Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2026-07-27 The meeting was called to order at 19:35 by hng. In attendance were Student keyholders: scj643, xy, hng, smith141, psvenk Associate keyholders: asahteck, petey Members: ilyag, mniwheat, guoj1112 Guests: jayfro Administrivia: hng: This week, turino14 remains at the conference, so I will be presiding over today's meeting. We will start with administrivia. scj643: Could we get some more power strips in the back? xy: What do you mean by "power strips"? These things? *gestures* There are tons of them in the SMR. ilyag: Speaking of power, I noticed that we only have low-power USB chargers in the office; is this correct? hng: Do we have any USB inline power meters in the electronics cabinet? If not, we can allocate for one next week. scj643: We could get a few of them. ilyag: Thank you to whoever went on the snack run. asahteck: Hi, I used to help with the Minecraft project. I got emails about moving things off of froyo-machine. Not sure about the status, but I have a guy who is willing to take care of hosting it outside of SIPB. hng: I believe turino14 is doing something re Minecraft, but I'm not sure what's going on (I should...) asahteck: Sounds good; I'm just trying to organize the migration. guoj1112: Thanks to whoever added me to the Mattermost. scj643: We have more snacks! Right now, though, don't touch the ((cheesesticks or (mac and cheese)) in the fridge). Those are mine. psvenk: In "cheesesticks or mac and cheese in the fridge", does "in the fridge" bind to the entire expression (cheesesticks or (mac and cheese)) or just to (mac and cheese)? scj643: The former. Project Reports: xy: Hyades continues. I made Hyades use microVMs instead of containers, which should offer significantly better security. On Friday at 17:30 (during the HWOPS meeting), turino14 and I are going to set up the physical Hyades server. We still haven't resolved the subsubdomain problem yet, but we're working on that. We do also have the solution of just using sipb.cloud if we can't figure that out with IS&T. xy: I also added group support to Hyades so that a student organization can get a group account. This uses Moira groups; I didn't want to follow Scripts's implementation that uses AFS lockers. ilyag: ARK continues. petey: Did bzelnick give an update that we turned over the admitted students Discord to the children? hng: Yes! We did see that update. petey: That's good to know. I'll also say that I was at a dinner party the other day with a current MIT faculty member who was part of the MIT Class of 2017. The Class of 2017 was the only year when we ran an admitted students Facebook group where we did not verify people's identities. And I said "you were the Class of 2017; you must remember the Facebook group!" He went pale, and said, "that was an insane and dark place". So, I would like to thank SIPB for helping us move past this. If an MIT faculty member still remembers, with cupcake-dog-traumatized eyes, what the admitted student group a decade ago was like, the work that you all have done with IdentiBot is having a very big impact. psvenk: dtemkin sent an email asking to tlo asing if there is a possibility for sipb to get a trademark on the hydrant name since we had these unauthorized non-sipb affiliated projects that were using the hydrant name to promote themselves. Of course this is just asking if such a thing is psosible, we won't move ahead without consulting the rest of sipb first. Other: petey: If you've walked through the open space out by Kendall Square (on the far side of Medical, where the outdoor movie theatre is), you might have seen glowing lights outside the MIT Welcome Center. When we opened the Welcome Center, we included those multicolored lights from an MIT alum-founded design firm, and we required that they open-source the code, so that we can use the code for a bootstrap program (which asahteck worked on a few years ago). You don't have to convince kids who are interested in coding to apply to MIT; you have to beat them with a stick not to. petey: Anyway, this curriculum project has been here for 4 years, and people want to get it done. My goal for the fall is to work with a couple of students (whether as a SIPB thing, as a UROP or independent study, or otherwise), and push this repo to the Internet, where it can be living and breathing and FTGOS (if SIPB agrees that it is FTGOS). It would be great if this project could benefit the community, and we could also work with Adafruit to make a small hardware kit that we can sell in the Coop or the Welcome Center. petey: That's the big picture of the project; there's no big ask of SIPB right now. I'll work with the people who responded to my email, but I wanted to mention this in the meeting / minutes so that anyone who may be interested would begin to cogitate about it. As for relevance to SIPB, it's an open source project that would spread that experience and that ethic to a wide variety of people, and it's also a prominent way to show to prospective students that SIPB exists and is committed to these sorts of projects, to promote SIPB's longevity. scj643: Are non-students allowed to be involved in this project? petey: Potentially. In the fall, what I'm trying to do is find a couple of people who I can work with directly (some of these poeple I already know). In the long term, I have never met you human before, and I don't know how students vs. non-students are arranged in SIPB, but I don't have a particular prior for that. [discussion about hardware] hng: My question is: is the current state of the lighting system something that is rather well-documented; i.e., is everything in the bill of materials something that you can get from DigiKey, or would we need to custom-fabricate parts? petey: It's all well-documented and all of the parts are off-the-shelf; it was designed that way on purpose. I can get the parts and send it to whoever would be a good point of contact for that, or drop it in the Mattermost or something. [asahteck demos Web application for controlling the lighting system] ilyag: I could work on some of the administrative aspects, including licensing. I know some people at GitHub and the FSF. scj643: Wouldn't we just use the MIT License? hng: Well, it depends on what people's ideological inclinations are. We don't need to use a license just because it has our school's name on it. After all, not everyone at UC Berkeley will use the BSD License. scj643: Drawing tablet works great with the Switch 2. ilyag: These chairs are so adjustable! I wonder if anyone thinks they're too adjustable. scj643: I do! I think they're too easy to fidget with. [ilyag demonstrates] asahteck: This is my undergrad, Jay. He is working on the programming languages side of my project at Northeastern (where I am a PhD student). I know we have a lot of cross-NEU-MIT exchange with me and almonds, so I hope this can be a good collaboration. jayfro: I've been working with a language called Knitout, a language for instruction-oriented code controlling knitting machines. asahteck: My research is about converting code to fabric, so that's the ilyag: Are LLMs any good at writing Knitout code? asahteck: No! And a lot of our research is about writing safety checks to make sure people who don't know what they're doing don't damage the hardware with faulty instructions (such as AI slop). asahteck: It's compilers on top of compilers; it's like . scj643: Can we make something with the SIPB logo using it? jayfro: Absolutely! asahteck: We should also get back to the email from the originator of the fuzzball image. We should get a fuzzball tapestry. Other Other: scj643: I'm being paid $50/hour to review slop code, but it's for a good cause (turning MuseScore data in music notation into Braille). guoj1112: The fall semester is sooner than you think. scj643: Did anyone hear from rgabriel about the Switch for the office? hng: rgabriel is not online; I don't think there was any further correspondence regarding this matter. scj643: Switch 2 is fun. Also expensive. I probably spent well over $700 on it and games for it. The meeting was adjourned at 20:16. Minutes taken and submitted by psvenk.