Meetups/Infra/2025-12-08

Spec driven development (spec precedents, RFCs, ADA/design by contract), TPUs/GPUs/accelerators a bit of what why & how, NoiseGarden k8s cluster demo feat. X.noise redirects to X.garden.noisebridge.net (at least on NB lan/wifi), membership portal.

Introductions

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

• Loren - bg running this meetup
• Jet - software extremist, do some NB things, why the wiki's been down so much, how to
• Wheezy - work in infra, play video games -- generally look like trouble, but I'm not, also a game developer and a uniwheel-racer
• Josh - prime attendee - plays with computers for fun
• Derek - spec-driven development
• Jeanie - 50 years ago my parents liked to bowl, I think this is more fun
• Herschel - presses buttuns
• Dan - likes computers
• Frank - mostly does software
• Max - back again
• Cole - also back, does linux mostly, needs to ACTUALLY write software
• Doug - likes computers, wishes he were more interesting
• Lulu - i came here to learn
• Elan - aspiring devops person
• Kevin - likes computers, software dev, also aspiring devops, occasional game developer
• LX (on the discord) - maintain game development, meets downstairs on Wednedsays. We need maintainers, guild bus factors > 3-5. Working on a new member portal for NB
• Chris - used to be a devops person, in the year dot com crashed, the crashing is back, things haven't changed but I'm no longer a network admin. Now build satellites. Pulling aerospace practices out of the 1980s.
• Daniel(Web) - is leaving

Announcements

• NB16 nb.wtf/16 party this weekend

(share with your friends!) TLDR:

• • Friday, hack-a-thon (stupid hackathon) e.g. zipper for bananas + cli Tinder (so you can meet the ASCII character of your memes)
  • Sat: class-a-thon
  • Sun: party + hack-a-thon judging

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!

• Spec-driven development

putting vibe coding on rails
SpecKit (GitHub) - a tool called Specify generates config files for your project, 

claude code
cursor + cursor cli / agent
openai codex

• • Help bit of history

Kevin: in my father's generation of programming, they had to create a binder, to pass around a plan, get sign-offs -- required to write code before it could run on the mainframe.

the human must still architect (for best results on earliest attempts)

• • RFC

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1149
https://dotat.at/tmp/ISO_8601-2004_E.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools'_Day_Request_for_Comments

• • the styles of content in an RFC oand just as usefully in a spec, may include details of data layout: bit, byte, or element level detail. Reference to other standards, private ranges. Notes, warnings about use. Requirements of

• • This idea of spec driven development -- sounds like ADA, design by contract, define your own
  • Concern from me & organization: When you play with LLMs, you don't have repeatability. How do you get assurance about the output

Alex, who came last week — asked multiple models to validate that models built what they should, or are testing appropriately and adequately

Ensemble of LLM outputs. -elan

• GPUs TPUs APUs - https://considerthebulldog.com/tte-tpu/

https://jax-ml.github.io/scaling-book/tpus/

TPUs, GPUs, why use them:
   for linear algebra
   
   gaming
   universal funcation approximators
   weather prediction

Why not CPUs?

(cpus are good at branch)

constraints breed creativity

difference between shipping by shipping container vs airliner

tpus

embedded hardware - power constraints

asm intrinsics
sse, sse2

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/docs/intrinsics-guide/index.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsic_function

js programming game, constrained https://untrustedgame.com/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/375820/Human_Resource_Machine

• NoiseGarden Demo

.noise domains -> .garden.noisebridge.net

• NB memberportal https://t0.vc/m

putting in place before nb16
follow up in discord #members-and-donors-portal  (differs now from membership-

Outros

• Kevin - interesting hearing about spec kit and tpus. High-level about TPU of interest. Modern phones come with ability to run small models. Close to real-time. Run YOLO, CNNS.
• Elan - thought I understood accelerated matrix multiplication, that TPU article looks good
• Lulu - learned full name of RFC "Request for Comment" - more about workflows, pJ pico-joules
• Doug - think spec-driven development would impose good behaviors, good to explore.
• Cole - spec driven dev, .., what "intrinsics" meant (compiler-provided funcs)
• Max - lots of reading to do, intrinsics - how do they even
• Frank - spaceport v interesting, seeing how it's used at calgary
• Dan - curious about protospace.
• Robert - all confusing, + Jet
• LX - collective demo project using spec-driven development
• Herschel - TPUs learned I have more to learn
• Jeanie - spec driven development interest. So behind on AI
• Derek - intrested in GPU microcode, sneaking instructions in there without using the compiler. CUDA
• Josh - games a bit
• Wheezy - ty elan for putting me on hardware...
• Jet - showing off my meme

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