OTC CatchUp #249 Summary

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OTC CatchUps are weekly informal sessions involving project showcases and technical discussions. They are held every Saturday from 10:30 PM IST. Join in!.
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OTC CatchUp #249

Authors: Mohit Shetty · Ankush Kapoor

Date: 16-08-2025

Duration: 4 hrs 33 mins

Topics Discussed

Pranav initiated a discussion on whether operations on arrays or linked lists are faster.
- He also shared a video explaining that both had the same speed on older machines.
  - Arrays vs Linked Lists – Computerphile
Rishit shared several updates, from his NVIDIA highlight to issues companies face in the context of research ethics
- His AI project was featured in NVIDIA’s keynote conference
  - NVIDIA Keynote Video
- Shared a video explaining Level 4 vs Level 7 load balancing
  - Load balancing in Layer 4 vs Layer 7 with HAPROXY Examples
- Spoke about an intern at Bytedance who won a top award but was later sacked for malpractice
Chetan Jangir presented his ML project that predicts optimal compiler parameters for GCC
- ML-FlagOptNet - GitHub
Jaden mentioned that he’s working on maritime cybersecurity
- Intro to Marine Cybersecurity
Alpesh shared multiple updates ranging from serious security vulnerabilities to learning about different Microsoft technologies
- He is actively learning about Active Directory in Azure
  - Microsoft Entra ID
  - Purple Team - Active Directory and AzureAD v1 - Free Course
- He discovered that Windows NTLM is still used to store passwords in modern versions of Windows
  - NTLM overview
- He spoke about a loophole in GPL licenses which allows closed-source usage of open source code licensed with GPL
  - Understanding the SaaS Loophole in GPL
- He highlighted a serious Next.js vulnerability where adding a header could bypass authorization
  - CVE-2025-29927: Next.js Middleware Authorization Bypass - Technical Analysis
- He mentioned Nuclei - a security tool and its parent project ProjectDiscovery
  - Nuclei
  - ProjectDiscovery - GitHub
Jaden and Rishit had a discussion on whether transformer models could simulate AGI in the future
- The “Transformer AGI” Illusion: From Big Claims to Real Limitations - Article
Mohammed Kaif shared about a project he’s privately developing around music generation
- ACE-Step: A Step Towards Music Generation Foundation Model - Reference Paper
- Modal
Manan spoke about his web dev projects, including a Leetcode-like platform and an online chess game web app
Bhavesh shared a simpler version of the online chess platform he had shared about in previous catchups
- GitHub Repository
Harsh Kapadia spoke about how Preboot Execution Environment (PXE) is used to load network OS
- Preboot Execution Environment
Wilfred Almedia shared insights on infrastructure and API tooling
- Recommended HAProxy for rate limiting over directly using Django, or FastAPI as middleware
  - HAProxy
  - HAProxy Docs
- Shared about Unkey, a developer platform for modern APIs
  - Unkey Platform
  - Unkey GitHub
- Mentioned the use of older open-sourced versions of ScyllaDB as an alternative to the newer closed source version
  - ScyllaDB Official Site
Mohit shared about a project he’s working on that is focused on building an explainability toolkit in AI
Harsh Kapadia shared resources about provisioning and cluster management tools
Additional resources and links

Attendees

Meet Screenshot

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