Meetups/Infra/2025-07-21

2025-07-21 m Meetups/Infra

(TODO summary)

Introductions

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

• Loren -- looking for people to help run infra at Noisebridge -- today: shared marimo(?) notebook performance
• Wolf -- self-hosted personal projects, feep search (search.feep.dev), this week: learning about Linux's Logical Volume Manager (LVM) and btrfs, subvolumes and snapshots
  • M$ has a combined FS + DB manager with SQL Server that supports this snapshotting. Oracle implemented something similar on their database on top of ZFS
• Doug -- like computers -- this week: building a high-ram server, 3½TB
• Kevin -- also likes computers and writing software -- use LLMs a lot lately (not 10-99-ers, just interning). Like network and storage infrastructure stuff
• Cloud -- run 5MoF (third Thursdays) -- study communications and why groups stick around or don't
• Greg -- self-host a bunch -- used LLMs to fix nix config
  • and also to convert Loren's Bluesky firehose program from Python to Rust, one-shot with one bug: https://code.everydayimshuflin.com/greg/bsky-firehose/
• Alex -- ML stuff for work, this week thinking about smaller LLMs, do we
• (Miko -- intro / written in jitsi chat?)
• Elan - on jitsi, interested in self-hosted and scalable computing
• Jet -- listening in for a moment
• Alex -- I'm an ethical hacker, contract for a lot of private clients. Pen-testing products, and designing them. Make cat-themed products to teach wifi hacking to

kids. Ethics is an exogenous property no one can label themselves an "ethical" person. would it be ethical to save George washington, Mao, or Stalins life? they are responsible for millions of deaths.

Interested in reproducibility. Yocto.

NixOS. Introducted to

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!

• ML stuff / Kat / Alex
  • Can we do smaller models. People often want to do classification, default to pasting it in to ChatGPT.

• Loren -- model routing -- claude code uses sonnet for planning, prompting the smaller model, with haiku for implementation or summarization

• Kevin -- was quite frustrated with vibecoding, lots of time spent hunting errors. Have built up an interface where I write up formal program specifications, and have much more successful implemntations built on top of that

built a first version in java, hated that. Second version in python, liked that much more.

on-going building of context, code I've liked from before. Ask it to generate the code in chunks. 

signal group where we talk about this.

converting COBOL to java. 82-yo mainframe programmer.

zettabyte

as an individual developer spending on LLMs, I'm willing to spend ~$10 per day, to supervise and return. 

• Delta AI, personalized pricing news -- 3% now, aiming for higher / 100%.

TSP optization & route planning, in future weeks.

• LVM --

wolf -- on lvm snapshots, wolf chose not to use, because they required sudo mount. it was unclear how the underlying disk would handle running out of space

pvs, vgs, lvs -- Physical Volumes, Volume Groups, Logical Volumes

stripped down linux

IBM 360 instruction set. Comprehensive. / CISC rather than RISC. Divided up by operation type. Designed as a high-level byte code to write business operations into.

IBM360 emulator, available under QEMU.

mainframes -- did io offloading

• wifi hacking

hacking presentations -- beginners-- helps to give examples, make it concrete, ground it

not: "hackers in a coffeeshop, going to pop you company"

but govt at point of entry, doing mass surveilance

war driving -- drive up and down a city block -- mac address header,

LoRA on satellite. $35k? sat

Like doing everything microcontroller based. WiFi Kitty. Export data, view in python notebook, google colab (or jupyter)

Seeed studio -- Hackster / dev kitty.

How did you get startup contracts?

YT videos -- people reached out.
Focused on creating a more concise and energtic ways of explaining it.

What do you want out of your time at Noisebridge?

Maybe tech some workshops.
At the nerd embassy -- always learning, always stuff to learn.

Questions, Discussion, or Coworking

• [Issue]

For next time

• Traveling Sales Problem -- TSP / solving big problems

Readings & Exercises

• Readings
• Exercises

Join online

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

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