Published on by Nayar

Attending Biopunk Meetup in Frontier Tower

I was intrigued by this event so I decided to attend it. It was situated in Frontier Tower in San Francisco. The tower is dedicated to be a frontier in research. Each floor has people working on different aspects such as Robotech, Neurotech and AI among others.

Everyone was greeted and was welcomed to present themselves and what they are working on. It was very brief without any visual support.

After that we got to chit chat with the other guests. It was really awesome to meet scientists who are pushing the knowledge boundary. I hope one day i’ll be able to help the scientific community with my computer and programming knowledge.

 

Published on by Nayar

Vibe Coding with Convex Chef at Convex

My Friend Abdur from PyMug recommended me attend events on lu.ma. I found this awesome Vibe Coding Meetup from convex. I didn’t know convex company nor products so I decided to go there and try it out.

I was greeted by Wayne and he guided the participants on how to get started.

Since I was working on working my Frontend for my Kreole Chatbot, I decided why not ask convex chef to do it for me.

With 1 prompt, boom! It made me a whatsapp clone interface. But I wanted to interact with it. Send messages and reply back. I asked it to do that and it worked.

I was even more shocked to know that this is actually saving in the database. Crazy!!!!

Next step was to make it display the products from my chatbot. I thus asked it to create a carousel of products.

Magic once again. It looks so pretty. All the best practices from design i think are there.

But but but. When I asked it to make the add to cart functionality, it didn’t work due to some bug. My AI tokens were also depleted at that point and I started to debug manually.

I see it is a tiny error but since i was totally new to the framework, i couldn’t solve it.

And then came Food time and Demo time where everyone could showcase their vibe coded project.

 

It is such a cool office. They have guitars and drum sets!

Was a really cool experience. I invite everyone to try it out and let me know till where you are able to stretch it: https://chef.convex.dev/

Published on by Nayar

Using AI to Catch a Thief in Flic-en-Flac

A thief stole a bicycle on my porch and we have CCTV cameras installed. However, witnesses couldn’t recall the exact time, leaving us with three full days of footage to review. Watching it manually was impractical, especially since the mobile app couldn’t fast-forward remotely as it was not on the same LAN as the DVR.

We downloaded all 65 video files from the DVR, but even that was daunting. That’s when I turned to AI.

Using AI to Solve the Problem

I asked ChatGPT to write a Python script to detect bicycles in the footage.

The script worked immediately, but after some testing, I adjusted it to detect people instead—making it faster and more efficient.

It saved only frames with detected persons, reducing hours of video to just the important clips.

Tools and Setup

I ran the script on an Ubuntu machine with an NVIDIA RTX 4070 ti super GPU, which processed the footage quickly. What would have taken days was done in almost 3 to 4 hours.

The Moment of Truth

Reviewing the condensed clips, I finally found the thief on camera, riding away with the bicycle.

What do you think is the proper way to bring justice?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Published on by Nayar

Key Rate is down to 4% from 4.5% in Mauritius. Should you rejoice?

As from September 2024, the new rates came into effect.

Before starting to chant for your favourite politician, let’s see if its a good thing.

If you have lots of Money in the Bank?

Bad news for you. You will receive less interests per year on your savings account. You will now receive Rs 26,000 instead Rs 31,000 on Rs 1 million Rupees in MCB. So your money isn’t going to grow as fast in the bank.

If you have a current home loan?

Good news for you mate if you have a floating interest loan. You will be paying less on interest charges now as the PLR has also decreased.

So yeah. You may chant.

For new home buyers?

If interest rate decreases, meaning you’ll be able to get higher loan amount to purchase your dream price right? RIGHT? Sorry but nope.

Let’s consider a person getting Rs 30,000 per month as salary. The bank would give a maximum loan of Rs 1,832,710 to that person if the interest rate 6.75% pa. The person can therefore make an offer of Rs 1.8 million to a house owner to purchase. 

When the interest rate is decreased by 0.5%, the person will be allowable of a loan of Rs 1,930,222.

But you see. If you have money despite not doing anything, your colleagues also has more money to bid on the same house. In the end, you’ll end up paying the house Rs 1.9 millions. You didn’t make any “progress”.

Conclusion

Money is losing value.

Published on by Nayar

Breaking Even on FUNDKISS after 5 Years.

I have been investing on the FUNDKISS platform since 2019. FUNDKISS is a peer-to-peer lending platform based in Mauritius. Over the years, I have invested Rs 525,000. Today, i just broke even after 5 years!!!

There’s no point is calculating CAGR. Do you think it was worth it? If I would have kept the money in the bank, with interest I’d would have gotten much more for 5 years. I know COVID19 played a huge part in this sub par performance. I have lots of capital in default + arrears.

While I still have lots of capital outstanding, I don’t have any big expectations from them. Some projects haven’t paid me in 8 months. Most of the remaining ones are non-performers.

I’m glad I didn’t “lose” money in math terms but we’ll have to ignore inflation figures or even basic saving interest rate (3.1%) right now. How was your experience so far?