Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2025-03-10 The meeting was called to order at 19:35 by psvenk. In attendance were Student keyholders: psvenk, alwinfy, turino14, suufi, innaavo, dtemkin, rgabriel Associate keyholders: almonds, vex, petey Members: anhad, monicav, nkk, johnm2, ilyag Guests: sunjing Administrivia: psvenk: First thing, keyholder nominations. alwinfy: I'll nominate skylarh for keyholdership psvenk, innaavo: Seconded skylarh: I accept turino14: I'll nominate anhad for keyholdership innaavo: seconded anhad: I accept psvenk: Can we hold your keyholder election next Monday? anhad, skylarh: Sure. psvenk: As most as you probably know, we had a meeting with IS&T on Thursday. We discussed various things. dtemkin: Gradient, the replacement for certificates, is being piloted! It's an MIT startup, which whatever. Don't have to renew certs every year/automatic. alwinfy: Yay proprietary software!!!! Love having that on my phone anhad: Does it work on my phone? dtemkin: Probably psvenk: [email changes being rolled out in the medium term] petey [in chat]: how quickly people have forgotten https://thetech.com/2013/03/20/fakeemail-v133-n13 dtemkin and psvenk: Since email forwarding would break with these changes, they are working on a way to let us use Gmail officially. psvenk: For context, some mail providers have been flagging email and spam since MIT has a lot of people who forward all their mail to their Gmail, which means that MIT's email servers are a large source of spam. psvenk: The way this impacts us specifically is that projects who send email will need to get a form of authentication to send that email. psvenk: We also discussed budget. They are having their budgeting meeting today. Fingers crossed that we'll get some more budget. alwinfy: If not, we'll have to start snacking on the drywall instead. innaavo: I have some updates on CPW, and want to take advantage of a lot of people being present to decide on event dates/times. The main thing is the Q&A / Project Showcase / Game night / Hackathon. This should probably be Friday or Saturday night. If on Friday, we can do it after the server room tours that are happening at 17:30 to 18:30. This is the event that we need the most project leads to show up to and to talk about their project / work on it. innaavo: I don't know if we want to have all 4 events on the same day back to back. alwinfy: We can also have more than 1 server room tour. They are low effort, taking them to the server room. inaavo: That is actually a good idea. The thing about Thursday is that the opening ceremony is on Thursday. psvenk: It's 8:30-9:30 pm so it would have to be really late. alwinfy: It's good to have a way to catch stragglers and also talk to people who arrive early. psevnk: We did have a few of them last year. People who just come here because they heard about SIPB and want to see the office. alwinfy: We can have people on a door rotation so we can have as much people during CPW as possible. Also, because the stud is a big place of CPW activity since a lot of logistics takes place here. innaavo: I can send a spreadsheet with sign up times. Hopefully, we can have one person with tap access to the SMR with the main important times. alwinfy: We do want to be mindful about how much we pitch SIPB vs how much we pitch MIT as a whole. It is considered a bad taste to try to poach pre-frosh before they go a chance to go to Activities Midway. psvenk: The message should be "MIT is cool because SIPB is cool". alwinfy: Please don't poach the frosh. I know clubs that have violated this. I'd like to not be one of them, just out of principle. innaavo: Just show them that MIT is cool, because we're so cool! And it'll be effortless, because SIPB is positively teeming with social skills. [alwinfy coughs very loudly] innaavo: Frosh are getting meal swipes. So we should have around $300, and mainly the main thing we are purchasing is snacks and sodas and cookies. I am okay with purchasing a dinner, especially if SIPB members are going to be in the office for a long time. Either way, expect to spend less money than on previous years. psvenk: There was an idea to have dinner at the Python bee, but just snacks at the game night. However, I think it should be the opposite. Last year we had pizza at the Python bee. It was difficult that everyone was packed and crowded and trying to watch, and also eating pizza. When people have meal swipes, it feels unnecessary for that event in particular and just in general. If we are having food, the food should be part of the ambiance. innaavo: Especially since we have events back to back. psvenk: Can everyone here make it on Friday? psvenk: It would be good to have snacks. Budgetarily, we don't know. But I think $300 is reasonable, and $400 or $500 wouldn't be the end of the world. innaavo: We have $1500 in change in our budget, which is why we are shooting for the lower. innaavo: Last thing for CPW: What should the prizes be for Python be? A T-Shirt? psvenk: That ties into the merch thing. alwinfy: In past times, we have tried giving a raspberry pi but that came off a bit nerdy. psvenk: But we are nerdy, come on. alwinfy: Last year, I think we did mugs? But also, because we were starved for resources. So we should plan this better ahead of time. rgabriel: East Campus gave a bee plushie and I think it was cute. anhad: But people had to take this on a plane. psvenk: During my CPW, East Campus (i.e. cjq) gave the person who won either $8 or $16. alwinfy: Yes, 10 in hexadecimal. psvenk: Yeah, so $16. innaavo: I have purchased an Adafruit microcontroller that I don't want. Maybe we can give it away. psvenk: And alwinfy, you were happy to run it? alwinfy: Yeah rgabriel: How about we give them $15 in TechCash, and say "you can only use it if you join MIT." monicav: I like the t-shirt idea. I'm sure the winner would like having a nerdy "I Won The Python Bee" shirt. anhad: I could make a design. It's not too hard. psvenk: Speaking of Merch: anhad: I'd need the branding materials, though. johnm2: If you DM me on Mattermost, I'll get back to you on it. psvenk: So what is a good quantity/price range for merch? I was thinking $150-$200. Depends on how much quantity we get from that. innaavo: I was looking at donor things in the past, just looking at our finance stuff. We've had up ~$700 donated this school year. I was thinking of sending "Thank you" notes to donors. I found these postcards of our Minecraft. We could handwrite nice notes for them. psvenk: How much are stamps now? ilyag: I think it's $0.50 each. psvenk: $0.50???? Back in my day, you could get a whole thing of $0.50. alwinfy: You'll make a great grumpy old man one day ilyag: I'd be happy to help with the post cards - I can write pretty. psvenk: There was also the idea from last week: Should we do something for Pi Day? alwinfy: Do we know more about the budget now? psvenk: We don't! That's the thing. That being said, there are arguments for and against - last time, don't get me wrong, we did have fun going to Costco, but there were fewer than expected in attendance. And on Pi Day specifically there is fierce competition from other free food events. Especially considering our financial situation. rgabriel: There's so much pie. We don't need to be another of the sources of pie. psvenk: Even if we get more funding, the fact remains that IS&T and MIT generally are going through tough times financially. So it would be better to delay to after spring break, especially when people will be less hosed, and knowing that we can (hopefully) allocate more and get more turnout. innaavo: Agreed. turino14: I've been throwing around the idea of a SIPB blog / newsletter. I have been very busy so not much chance to get started, but want to get the ball rolling. What have y'all been doing since January? I can send an email or a message. I can join everything up and make some nice email / blog, detailing everything that we have been doing, and we can post it after Spring break or something like that. almonds [in chat]: Can we also use the website's blog feature for that? alwinfy: Do you want a meeting for this? turino14: Maybe rgabriel: I know the Matrix project has a bot that sends a "I did this" for projects, and there's a bot that compiles them into a "This Week In Matrix" sort of thing. turino14: Yeah, sort of like that for all of SIPB. I think monthly might be too frequent - maybe twice a semester? rgabriel: We could just copy Project Reports. johnm2: This is something that could also fall under the Site - we currently have a blank blog. We've talked about it and it would be cool to get some of the bigger projects to write blogs to start us out - Hydrant in particular, since a lot of people know it - and as a place to show off cool projects that are less known. turino14: Yeah, I mostly got the idea from the empty blogroll. alwinfy: You should be a part of the Branding meeting this Sunday. innaavo: There's an alum - simsong - who recently published a book on differential privacy. It's going to be published on the 25th of this month. We can purchase it now, for the library: innaavo: Motion to allocate $18.12 for the book psvenk: Seconded & motion to white ballot turino14: Seconded [motion to allocate $18.12 for differential privacy book passes by white ballot] [conversation about our current books being old] alwinfy: Not motions yet but suggestions: Effective Python/C++. Or other languages - I know of one about robotics, and math languages like Matlab/Octave. alwinfy: I want to see if we can formalize our checkout process a bit better. There's in the archives some way to inventory to see who's checked out what. If we start getting more recent books, we might even get non-SIPB members trying to check them out, in which it would make sense to have a clearer system. psvenk: It would be good to get in contact with the people who were previously in charge of this -- preferably a modern, computerized system. turino14: In the SMR, we also have a bookshelf with a lot of old books/manuals! rgabriel: has a list; it seems unmaintained. We could try to revive that. That being said, we should get an official library project, which seemingly used to exist, and think about questions - like people who can maintain the shelves. Also the Anime club has a software for checking in/out manga, so we can talk to them about how they do it. Project Reports: Ghost of nmorgan: ARK continues. We're working on a yaml file to orchestrate the calendar module and future modules so stay posted on that. On the LLM side of things, function calling works smoothly with API providers but is a "langgraph" documentation nightmare for local dev. We have a few options in the works, the question is which we're going to sink our time into. ilyag: ARK continues. turino14: HWOPS continues. We finally racked the ARK server, after a long time waiting for the rails. For the most part, we set up the FPGAs server. monicav: SIPB FPGAs continues. We're still getting all the parts together to assemble the server. Once we have that, we can set everything up with certificates so people can start testing out the prototype and writing verilog and flashing the FPGAs. johnm2: SIPB Branding and Propaganda continues. We are trying to chase down information on projects that have not gotten back to us yet. I am also on the midst of conceptualizing new posters for SIPB! vex: SIPB Tor continues. We are trying to get a 10G line for the past few months. We got a response that we weren't actually saturating the bandwith we have. There are also 3 other relays, but ours is an exit node. We are not saturated anymore so we have to figure out how to use more bandwidth. skylarh: Eventful continues suufi: OpenGrades continues. psvenk: Hydrant & CourseRoad continue. Other: psvenk: CPW is sooner than you think! turino14: If you ever forget what's the date of CPW, just remember that it coincides with the Chittagong armoury raid. Give or take 95 years. psvenk: In Bangladesh? ilyag: That's going to be easy to remember! psvenk: Oh! This was during British colonial times. I am not familiar with this part of history. I should brush up on that. Anyway. turino14: For my political economy class, we are discussing that! Other Other: innaavo: Happy Spring Forward! alwinfy: I'm so sleep deprived. johm2: Concord Market opens tomorrow! Allegedly! dtemkin, rgabriel: It will!! dtemkin: It passed the fire test this time. alwinfy: If you want to be credited in the end notes of the meeting, put your name in the top right in the people icon [on Etherpad]. The meeting was adjourned at 20:14. Minutes taken by rgabriel, alwinfy, innaavo and submitted by rgabriel.