Meetups/Infra/2026-06-01

2026-06-01 m Meetups/Infra

(TODO summary)

Welcome

To the weekly infrastructure meetup

(Kippling adapted poem:)

We discuss FOSS (free and open source software), ... noisebridge infrastructure,

this week public & symmetric key cryptography

Introductions

• [name] - [background]. [goals for meetup, or interests to explore]

• Loren - crypto personal relationship manager, symmetric key & public key topics
• Erik - regular attendee recently setup a program that listens to conversations and casts them, uses multiple models piped, processing with LLMs to create text
• Derek - programmer, working on spec management system, hope to demo later
• Frank - how mobile dev have changed
• Cole: Software engineer, working on distributed syncing solution for mobile and desktop
• Thijs - Data scientist, just moved to SF, thinking bout building a home lab
• Dave - works on infrastructure.
• Victor - linux fan, spend the last week getting linux running on a tablet, Samsung Galaxy Tab S8
• Abdel - sysadmin emplyer making him vibe code a lot.
• Kevin - SE by trade, devloping in coding agent observability realm
• Chris - working at scraping
• Meghan - second time here, also working a few things
• Renaud (sp) -
• WeZ - loves learning thing, doing RTL code.
• Brandon - haven't been in a while, touch lots of coding projects, lots of langauges, C++ passion language, interested in AI
• Kat - haven't been in a while, cool to see this group growing so much. Have a demo later, Jack in the Box AI, CrankGPT
• Elan - Reached a new stage of enlightnement: four levels of nestedness of docker / vm/virt

Lesson or Demo

• Read aloud: clarify for meetup. We are taking notes in a riseup pad (or I am--help appreciated, and links). We have meeting notes posted to the wiki. noisebridge.net, search Infra, or Meetups/Infra. (the Infrastructure page has a disambiguation link.)
• Shell, web services, self-hosting, networking!

• Erik - demo

Magical dragon fly people
Local inference
Voice-to-Image
Speak a description, get an AI-generated image. Optionally cast to Chromecast.
https://github.com/ErikAllanKincaid/Voice-To-Image
Running all local models.  Whisper -STT-> LLM -Prompt-> Diffusion -> Chromecast

• Derek - demo

spec driven development tool.


Thijs -- custom harnesses, (Pi ?) to control what's sent to the agent, more directly
Kevin - there's a repl for managing specifications. This is well adapted for teams, doing incremental updates to specs, spec driven updates.
Using python, 
Using in coding agent observability work. One outcome: higher reproducibility in generated code. 
https://libspec.com/

(Chris demo?)

• question: Dave: I wish to hear folks opinions about configuration and constraints evaluation

Dave: I wish to hear folks opinions about configuration and constraints evaluation

configuration management with constraint languages?
https://cuelang.org/ https://cuelang.org/docs/
https://refactoring.guru/design-patterns/builder

• Loren - public & symmetric key crypto
  • hashing
  • fast / slow / memory hard
  • who to trust, broadly speaking.

* public 

* establish secure channel, maintain secrets
** if key exchange has already happened between two people
** the only known information is size of message and time the msg was sent
** there are levels of trust
*** RSA
*** ed25519 / x25519
*** ellipic curve
*** diffie hellman
*** HASH functions
*** ROT13
*** Caesar Cipher
*** Modern Ciphers
academics insisted that the systems need to work well enough then the key is the only secret necessary, despite adversery knowing the algorithm. A push back against security through obscurity

• uses of
  • TLS, WebPKI, Signal, ssh,
  • Bitcoin, ownership of private key determines owner
  • Tor, I2P, FreeNet, GnuNet,
  • IPFS
  • https://cr.yp.to (djb)
• NIST (*), Soatok, Zacchaeus, US Cyber Command, NSA (sometimes, defensive & offensive),
• age - signing ecryption

• Tools

• c
• Encryption at rest, not necessarily.
• DES, 56 bit encryption algo, secure enough for internal US. EFF assembled some compute to break it. Encrypting twice was same as encrypting once with another key.
• Meet? In the middle attacks.
• Some attacks use the same principle as the birthday paradox
• Difficulty does not necessarily scale intuitively.

*** TLS tutorial
https://tls13.xargs.org/

• vibe code -- review of tools, mainline recommendations

• • Ask the AI how to use it
  • Advise and brainstorm
  • many coding agents have "slash" command /...
  • /skills /mcp /
  • text to speech software for quickly entering text
  • asking for references, for specs, and sessions, ask for source to help communicate intent to the coding agent
  • working upfront to think hard about the system wholistically,

Verification -- is very important, with Models, and teams of human engineers, juniors, peers.  Very good at writing tests. 

• • loops of any kind, having it very itself, is very helpful (victor -- had a model fix a graphics driver, and pointed a web cam at it, and let it work)

• • let the designers cook a bit, the design is another view on the architecture that informs the development. Save yourself a stage of iteration.

• • show me your database tables, and I can tell you what your system does. Show me your code and I'll have no idea

• • Iterate on what the data model looks like,

• machine consciousness conference this last weekend, trying to form a field https://luma.com/mc0001

• Joascha Bach was at a machine conciousness conference
  • there are interesting past talks, modalities of communication and interaction that might

• Crank GPT, https://crankgpt.com/
  • RPI 5
  • LLM, could .8M automated speak recognition.
  • 1B parameter model
  • Can feel it while the model is working
  • As soon as the tokens are generated the

liquid AI,

350 M parameter model startup pitch, tell me what you're LFM liquid foundation model Moonshine, based on whisper. Kokura,

orange pi's ? sort of OK. Practically some problems, transformers don't work great on NPUs,

originally wanted to build a box that was privacy focused, demonstrates that it's possible to have local AI. visceral demonstration of the power required generate

Outros

• Erik - loves the idea of the crank gpt, will make a battery powered pi that does almost the same thing.
• Derek - Procedure for Victor's port the display drivers ?
• Loren - Would like to find other CC Licensed intuitive educational materials for encryption. And more small & self-hosted models - https://idea-instructions.com/public-key/
• Frank - will learn more ballot measure D,
• Max - voted already
• Cole - Voted was not late, nothing to add
• Kat - awesom to see such a big group
• Thijs - thought this (CrankGPT) was really cool
• Dave - learn more about self hosting
• Victor - wants to look more into running small models
• Abdul - will read up on birthday paradox and read up on libspec
• Elan - will bike to power LLM ? Fitness instruction?
• Meghan - hopes to have a demo, building a git forge, github-alternative
• Robert - crank gpt, interesting that powered just by cranking, simulating a crank?
• Kevin -
• Chris - enjoyed the crank gpt video ad.
• Branden - enjoyed crank gpt

Questions, Discussion, or Coworking

• [Issue]

For next time

Readings & Exercises

• Readings
• Exercises

Join online

• Try it yourself!
  • Join libera.chat #nb-meetup-infra

https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Meetups/Infra