekend, and my friend was like wow, you came just when the weather became really nice. [...] of course as soon as he said this, the weather turned [shit]. kenta: The jackpot has a prize that is [...] so if you see websites that [...] they overflow [...] wqian94: Relatedly, one of my high school [...] started a fund to buy lottery tickets. emmabat: I heard that the odds of winning the lottery is lower than the chance of getting struck by lightning. dzaefn: That is true by a large margin. wqian94: In fact I heard that more people bought lottery tickets than are allowed to vote. emmabat: [...] It's not too late to [vote]... wqian94: In other news, at Harvard, the engineering school has a dean. In case you didn't notice, I go to Harvard now. [...] He wanted an AMA, and the only time he could do this was Halloween evening. We were trying to plan for this, and we asked him what kind of costume he would like to dress up as, and he said "an MIT grad student". The meeting was adjourned at 19:54. Minutes taken and submitted by mtheng.