Meeting Notes 2024 11 26

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These are the notes from the The 788th Meeting of Noisebridge.

Date	2024 11 26
Note-takers	Loren, Mark, Julius
Moderators	Sameer

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Meeting Summary

TLDR what happened at the meeting:

• Announcements:
  • Thxgiving potluck on Thursday at NOON!
  • Circuit Launch 2.0 Grand Opening in Mountain View December 7th! https://lu.ma/2lkm9otp
  • Roofer coming to do work this weekend - will be leaving lots of stuff in front patio area, please respect their use of that space!
  • class on inserting lights into textiles - 2 opportunities! Next circuit hacking Monday as well as on December 11th with the Sewing guild!
• Consensus Items:
  • Buying a Qidi 3D Printer. Consensed week 1.
• Discussion Items:
  • Note-taking/Meeting Tools
  • 3D Printer - buying a new one, and how to manage the room/equipment
  • City Permitting/ Roof Leak work etc
  • Lockers/ storage options/ new storage system proposal

Introductions

Sammeer - software engineer, interested in building various new things Guy (@Rugyoga) - I look after the 3d Printers and teach related classes

Julien - First time in a month. Just stopping by.

Zuri -First time here - I want to build stuff! I write code too. Awesome people here!

Ellen (Elle) - On a newish computer. Meant to bring a box of persimmons but I couldnt make it in person tonight, sorry!

Mark - You can ask him about noisebridge things, and things related to games and movies.

Julius - Right now trying to remind myself how to actually machine stuff. I think balloons are cool!

Ken - been around NB for like 3 years. Workin on va variety of projects, most recently the shop wall.

JD - I teach the laser class. Currently got myself embroiled in the permit city bullshit thing

Jasper - was laser certified recently. Been hangin with the spacebridge crew, and I want to apply to be a Member!

Loren - I host an infrastructure meetup on Mondays and help with Treasurer stuff. Also want to help NB host more useful computer services. Talk to me about that!

formerly Ⅹ - blinky hacking, Mt. View bbq Dec. 7th w/robocar racing

Short announcements and events

Ken - yesterday I was supposed to have help with the plates for the wall, but I didn't get it. Did preliminary work though.

Elle - we are having a thxgiving lunch potluck at NB on Thursday around 12 noon! Sign-up please in the events-forum channel post about it in discord so we can have a sense of what ppl are bringing/what is needed!

formerly Ⅹ - Join us for our Grand Opening of Circuit Launch 2.0 on December 7th. Check out our new second facility in Mountain View. We will have a day full of innovation and fun including, DIY Robocars, Brazilian BBQ, Robot Demos, and much more. Please RSVP if you plan on attending. Click on the link below. https://lu.ma/2lkm9otp

Mark - Dana the roofer is coming around this weekend - friday, saturday, sunday, doing work. They will be using the front patio to store tools and equipement, please do NOT mess with their stuff!

class on inserting lights into textiles - 2 opportunities! Next circuit hacking monday as well as on December 11th with the Sewing guild!

Excellence

Get at close to a 10 as possible for what you produce, in terms of building. In the context of socializing here, being nice to eachother!

Brief Kudos

Recent examples of excellent behavior, say 3, unless the passion moves you.

Kudos to Sameer for stepping up and running a meeting!

Kudos to Brian for continued work on the electronics and music rooms!

(Aside: Suggestions to Brian on layout for music room, some musicians have suggested some changes.)

Too many to name, a lot of coolness; people cleaning up in the sewing room; other people cleaning--it's been a good week.

Kudos to Elle for hosting cool things. Like ?

To Ethan, for hosting the Stupid Hackathon---hosting hackathons is Most Excellent and should be done all the time.

Kudos to Moof for hosting 5MoF this last time for Cloud!

Big C Consensus Items

Nobody likes 3 hour meetings, only explain if new people are present. https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Current_Consensus_Items

Consensus Items

Only for talking about Big C consensus items, small c consensus items should be discussed with people at the space at the time of the change/new item or can be reserved for the discussion section of the meeting.

Consensing to fund the 3d print guild to purchase a Qidi Max 3 at the black Friday price of $700 + tax and shipping. (https://qidi3d.com/products/qidi-x-max-3). It would enable prints of kinds that are currently impossible on the existing printers.

Discussion Items

Discussion Item 1

From/Raised by: Loren, Mark, Sameer Seeking next step On topic: better jitsi+riseup pad meeting platform

Loren - Im interested in sketching things out. Will come to a future meeting with a new link we can try? Do ppl have features they want us to try?

With someone new hosting today we are noticing some more rough edges in the current system.

• Live render -- of mediawiki text for notes. Pandoc.

• BigBlueButton -- https://bigbluebutton.org/ -- https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton

• One-button publish from notes. One-button start meeting.
  • Summary of meeting notes -- share on discord & email ( @ )

bigbluebutton.org possible solution

Mark - still interested in pursuing AI transcription

Loren - Don't want to force the discussion to follow a format that is conducive to AI transcription

Elle - we edit our meeting notes for brevity/respectfulness. Transcription also creates a much more accessible record for third parties

Mark - we lose a lot of information due to having to transcribe manually. Would rather just get everything then edit out what we want after

Julius: What worries me is the potential for AI hallucination, see e.g. medical transcripts in the news recently(https://apnews.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-health-business-90020cdf5fa16c79ca2e5b6c4c9bbb14)

Mark - I think a editor would be able to identify and clear up any potential issues like that, plus the nature of our convos is different from something e.g. medical information

Elle: Then we have like an editor job, which is also a lot of work. And the systems still potentially have enough issues I might be concerned.

Mark - would you (elle) be okay with something like a pilot run of a system?

Jasper - I work with a lot of machine learning tech. FWIW, these techs are much better at summarizing from previous contexts rather than making stuff up. I'd worry more about omissions than hallucinations. I've used them to write letters. AI's are pretty good at summarizing existing bodies of text.

• Last night at infra meetup, we did a demo of Whisper (and local ollama hosting of LLMs), which does transcription. We can run a lot of this locally - Whisper in particular we could possibly try out and see how it does with streaming output.

• Mark -- used these tools in other meetings, another context.

We'll have a separate session -- working out workflows to make it easy for Mark, or others, to host a meeting with these tools. whisper.cpp, llama or similar for summarization.

Discussion Item 2

From/Raised by: Guy Seeking Advice/ [C]onsensus On topic: New 3D Printers Well maintained Ender 3, or PRUSA mini, bambu or wait for prusa core x/y if $1,000+ budget.

- Guy: We already have Ender 3's. What we should do: get bambu, or better bang for buck, Qidi max 3 (https://qidi3d.com/products/qidi-x-max-3) is on sale - open source firmware , prints as fast as bamboo, 90% as good as bambu. Uses open source Clipper software.

J -If this is gonna be the premium printer for the space, are we actually gonna want ppl hacking on it?

Guy - no. That is what the Ender 3's' were meant for anyway.

JD - from what I recal - it was pointed out that well over a decade ago, some of the preliminary work for figuring out how 3d printing even works was done at NB. We have a history of actually building this tech.

Guy - this is primarily meant to be here as a tool to be used, and Ender3's to be hacked on and learned about how they're built via.

Elle - there is already an overflow of 3d printers. Are we removing some that are not working so well/have been cannibalized?

Guy - 1. Advice for the community: DON'T accept any more 3D printers unless the DEFINITELY work. 2. We ARE going to have a purge.

Elle: 3D printer room should go through the same process as the sewing room: throw away all things which aren't working.

Guy - Screamin deal on Qidi max right now for Black Friday. This is time sensitive!

Loren - we have sort of 2 different use cases. Ppl who want to use as tool. People who want to hack on. If people are coming in just to use stuff perhaps there should be a cost. What is this contributing towards the bottom line? More of a vibecheck.

To the extent people want to hack on stuff - maybe we ought to set aside a separate space/make the distinction clearer.

Guy - I've only come across ppl who want to hack occasionally in my 2 years running things here.

Loren - also can you help enforce the "no new not working 3d printers" with something like a big sign? Laminated, QR code to Discord, and instructions.

Mark - If you don't already can you get a cash box in the room?

Guy - Already done. Suggested donation $20. I see people put money in. I don't know who is collecting it. We funded the Bambu that way. It's been another year and I was expecting to be able to do that again. With people paying $20 we should have the funds.

Mark - For Loren, do we have a selector for donations saying "This is for X"?

Loren - Currently not working. Considering spinning up a separate domain and system just to get that going.

Sameer - Is it a problem that people come to the class and don't pay?

Guy - [Julius] Not really

Elle - In support of getting donations easily can someone print those out for every room?

Mark - Yes. Other question for Loren, have we been separately accounting for the cash box in the 3d printing room.

Loren - For the last 3-6 months I have been accounting for each cash box separately. Have not been collecting from the 3d print cash box.

Julius - we should probably move in the direction of standardizing, towards the goal of having just "high end printer that work"

SIDE NOTE

• more NB Venmo QR codes -- to share around the space -- one for each room.

(Also is there a shorturl that'll redirect to the Venmo?)

Discussion Item 3

From/Raised by: JD Seeking to report update On topic: permitting

JD: - For a while, we've known the city has been insisting on us doing an extensive documentation of the space for code compliance, etc etc. We went to small business admin to get help with this - they assist nonprofits. JD's architect wife has been helping as well. They told us how the city can help us make it all work. Long and short of it - there is an outstanding change of occupancy from back in 1993.

1993: Was a motorcycle shop, change of occupancy, storage/business use -> light industrial use, which never happened, permit was cancelled by the city. Landlord thought that it went through, they represented it as a light industrial space in our lease, and our use fits under that (classes, etc.). So, NB is moving in, we were not aware that we needed to notify the city of "change of use", if light industrial prior and light industrial now then it's fine. But, there was a complaint about non-compliance with the code, it brought a building inspector down here who saw the discrepancy of non-light industrial, but non-hazardous storage and business space. So we need to do the actual permitting process, get architect's drawings, code-checks (fire exits, etc.)---and because it wasn't fixed 30 years ago there's a 9x price on top of the permit.

The person at the small business lease it's a lien against the property owner; it's not on us on the tenants. Good news: this woman is paid to be there to explain this to us. Planning Department Small Business. A program "SF Shines" (https://www.sf.gov/sf-shines), the city will find and fund an architect to work with us to work through the permitting process. The whole thing has to be wrapped in the 30 days. Normally when a yoga studio goes into a former bakery they're submitting permits to turn it into a yoga studio. So the use is wrapped in. So we should be able to include the changes with the wood shop etc in the overall change.

Item 3.2: roof

Loren / Mark

Loren - We were sent a report from the roofer about graffiti and foot traffic on the roof (footprints etc). The landlord is claiming that this is our responsibility because of access we allowed. They claim the cost to repair ~$5000.

[redacting convo about specific advice/questions]

Ken: There's a leak in the (?) roof.

Discussion Item 4

From/Raised by: Ken Seeking input On topic: Moving lockers to second floor, maybe adding more lockers. Also review the locker policy. Storage in general.

Ken - The proper way to handle that would be to acquire pallet shelves and go UP with the storage.

Julius - I've been shopping an idea with folks - ceiling to floor, a system for renting space on such shelves. Kind of an awkward system currently where you just sort of put stuff somewhere, hope no one does something with it, etc etc. Empirically ppl do not put do not hack tags well on things.

JD - give us a rough sketch, for size and such

Elle - I have a concern about renting space. What about folks who can't afford to pay that rent?

Julius - for sitations where a project takes a significant amount of space - this is a solution to that. I think this comes back to what Mike was gonna mention - lots of people with quite a few lockers and many with 0 lockers. Seems unfair. Paying some nominal small amount would help distribute things more equitably.

JD - yeah, if its like $5 or some small amount, that seems not so bad. That said, NB has the long standing policy of not denying folks due to lack of funds. That said, the "put skin in the game" is a good impulse and seems to be thinking in the right direction.