About OTC CatchUp

Note OTC CatchUps are weekly informal sessions involving project showcases and technical discussions. They are held every Saturday from 10:30 PM IST. Join in!.
For all summaries, please visit catchup.ourtech.community/summary.

OTC CatchUp #195

Date: 03-08-2024

Duration: 5 hrs 13 mins

Topics Discussed

  • Rakesh Kumawat talked about his AI project which essentially took in a PDF as an input and he could then ask it questions. He used OpenAI to help with the AI-side of things and Pinecone as a Vector Database for easier AI-based text searching.

  • AWS

  • C

    • Graphics

    • Turbo C

      • Siddharth also told us about a project that started porting Borland’s Turbo C source code to GNU GCC

        • The project has since fallen out of date and doesn’t compile on a modern Ubuntu 22 installation. Siddharth contacted the project’s creator to ask if they could update the project to make it compatible with the current version of gcc.

        • With Kartik Soneji's help, we understood the author’s reply.

        • Essentially, the author said that since Turbo C was written in an era of 16 bit computers, programs expected int to be 16 bits and long to be 32 bits, etc.
          In the past, the project inserted preprocessor directives like #define int int16_t before the standard libraries were loaded to patch the code into behaving correctly on modern systems.

        • This used to work, but the modern standard C library has evolved a lot, making it more complex and prone to breaking from blind patches like these.
          The project author believes while it’s possible to work around the specific issues, it’s a loosing battle since patching the standard library is not a viable long term strategy.

      • Siddharth was enthusiastic about continuing the project by exploring alternative approaches like a transpiler that translated old TurboC code into code compatible with a modern C standard like C17 or C23.

  • Harsh Kapadia shared Frogger but it’s ASCII art.

  • Kartik Soneji shared Tetris at the MIT Green Building.

  • We talked about Metaprogramming.

  • Nishant Goel asked about an issue that he was facing, where he was not able to upload files to his Amazon S3 bucket from his web app. Turns out that it was a CORS issue.

Projects Showcased

  • Siddharth Kaduskar showcased updates to his project 'Bunker', a centralized platform for professors to update attendance and for students to monitor their attendance records seamlessly.

    • He showed us how he implemented various CNN, Clustering and Regression algorithms to be able to identify table columns and rows in attendance sheets without using a service like Nanonets.

Attendees

  1. Aaditya Nitin

  2. Abhigyan Bafna

  3. Bhavesh Kukreja

  4. Chirag Nayyar

  5. Darshan Rander

  6. Darshit Suratwala

  7. Dheeraj Lalwani

  8. Harsh Kapadia

  9. Jaden Furtado

  10. Kartik Soneji

  11. Mohit Gangwani

  12. Rishit Dagli

  13. Siddharth Bhatia

  14. Siddharth Kaduskar

  15. Swapnil Borkar

  16. Viranchee L

  17. jaden furtado

  18. Abhinav Singh

  19. Alpesh Bhagwatkar

  20. Anil Harwani

  21. Arthur Smile

  22. Gajraj Singh

  23. Isha Madlani

  24. Lokesh Chachad

  25. Nishant Goel

  26. Pranav Prasanna

  27. Rakesh Kumawat

  28. Sahil Bansal

  29. Sarvesh Huddar

  30. Shashank Gupta

  31. Tarun

  32. Manav Methwani

Meet Screenshot

Meet #195 screenshot

Note For all summaries, please visit catchup.ourtech.community/summary.

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