Sudoroom is Made of People (August 2024 Newsletter)

Our August 2024 newsletter (Still being updated as we speak)

Events this week at the Space

8/26 – Octavia Butler predicts the future (Agents and debates with robots and more) – Women & Non-Binary hack night 7-9 pm Monday – get your hands dirty and control the future
8/27 Open Sewing and Making lab 2-11pm! so you can start in the afternoon
8/27 Lynn Conway Hardware Hack Night 8-???
8/29 – Thursday mornings 9-11am – Coffee & Algorithms: REVOLUTION!
8/30 – Design your own Museum Exhibit with Open-Source Blender – A 30 minute remote meetup teaser for an in-person Blender event
8/19 Monday – OCTAVIA BUTLER & OPEN-SOURCE AI: RAG & VECTOR DB – WOMEN & NONBINARY HACK NIGHT we continue our open-source AI workshop focused on Octavia Butler (see some of the prequels)
8/20 Tuesday – 2pm – 11pm – Open Sewing & Making Lab note that the hours are longer and extended!
8/20 Tuesday 8pm-11:45pm – The Wonder of Panoramas – Hardware Hack Night we explore physical and virtual panoramas in virtual reality and on paper
8/22 Thursday Morning – 9:30am-10:15am – Clique-y Algorithms – Whiteboard & Coffee Series – putting the soul back in soulless graph theory algorithms
8/23 Friday 4:30-5:00 pm – Speculative Design: Urban Planning around SudoRoom & Temescal – a short but sweet teaser online (remote) for an in-house UX session later this month

Motto: Appropriate Technology

Appropriate technology reminds us that before we choose our tools and techniques we must choose our dreams and values, for some technologies serve them, while others make them unobtainable.

Rainbow Magazine, 1977

Hippie Network Social Graph Theory in the 1970s

Hacking a Midi Controller

Shantea Controls hacked their midi controller to make rad music with help from Jake during hardware hack night!

Octavia Butler Theme with Open Source AI

After being stuck doing dozens of customer sentiment analysis and storefront chatbot examples, we decided to put the open-source and soul back into our Women & Non-Binary workshops with some Octavia Butler themes! Instead of mindlessly adding AI models, we also discussed the implications of open-source and transparency and read over some papers. Just about everyone was able to leave the evening with an open-source generative AI model and some code that ran whether they were on a Mac, windows or linux machine!

This upcoming Monday we continue for session two with RAG and vector databases!

Building a Virtual Reality SudoRoom on Open-Source

Visit us in virtual reality on your headset at https://sudoroom.github.io/webXRSudoRoomHarwareHackNight/ – Chat with Romy if you want to contribute and learn A-Frame for open-source webXR

Introducing Speculative Design Workshops Involving our Neighborhood

We’re starting with a short but sweet remote meetup next Friday with an introduction to speculative design. Eventually these will move to in-house workshops led by talented UX designers involving projects like “body-storming”, exploring the diverse immigrant neighborhood of Oakland, and imagining new technologies beyond our wildest dreams!

Use AI to imagine walkable streets, electric scooters, and immigrant food stands to create a healthier, more locally focused, and just Oakland!

New Posts this week

Note from our successful whiteboarding Session – Rust & Algebraic Datatypes led by Jade from Noisebridge – https://sudoroom.org/algebraic-data-types-in-rust-whiteboard-style-kung-fu-at-our-women-and-non-binary-hack-night/
Slices of Life from our Hardware Hack Night – https://sudoroom.org/slices-of-life-from-hardware-hack-night/
Our first successful collaboration at the Museum with Noisebridge’s Aaron – we even have a print handout from this collaboration on “Where is the Math in Art?” https://sudoroom.org/where-is-the-math-in-art-print-handout/
We’re adding more fine arts into SudoRoom Tech and Analog hardware projects with links to art on display at the Berkeley and Oakland Museums – https://sudoroom.org/dioramas-at-sudoroom-hack-night-preparation-we-are-not-coconuts/ we are not coconuts and we are note a remote-first hackerspace!

Robots Came to Play at SudoRoom

Robots can be friends too! (from our last hardware hack night session) – The BEAM robot is up and running and you can see more robot projects as we update our Robot project page.