### N.B. These minutes are DRAFT until this note is removed. ### ### The minutes on Etherpad are provided for your convenience and are ### NOT official. The official copy resides in /afs/sipb/admin/minutes. ### Contributions are welcome! Please denote your username by ### clicking on the user icon in the top right corner. Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2024-06-10 The meeting was called to order at 19:33 by rgabriel. In attendance were Student keyholders: aabreu, amigdal, colclark, rgabriel, psvenk Associate keyholders: almonds, jeffery, scj643 Members: andiliu, dtemkin, guoj1112 Guests: '() Administrivia: rgabriel: Welcome to the SIPB meeting! rgabriel: We have $1.5K remaining — that's the official number. We have a few ideas on how to spend it: maybe merch, a dinner, or servers. If you have any other allocations you'd like to make, feel free. almonds: The AMD GPU, RX 7900 XTX, which has 24 GB, is ~$1000 on Amazon and I think it would be a good idea for not only the LLMs project but also just to have in BOSS-BABY as a gaming setup, since it was nice to have the 4090 in there for games. scj643: I second that. almonds: I also want to say that in my experience at home with that GPU, it doesn't load the models very quickly, although that may be because my setup is limited by RAM. I can't confirm that until I upgrade my setup from 8 GB to 16 GB tonight. I'll report back. andiliu: I also second almonds for buying AMD GPU. almonds: Does anyone have ideas for merch designs? scj643: Grumpy fuzzball? That's the only thing I can think of. almonds: I think it would be nice to have a keychain fuzzball. Anyway, I think we should spend our budget more on computing technology rather than dinners and merch. scj643: I agree, upgrading BOSS-BABY will have more lasting impact than buying merch would. psvenk: I agree. rgabriel: Something that is good to note is that merch can be seen as an investment for recruiting. almonds: Looks like our main constraint is the lack of design ideas. rgabriel: We could just punt this to the next fiscal year [post-June 30]. psvenk: I have a proposal for dinner. Let's have a SIPB dinner except it's just me. I'm in New York. rgabriel: Or we could have a remote dinner, where some people are in the SIPB Office and some are somewhere random in New York! psvenk: Sure, we have a SIPB dinner for all the SIPB members who are able to meet up in New York. almonds: I'd travel to New York if at least two other people are there. andiliu: I'm in New York but I think BOSS-BABY is a better idea. jeffery [in chat]: I would be there! colclark: i would be down for this if everyone else in sipb was psvenk: In all seriousness, I agree that BOSS-BABY is the better investment here. jeffery [in chat]: there's also a student discount for amtrak :P but i also agree with prioritizing the gpu scj643: We should also consider investing in peripherals for BOSS-BABY. scj643: Motion to allocate $40 for a Logitech G502 Hero psvenk: Seconded psvenk: Motion to white ballot. scj643: Seconded [not unanimous] psvenk: Let's discuss. [discussion] colclark: Motion to allocate $160 for a Razer Hyper 3. Can I get a second? scj643: No. And if you want a mouse with ten-key side buttons, get the Logitech G600, which can be had for ~$40. almonds: I think you're just filibustering. colclark: Yeah. [passes 3-1-6] almonds: The GPU is actually $911 on Amazon. Proposal for it? scj643: Seconded [passes 8-0-2] almonds: That leaves ~$500 left. I don't have any ideas for merch, aside from the keychain. psvenk: I don't know how we would go about procuring a keychain, given that the design would need to be given as a 3D model of some sort if there is some way of doing it through Custom Ink or the like. colclark: We could spend it on SIPB55. Perhaps $500 could be the difference between having Richard Stallman, or having "we have Richard Stallman at home". almonds: If we don't have ideas for merch designs or for dinner, I also think having new hard drives for the SIPB mirrors project would be good. [discussion] almonds: How does two 16 TB drives for $338 sound? amigdal: Seconded [passes 6-0-4] Project Reports: scj643: Vault is going to continue when I'm not feeling like complete garbage. andiliu: DormDigest/DormSoup continues. We have pointed dormsoup.mit.edu from AWS to dormdigest.mit.edu. And we're working on getting Shibboleth back up. almonds: LLMs continues. I'm meeting with IS&T on Tuesday at 10:00 to discuss the project. Reach out to me if you have an interest in the project and would like to participate in the meeting. I've updated the llms-dev-1.mit.edu site to use Mixtral instead of Llama 3 since it gives us better performance, and I updated the page to have more information about the model. rgabriel: Matrix continues and Element is updated to the latest version. Other: almonds: The Etherpad site [etherpad.mit.edu] breaks sometimes; I think it did this a couple of meetings ago, when it said "service unavailable" all of a sudden. scj643: The Okta migration is sooner than you think. almonds: June 17. scj643: Oh, that's next week [said in classic "sooner than you think" fashion]. almonds: The Coolify project (it's like a self-hosted Heroku) sounds kinda..... cool. rgabriel: I think it would be cool to host as a SIPB service, because when students get out of weblab, they don't really know where to host their sites beside sites like Heroku. We could also host MongoDB on the server we got for it. [quietly, the remnants of Hyades whimper in the background] almonds: In the Fall, I would be interested in coordinating such a project more formally, though for now I'm focusing on LLMs. That should be in time for weblab. rgabriel: We could also host some cluedumps for weblab. amigdal: I want there to be machine room tours again. It used to be near the start of the fall semester, and involved a visit to an IS&T machine room in W91, and then having Jeff Schiller tell stories. I recently encountered Jeff, and he said he would be open to do it again. I may attempt to take point on this closer to the start of the semester. Other Other: scj643: Apple is pushing full forward on generative AI. [discussion] almonds: I got RAM in the mail today, and it was funny to think that you can order RAM through the mail, but you can't download RAM online. colclark: Guess who failed their driving test for a second time? I thought a yellow light was blinking, but it was actually a red light and I hadn't gotten enough sleep in the last two days. almonds: Sometimes, the law system works. [More Apple discussion] The meeting was adjourned at 20:49. Minutes taken by psvenk, almonds, scj643 and submitted by TBD.