Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2023-02-13 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by jmvidal. In attendance were         Student keyholders: amigdal, bds, cjq, jmvidal, huydai, toomas, xy         Associate keyholders: jeffery, kenta, markchil         Members: almonds, alwinfy, colclark, guoj1112, nx, psvenk, rgabriel, shreyach         Guests: spruce, vrong Administrivia:         jmvidal: Elections are happening next week, not for keyholdership positions, but for EC positions! Come next week to be elected for something. The positions that we are going to be electing is: Chair, Vice Chair, Secretary, Treasurer, and 5 Members at Large for a total of 9 positions on the EC.                 huydai: where do you see the description of the roles?                 cjq: constitution.                 huydai: http://www.mit.edu/afs.new/sipb/admin/text/constitution/constitution.pdf                 huydai: Lots of EC positions are graduating this semester, so this is a good opportunity to start thinking about EC positions Project Reports:         kenta: I plan to give a short 5-10 minute talk on Integer Factorization tonight. Stick around after the keyholdership election. I do wish SIPB has an option to give a more informal talk on a technical topic, which is what I'm trying to emulate tonight.                 almonds: dormspam has updates. we're working on it! we're starting regular meetings on thursdays 5pm, it's in the calendar. we've made forks of the original github repository since we don't have access to that, and we're trying to contact the original developers.                 huydai: we're going to be meeting with Kevin this week, which will be exciting + helpful for us to understand how the previous system owrked. we're also looking at writing our own backend if that's easier to work with.                 jmvidal: any other project reports?                 cjq: i want to give a report for hydrant. and by that i mean i want to force colclark to give a report for hydrant.                 colclark: Would you believe me if my microphone is not working? *pauses*. Okay, we got all an-all record attendance high of 5 people yesterday. We're going to have a better version of Hydrant in the near future.                 psvenk: we're working on the ownership of fireroad; hopefully we'll get access to the server, which would allow a bunch of things to get fixed. Other:         almonds: W20 closure continues                 toomas: Which project is "W20 Closure"?                 huydai: the secretary can do whatever they want in the minutes, so they can add fake things that people have said.                 toomas: if it's in the minutes it's true.                 guoj1112: ah yes, proof by authority.                 nx: some people are moving to walker, no? we had to move stuff from our basement room                 kenta *in chat*: more extensive than "usual". ;-) Other Other:         guoj1112: The superb owl happened. i don't know the details                 huydai: i liked the halftime show by Rihanna though, i thought that was pretty cool.                 colclark: for entirely-unrelated non-suspicious reasons, i now have an rfid reader.                 cjq: they have different permissions. i can't use my mobile ID to get into the math lounge, but i can use my physical ID                 rgabriel: there are some doors where the ios mobile id doesn't work but the android mobile id does.                 huydai: is this an ios device issue?                 rgabriel: i think the iphone readers use a slightly different technology. not every door is compatible.                 psvenk: it's compensation to android users for atlas crashing more often on android than ios.                 toomas: you don't really need atlas any more after the covid attestation went away Keyholdership Election: jmvidal: will the candidates please step to the front of the room, wherever you think that is. almonds: cool beans jmvidal: now that you're at the front of the room, say your name and what you've done for SIPB alwinfy: i'm alex, i've done several things for hydrant. i've set up the deploy mechanisms and set up the mirror when scripts was down. almonds: i'm almonds, or Maddie, or Madison. i feel like I haven't done much for SIPB, but i want to. i'm on the dormspam project; we're picking up pace now. in the past, i've answered emails that have come into SIPB. i'm always looking for ways to help out. (retcon: oh yeah, I also ran a cool IAP cluedump) psvenk: Hi I'm Pratyush, I've done a bunch of work for Fireroad, Courseroad, and Hydrant. rgarbriel: Hello, I'm Gabrieil, or rgabriel as my kerb says. I have worked on wide tim, which is the Discord verification bot for the 2027 server. I am currently working on Uplink and Matrix @ MIT with its integration into Canvas and Moira. shreyach: hello i'm shreya. i've spontaneously worked on things, hydrant, hwops, docs, discord bot stuff. colclark: hi i'm colin clark. i've been mainly messing with hydrant, trying to get it to a more sustainable state, and helping around as much as i can. cjq: that is all the candidates jmvidal: great! now that the candidates are done, please use the raise-hand feature if you'd like to ask the candidates a question. any questions? almonds: what color is the carpet? am i allowed to ask questions? jmvidal: i'm not sure. they would be unconventional. huydai: I think we can accept it, yeah cjq: Would the candidates like to answer in alphabetical answer of their kerberoi? almonds: that's me then alex. i think TV static red-ish, not like floorpi carpet but more like 41w-ish alwinfy: It's color of red after being trampled on for 30 years without deep cleaning, so brownish. colclark: have you ever like had brick thrown at you? then the combination of blood and red-ish color make that color... fun story shreyach: it's hopefully not wet? the colors are probably in superposition, it's what we observe when we observe it. almonds: yeah that's a good point psvenk: you skipped over me but that's fine. approximately the color of huydai's shirt. rgabriel: to be fair, i think the question didn't specify whether we wanted to answer the color of the sipb office's carpet, only *the* carpet, so i'll answer blue for the carpet in front of me. jmvidal: that's a fair point. huydai: if sipb suddenly acquired an aircraft carrier, what should we do with it? almonds: go on a camping trip. inside. alwinfy: sell it and buy more servers colclark: find us a new building that's not w20 attic. shreyach: i'd be down for a SIPB field trip, that would be fun. psvenk: i was going to say sell it to buy more servers rgabriel: sell it for unspecified purposes. huydai: i feel like we have a lot of capitalistic nominees this time cjq: Without looking at the ceiling, please identify as many objects in the ceiling as you can. huydai: to clarify, in the sipb office? cjq: yes, the sipb office; the ceiling of the sipb office almonds: i remember a couple but not many. i kind of want to name two vague objects instead of one big object. there are these rings right, that are used to hit the floppy disk to be rewritten, right? bds et al: yeah, write-protect rings alwinfy: there's a large plushie of nyancat. it's handmade and capable of holding the gavel. colclark: on the ceiling besides cj's receding hairline... oh the dollar cube bill that's pretty cool almonds: how many bills make up that cube? colclark: I want to say 2. almonds: i think it's 6? colclark: it's like 2 bills that create 6 faces? toomas: it's definitely more than 2. assuming 1 bill for each face how much money is the cube worth at face value? almonds: i think it's 12 since it's 2 dollar bills since it was made by someone who was fascinated by 2 dollar bills or something cjq: yeah i think is 12 dollars. let's keep naming objects psvenk: fuzzball plushie? cjq: ok. it's not *quite* a fuzzball plushie, but close enough. we could tell the story later rgabriel: lights! shreyach: not sure if it's on or off of the ceiling at this point but there's the shark-banana thing that I used to be obsessed with rgabriel: if we're counting things not in the ceilng, there's a rubik's cube and a phone that i don't know what version, probably 3 or below. i think it's running android 2 cjq: the question was *explicitly* about things on the ceiling almonds: there's also license plates with... i can't remember exactly. there's the motherboard for the laptop from the "everyone gets a laptop", i forget what's that called. almonds: yeah, one laptop per child. alwinfy: there was another printed circuit board, i forget what that was for. one of them was green, one of them was red. almonds: it was some events. 2018, i wanna say? jmvidal: i think that's a good amount of questions huydai: for the record bds did say one day he hopes someone will say the motion trackers on the ceiling bds: They are not unknown either, but they are motion trackers for the VR headset, but no one really uses them. cjq: wait i use the vr headset! i played beatsaber in the office back when it was still open bds: any more? cjq: jeffery has a question. jeffery: *in chat* For whenever we're done naming things on the ceiling: Taking turns for each letter of the alphabet, name a SIPB member whose kerb starts with that letter. almonds, alwinfy, shreyach, rgabriel, psvenk, colclark: almonds, bds, cjq, dannybd, eshan, (skip f), gshay, huydai, ixa, jmvidal, kenta, (skip l), mitimmy, (skip n), (skip o), petey, quentin, rgabriel, shreyach + stevengo, toomas, uriel20, (skip v), wmoses, xy, (skip y), (skip z) bds: for y there's yczeng, and z is zackpi guoj1112: so we skipped F, L, N, O, V, Y, Z alwinfy: i'll take it! jmvidal:i have a question: what does sipb stand for? alwinfy: [the correct answer] bds: important addendum is wrong answers only almonds: Suspcious Internet Petting Bunnies alwinfy: Students' Inability to Process Binary shreyach: Stay In Parallel Boards. oh no psvenk: Suspicious Infidels Porting Basic rgabriel: Savoring Imaginable Potato Bread jmvidal: was that all the acronyms? cjq: colclark has not responded. if they're even there, question mark colclark: *in chat* connection broke, just a sec cjq: that doesn't begin with s, i, p, b. that's not even close. kenta: that is a wrong answer. You did ask for wrong answers only. amigdal *in chat*: you did ask for wrong answers cjq: I'll accept it. jmvidal: ok and other questions bds: i'm not sure if this has been asked yet or not, but would you rather fight 100 raspberry-pi-sized servers or 1 server-sized raspberry pi? almonds: well if i was a burst pipe on one of the upper floors, i guess it would be easier to trash one server in a fight. have some fun with a sledgehammer toomas *in chat*: ah so that's why W20 flooded cjq *in chat*: raspberry pi gone rogue psvenk: i would take the server-sized raspberry pi alwinfy: 100 rasp-pi-sized servers. the computing power is proportional to the amount of loot you take home. shreyach: i'd also go for the 1 server-sized raspberry pi cause it's just 1 thing to deal with rgabriel: 100 raspberry-pi servers because they don't have arms colclark: raspberry-pi sized servers because they'd overheat and implode instantaneously cjq: We have a question from amigdal amigdal *in chat*: What are some things that SIPB does well? What are things that SIPB could be better at, and how would you suggest it go about it? almonds: well, considering i did not know sipb was a thing until my senior year, i'd say outreach. yet I know there are plenty of other people who'd heard about it freshman year and participated. huydai: you're right. it's something we've mentioned in the past, being more open about publicizing event + dormspamming. it's definitely something we can do better. alwinfy: i think sipb does a fantastic job of maintaining the services it already does run, like what it has worked on it tends to work pretty well, i haven't experienced any outages other than the big w20 one that is currently ongoing. something i think it could do better... i think enumerating ways people can jump in, i know there's that new project db that's going on right now, but personally i like tried to join sipb freshman year and then what ended up happening was that i couldn't find a single thing to focus on. i think that was partially my fault but i think we can be a bit better at identifying places where newbies can jump in almonds: is there an ec position that fits? cjq: supposedly it is the vice [chair's] job to do outreach, i think according to the constitution, at least bds: at one point there was talk of adding a "community coordinator" to ec but i think that proposal did not make it into the constitution for whatever reason psvenk: on the same page, i remember near the beginning of the year, trying to tell my friends about sipb; some of them came and then stopped coming. a big part is that, there's a perceived barrier to entry in terms of the time commitment. people see all these projects, lots of stuff going on. yeah there's lots of stuff going on, could use more help, but there's big activation energy for getting started. almonds: i feel like that's an mit club thing in general, but also valid shreyach: something sipb does pretty well is having a ton of cool projects. you can say "yo, we work on hydrant, and discord verification bots", and they say that's cool. but it's difficult for someone to join. it'd be really cool, something i can work on, documentation, onramping materials, here's cool technology you can go ahead and get started with, stuff like that. rgabriel: i think sipb is really good at maintaining the stable projects such as hydrant, with its former name that we shall not talk about. as for projects, i think there's a lot of projects like scripts, xvm, debathena, etherpad that are just like seem to be run by cruft. for example fedora 40 is going to come soon enough and scripts has fedora 20. the only thing for that would be to invite and encourage more people to the project to speak with people currently available to hand that off cjq: there's definitely been a lot of discussion about the older projects like scripts and stuff and how we could onboard new people, but i think again you have a bootstrapping problem where you don't have anyone who currently already knows about the project and is willing to rope new maintainers. it's definitely something we should be thinking about. rgabriel: i think xvm and scripts are good examples. i also think more opportunites for members to hang out, maybe hackathons or other events, just a thing that people can organize. the other thing is that, i'm really not sure what went wrong with this, there's fewer women and non-binary people and mostly men colclark: i guess i can't really say anything that new. the fact that nobody here really knows how to scripts that well is really concerning, and something that i'd really like to see is better onboarding and offboarding on projects after people leave almonds: ++ huydai: i just wanted to respond to everybody's thoughts. everything that you guys said, are things that we in ec have said are problems and want to improve on. and also some things you've said are also new ideas that I think are awesome. it's definitely hard. i'm excited now because we have so many people who are active on project, which is a great improvement since the start of the pandemic, but there are still issues in terms of: how do we make it easy for people to join projects and how to keep projects going after people graduate.  i did a training mentorship thing in sipb where you could pair with a mentor on a project but it didn't work out because a lot of the mentors are not very active and it kinda fell apart. I'd definitely encourage for us to take these ideas and help bring them to life. almonds: do you like the community coordinator role that's not explicitly part of the constitution? i feel like i'd be a good fit for that, except i'm not a student. cjq:  well any keyholder can show up to the sipb ec meetings. for the record, they happen the first monday of every month. the future of sipb, etc, etc, these are things that are better discussed in a sipb EC meeting toomas: *in chat* a good follow-up question to this discussion is "how would you make sure your projects continue getting maintenance after you graduate" psvenk: i can speak for Fireroad / CourseRoad / Hydrant. a lot of it is twofold. there's a lot of dependency on cruft and we need to get that sorted out but we can get that more rooted in sipb. the second is getting things on to modern infrastructure making it so that people don't need to install Python 2. three is of course outreach and improvement. all of these have to go hand in hand rgabriel: another thing would be to have good documentation about projects, how the code works, how it's structured, what services are being used, just so people inheriting our repositories know what to do with it. almonds: so you must be Good At Coding™ if you want to be part of the Coding Club at mit /lh rgabriel: not necessarily, because there are a lot of tasks related to design and office heads and outreach. i think i've seen it stated on the website in some places, and i don't think it's *obvious*, but i think that is the case huydai: i get almonds's point that we want to help people to be good software developers, but there's a lot you can do that doesn't involve code. shayna, the previous vice chair, they did a good job with publicity, sipb minecraft. shreyach: having more people to take on more projects… right now we have a lot of projects / dead projects than we have active members. outreach might be a thing that's constraining us. jmvidal: and was that everyone??? *awkward silence* jmvidal: cjq, you had a question cjq: i feel like there's a lot more standard questions, but we're already approaching an hour, so does the most interesting keyholder in the room want to ask a question? toomas: I volunteer. please find a book that you'll swear on. [etherpad crashes, chaos ensues] toomas: do you want to ask about books or should we just swear on the book? cjq: do you swear to answer the following question truthfully and to the best of your ability? all candidates: yes toomas: are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Students for a Democratic Society? all candidates: no bds: do you want to tell the history? toomas: i personally know the history, i can explain that if you want. essentially, SDS used to have a fun way of getting money for themselves by infiltrating other organizations and siphoning all their money. this is SIPB's response to that. cj: you can catch the longer story next time! almonds: or in previous minutes jmvidal: are there any other questions that are not *the interesting* question? huydai: what's inside the "save in case of fire" box? i think that's important alwinfy: i know there's a frisbee and a bunch of one-time pads. almonds: that also sounds correct to me, as far as i know bds: the interesting thing about that is that they're in "ONLY OPEN IN CASE OF CRYPTOGRAPHIC APOCALYPSE". do you know what this is referring to??? rgabriel: quantum, question mark? bds: i believe that at one time MIT's implementation of Kerberos used an unsecure algorithm that could be cracked with shockingly low amount of compute power, and so that's the event which is referred to on that folder. jmvidal: what do you do when the fbi appears at the office door? alwinfy: let them in almonds: do what they say cjq: these are both correct answers. we're looking for something else. what happens after that? alwinfy: get out? cjq: ok, but what happens after that? huydai: who do you talk to first? almonds: inform the rest of sipb? rgabriel: office of general counsel? cjq: does any other candidates want to guess? alwinfy: tell the secretary? cjq: getting closer shreyach: the chair? cjq: yes!!! bds: anyone want to go into the history of this question or shall i take this one? jmvidal: go for it! bds: shockingly, this one actually has a history! we did actually have men in black suits show up at the sipb office at one time. the reason for this is that there was once this person who had a bit of vendetta against all the major publishing companies and wanted to leak all the papers to everyone. so this person decided this was a place to download all the papers off of jstor and publish them freely. this person chose the sipb office to plug in their computer where they were doing that. hence why we got the men in black suits at our door. they didn't really ask us anything aside from "Can we come in? Can you leave?" so if such a situation happens, let them come in, leave, and then call the chair. jmvidal: what do you do if there's a leak in the SIPB office? particularly above the office near the ceiling guoj1112: as in like a water leak? or a metaphorical leak? jmvidal: a water leak almonds: get a bucket. contact CAC, maybe? and tell a chair. jmvidal: think that sounds right kenta: this particular one i feel like i get to speak up since i'm one person removed from the actual event. the pipe that burst was chilled water, so this was the air conditioning system, pumping hundreds of gallons of water per minute. so this was a big pipe that decided to dump itself into the SIPB office. so to a certain extent get out and get out quickly because there's enough electricity in the power strips and stuff. if you want to be nice there's a circuit breaker panel behind the door that you can cut power to the office quickly jmvidal: would the most interesting kneyholder now would like to ask the question? toomas: i know the question now! why do you want to join sipb? almonds: community, helping out, friends and open the door when it's locked, because before I would just be sad outside. oh yeah, and actually being allowed to submit minutes now! alwinfy: i thought we already joined sipb as members? cjq: why do you want to be a keyholder? colclark: pull up at 4am for the free snacks. alwinfy: a lust for power, and contents of the sipb fridge huydai: as somebody who bought some snacks for the sipb office i'm really happy that snacks are the pulling force rgabriel: opening the office, having it as a space to work, so i can let people work in the office. shreyach: sipb in general has cool projects. also unlocking the door when it's locked and not sadly leave. psvenk: i want to continue being involved, having access to the office is nice, and being able to process information at the board. rgabriel: to be fair, you can be involved not necessarily as a keyholder. you can always do things for the mit community, unless there's some regulation i am missing. *aside* toomas *in chat*: the five fundamental forces of nature: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces, and free food huydai: yeah so the keyholdership distinction... so historically being keyholdered meant being a member, so you weren't a member if you weren't keyholder. but we've since changed that term. now it's a recognition for the work you've done there's some cool perks with being keyholders cjq: basically means we trust you enough to give you the key to the office. it's an extremely big power! what if one of you goes into the office and turns them off? very dangerous!! jmvidal: or takes the vr headset? cjq: oh my god, that is expensive. motion to get to breakout room toomas: when i was keyholdered it was non-keyholders jmvidal: let's just move to a new room cjq: true huydai: this is the part where we vote jmvidal: if there are no more questions, which i don't think there are, we will be voting! huydai: and we do have quorum! cjq: and we do have 7 student keyholders. and some more non-student keyholders. wow what a big number huydai: just to set up the breakout room, and i think this is the first time i've seen so many people collaborate on the minutes together. when i was the only one typing i was like "slow down" jmvidal: see you in an indeterminate amount of time Voting results:        almonds: 7 yes, 1 abstain, 0 no        alwinfy: 7 yes, 1 abstain, 0 no        colclark: 8 yes, 0 abstain, 0 no        psvenk: 8 yes, 0 abstain, 0 no        shreyach: 7 yes, 1 abstain, 0 no        rgabriel: 7 yes, 1 abstain, 0 no huydai: yes there can only be 1 keyholder tonight jmvidal: congratulations on all the nominees, see the secretary after the meeting. The meeting was adjourned at 20:59.         Minutes taken by cjq, almonds, huydai, guoj1112, jeffery and submitted by cjq.