Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2025-09-08 The meeting was called to order at 19:39 by psvenk. In attendance were Student keyholders: psvenk, turino14, nmorgan, innaavo, dtemkin, alwinfy, anhad, arjunjb, colclark, xy, aabreu Associate keyholders: rgabriel, bbaren, almonds, scj643 Members: emmiee, kikimora, guoj1112, bzelnick, ilyag, ishaanam, juarez, ryanruiz, vector, dsisson, jolting, t11s, liani Guests: liuyf23, annieguo, tejus, durgan, nicho414, kfbenti, daniel3, kadn, ryantang, jczhang, kylez, yuqingl, hdang, vxma, angela5, mborodin, Jacob Spunt, asrv, reneramz, mlui2, traceyl, cepierce, psvita, kaiyanl, lucys07, angjli, Kshitij, vzheng Introductions: psvenk: Welcome all! We are SIPB and we run services for the MIT community. How about we do some introductions: name, pronouns, year, major. psvenk: My name is Pratyush he/him senior in course 6-3 and 18, and I am the SIPB chair. turino14: I am Luis, kerb turino14, 6-2, vice chair, HWOPS. liuyf23: I'm Yifeng (Evan) Liu, EECS 2nd year grad student, 11 and 6. rgabriel: I am Gabriel he/him rgabriel also 11 and 6! annieguo: I'm Annie, I am studying 18 & 6-3 probably, she/her, sophomore. emmiee: I am emmie, she/her, 6-3(?) kikimora: I am kiki, 6-3 and 17, also freshman tejus: he/him, 8 maybe 18C durgan: I'm Durgan, probably 6-5 guoj1112: I am Joshua he/him, majoring in 18C nicho414: Nicholas, he/him, trying to major in 5-6 kfbenti: Kaku Benti, freshman, course 8 daniel3: Daniel, freshman, thinking 6 & 18 kadn: Cadyn, course 6-3 or ? ryantang: Ryan, thinking 6-5 (6-1) bzelnick: Ben, second year, 6-7 jczhang: Jerry he/him 6, probably 6-3 kylez: Kyle, he/him, planning to major in 18 yuqingl: [], she/her, [] hdang: Henry Dang, 1st year, [] ilyag: 4th ish year non-degree, mostly do 6 and 17, kerb isn't active but email ilyag vxma: Victoria, senior, she/her, 6-3 nmorgan: I am Nathaniel, a junior, major is 6-3, member at large and also project leader for ARK innaavo: Inna, junior, 18C, treasurer alwinfy: You beg her if you want money. innaavo: I won't give it to you. psvenk: Now let's go around the table. angela5: Angela, Freshman, she/her, 18C, [] dtemkin: Temkin, senior, 11 & 6-3, member at large (one of the elected positions who sits and give opinions). psvenk: We have exec so we can have a mborodin: I'm Matvey, Jacob: Hi, I'm not an enrolled student, I'm at a startup doing broadband. asrv: Adithya, 6-3 reneramz: René, 2nd year, 6-3 mlui2: Matt, course 2 sophomore. ishaanam: [intro] traceyl: Tracy, course 6 alwinfy: I am alwinfy, I unofficially run this place. That's a joke. psvenk: That's a true statement alwinfy: I am a grad student now, 6-3, member at large and housekeeping. cepierce: camila, she/her juarez: juarez, Junior course 12 ryanruiz: Ryan, thinking 6-3 or 6-5. Kerb is my full name vector: I am Victor. psvenk: What's your kerb? vector: vector [laughter] anhad: hello, I'm anhad, kerb is also anhad, and I help out with hardware operations and all of that fun stuff arjunjb: Arjun, 3rd year, 6-2. colclark: Colin, senior, 6-1 & 8, used to be chair. bbaren: Benjamin, was a 6-3 in 2013, MEng 2015. Was a chair back in the day. psvenk: Inna was also chair but she was too humble to say that. almonds: Almonds, 3rd year grad student at Northeastern. I'm kind of like a tray table, like a Member at Large but even less formal, help with small things as much as I can and work on the SIPB LLMs which is permissive-use large language models we run on our own servers, Etherpad which we are typing the minutes on, Jitsi which is what we are using for the meeting. she/her, they/them, 6-2 which is now 6-5. scj643: Chloe, my situation is complicated (I'm not a student), I help around. she/her alwinfy: You ask her if we're out of jolly ranchers. dsisson: I'm dsisson, she/they, and I'm scj643's girlfriend jolting: Joshua, junior, 6-3 psvita: Caleb, 18, sophomore t11s: Ben, sophomore xy: Anthony, he/him, 6-3 + 18 aabreu: Andres, 18, he/him kaiyanl: Kaiyan, 1st year lucys07: Lucy, 1st year, planning 6-4 anggeli: Angelina, 1st year, planning 6-9 Administrivia: psvenk: If you're new here, you can get added to our mailing list. You can talk to me or talk to alwinfy. Without any further ado, sorry that that took so long, what is SIPB? We are MIT's premier computing and infrastructure club, since 1969. alwinfy: We are older than unix timestamps! psvenk: We help the MIT community with computing! We create and maintain services for the MIT community. We're lots of fun, you can learn about sysadminning, you can learn about hacker culture, you can learn about all sorts of stuff. We don't have prerequisites or an application. Put in as much time as you want. Enjoy the community. We have server rooms and you can tour them. alwinfy: We have an open door policy so you can enter if the door is open and our keyholders keep the door open. Come here, have snacks, and we aim to be an open and inclusive community. psevnk: We are a federation of projects. Look at this board. Each project has its meeting schedule psvenk: Yeah so how does SIPB work? We're a federation of projects - you may have noticed this board, which lists all the projects. SIPB meets as a club every 7:30 PM. alwinfy: It's not nearly this packed psvenk: Don't worry it won't be this bad. But don't worry, please don't worry I'm contributing to the crowd, please come back. Each project has its own separate infrastructure and meeting schedule. Shoot one of us on Matrix or Mattermost and we can tell you how to get involved. alwinfy: There are a lot of projects so it's easy to get overwhelmed. If you want, you can help out on Hydrant; Hydrant always wants more hands. turino14: Also, if you have an idea of something you want, you can bring it to us, we can help you start it. There are other projects which you might be unknowingly relying on. psvenk: Our Monday meetings are typically pretty short, they usually would have been over by now, administrative things, how we spend our money, and progress reports on projects. alwinfy: It's also just a social time, or if you want to steal snacks. psvenk: None of y'all have been eating any snacks and that's a problem! guoj1112 (to the crowd): Here are the oreos, take as many as you want [snacks are being passed around the room] psvenk: sorry for not offering the snacks earlier. There's a lot more, this came from - sorry... Project Reports: psvenk: Can we talk about Hydrant? dtemkin: Hydrant is a semesterly course planner. You can search for all the classes being offered in a semester, mix-and-match calendar stuff, React frontend and web scrapers. It's pretty fun. We are meeting Sundays at 6 pm. psvenk: If you can't make that time, talk to me or dtemkin, and we can get you onboarded pretty quickly. alwinfy: All of this information we are presenting now, but it is also on our website at sipb.mit.edu, and scheduling at sipb.mit.edu/calendar, and you can find more information on the website. psvenk: Courseroad is the companion to Hydrant. It is a 4-year course planner for ppl to plan their degrees. They also want members. We also meet at the same time because it's been the same set of people working on both. Show up at Sunday at 6 or email us. aabreu: DormSoup parses dormspam and we put it in a calendar format. Have you all heard of dormspam? [show of hands as to what dormspam is] dtemkin: If you don't know, go to https://join-dormspam.mit.edu aabreu: A lot of our team graduated this year so we are looking for new people. We haven't decided a meeting time, that's what that QR code is about. psvenk: There will be an interest form at the end. suufi: I am Moh. I have been working on OpenGrades since 2022. Have you all seen the course evaluation system? If you are a freshman probably not. It has an arbitrary grading system, what does 5.7/7 mean? And only people who have finished the class can rate them. In OpenGrades, everyone can review the class in depth, even if they dropped it, and note additional context such as previous background or not. We also have a way of aggregating syllabi so students can upload syllabi, because currently you have to get it from others who took the class or the professor. My favorite new feature is who is taking what, so you can see what other 6-4s are taking for example. As of today, we hit over 10,000 grade points, I don't know how many transcripts that is but I guess a few hundred transcripts. psvenk: To join Mattermost or Matrix go to sipb.mit.edu. alwinfy: We need like hats. rgabriel: [matrix] xy: I am Anthony, one of the maintainers of the MIT mastodon server, global decentralized network of mastodon servers that communicate with each other. It is like Twitter, open source, really cool. If you just want to use it, go to mastodon.mit.edu. If you are interested in being a moderator or running the server, talk to me. Kind of shameless self-promotion, but the Nintendo Switch does work with certain laptops almonds: Does anyone know what LLMs are? Maybe you've heard of them. I am passionate about user privacy and access to technology. We are sharing permissive-use LLMs, which is like open source, they have a permissive license for non-commercial/educational purposes for example. I am coming from a teacher/instructor perspective, but this is also for researchers and students in the MIT community. I have been focused on keeping the frontend and backend updated, and improving the security. It is also working with MIT's office of research computing and development (ORCD). We have a limited amount of hardware but they have a lot more. We can decide on a time that works. turino14: Hardware operations, so we host all of our software not on AWS or anything like that but host it next door on our server room. SMR (SIPB Machine Room). We have servers for any project that might need it, you can learn about bare metal, maintaining servers along with physical security and anything involving hardware. After the meeting, if you are interested in a server room tour just come to me and I will give you a tour. For next year, some things I have in mind are replacing the power supplies, we want to setup more virtualization servers and storage nodes, and we have to organize/throw out/donate some of our old hardware, and we also want to update our website to something that's actually useful. Meetings are Fridays 5:30 pm. Stick around if you want a SMR tour. almonds: [re: FPGAs] monicav could not come turino14: FPGAs are programmable chips that you can program hardware logic, which is a very useful prototyping and low latency tool. We have a very nice FPGA which is very costly and we are trying to make them more accessible. If you are interested, come here and also check out MIT's nice classes on them. psvenk: SIPB Docs. almonds: We need to maintain our website and that involves working with Hugo, which is a static site generator, if you are familiar with HTML/CSS/Go/Markdown or if you want to learn any of them you can join the project and work on the website. Some parts are more dynamic, like the custom element with a list of projects. psvenk: Having a good website is easier said than done. To reiterate, all of our projects are welcome to people of all backgrounds, so please don't say this sounds really cool but I'm not smart enough because that's hogwash. psvenk: IAP Cluedumps. IAP is the January term where people do fun stuff on campus, there aren't normal classes but there are various for (and not for) credit opportunities like going abroad, bad ideas weekend, and what we do is organize "cluedumps" which are like talks/lecture series, about whatever SIPB members/non-SIPB members want to talk about computers, computer science, whatever suits your fancy, 1 or 2 a week in IAP. We can also have cluedumps as people wish during the fall/spring semesters but IAP is when it really ramps up. You also get teaching experience and get to share your passion. almonds: Check out sipb.mit.edu/iap psvenk: Scripts is a webhosting service used by MIT clubs, labs and various individuals around the MIT community. SIPB maintains this like everyone else in our own server room. This is arguably one of our most important projects, with free site hosting for anyone at MIT, can host basic scripts so it can be dynamic rather than just static. psvenk: SIPB XVM also provides virtual machine hosting. If you want a website that's more complex than what scripts can handle. 1 GB of RAM. rgabriel: If you need a larger VM you can come to a meeting or ask HWOPS. psvenk: We are happy to provide compute power to anyone doing a valuable thing for the MIT community. psvenk: We are almost done. Sorry this ran so long. As consolation prize, there is ice cream in the freezer. nmorgan: Who's heard of Jarvis / Tony Stark? ARK-OS is supposed to be our open source version of us, an open source framework for agents like checking your calendar. There are various buzzwords, but I want everyone to understand that even if it is ambitious/complex I want to meet you where you are at. So what we are trying to do over this next month is to be able to use states, navigate workflows, tools (MCP), and so on/so forth. It's better to explain the rationale - not about OpenAI/ChatGPT, we are not using any of them. All of this is going to be decentralized / self-hostable, which you will be able to run on your own computational hardware. Knowledge that you should be interested in learning: Local LLMs, states, graphs, frontend, backend. guoj1112: I am the main frontend dev using TypeScript/Svelte, and node:test for testing. It's a bit of an unusual tech stack, but I really like it. nmorgan: If you want to join the project, email me at nmorgan@mit.edu or use the QR code or use the link when it arrives. psvenk: How do I get involved? You can peruse projects on the Projects Database or go to sipb.mit.edu and click on Projects. Chat on the SIPB Mattermost/Matrix. Or talk to us after the meeting. Scan the QR code / interest form. psvenk: If you have to go, you can go, and on Friday we have a SIPB Social starting at 6 pm and going on until arbitrarily late. Feel free to drop-in between the hours of 6 pm and your bedtime, and there will be people in the office. It will be a chill vibe, chilling in the office, get to know us. There will be free dinner provided. scj643: Have we decided what it will be? psvenk: If you have strong opinions about what that would be, stick around, there will be vegetarian options, and if you have dietary restrictions / allergens you can also let us know. turino14: Does anyone have any questions? almonds: How did you hear about SIPB? Actual Administrivia: psvenk: SIPB meetings have 4 main parts: Administrivia, Project Reports, Other and Other Other. What you just heard is a mix of administrivia and project reports. psvenk: I propose a standing allocation $100/wk snacks. alwinfy: Seconded. guoj1112: Is this indefinitely? psvenk: This is until the end of the semester almonds: If you have specific requests for snacks, you can request them on the "Shopping List" channel. [motion to recurringly allocate $100/wk for snacks passes 14-3-0] psvenk: The majority of the frosh didn't hear this, but the stickers are arriving on Friday. I paid $60 for these stickers. If you deny this allocation, you will never see me again. Motion to allocate $60 for stickers. turino14: Seconded. dtemkin: Motion to white ballot. rgabriel: Seconded. [motion to allocate $60 for stickers passes by white ballot] psvenk: How does Chipotle sound? scj643: Eh.... Overpriced. psvenk: We can get pizza. What about the vegans? bzelnick: There's vegan pizza, right? psvenk: We'd have to order from a place that has vegan pizza but it would be more expensive. psvenk: Any other thoughts? psvenk: And I swear meetings don't go this long usually, so please don't let this deter you. Actual Project Reports: bzelnick: SIPB Discord is in a good enough place that I will be asking for collaborators now. psvenk: Sorry, you should've interrupted me. bzelnick: I probably missed an email. psvenk: There was an email scj643: Did the Index power supply ever get purchased? We allocated for that and I don't think it happened. [vote: 14 in favor, 3 opposed] psvenk: Motion passes 14 to 3 Other: bzelnick: can someone who knows how webathena works tell me? rgabriel: You can ask me questions. I may or may not have the answers. xy: The SIPB reading group is restarting this semester! Join on Mattermost/Matrix (Reading Group). First paper will be the Android Calculator app. Other Other: bzelnick: It is an unfortunate time to be a 6-7. [various]: Why? psvenk: There is a meme where some famous person said 6-7 on TikTok and now a lot of people on social media are repeating it and people are saying 6-7. colclark: At least your major is still real. psvenk: For context, Colin is a 6-1 which no longer exists for new class years. The meeting was adjourned at 20:33. Minutes taken by alwinfy, rgabriel, guoj1112 and submitted by psvenk.