Salai Vedha Viradhan’s Post

The Irony of Investing 🔺When Prices are Rising: Phones, Cars, Clothing, etc. – “Oh man, the price is too high. I am not gonna buy right now.” Stocks – “Dude, did you hear that this stock went up by 20% last week. I am buying more right away.” 🔻When Prices are Falling: Phones, Cars, Clothing, etc. – “Dude, things are on sale. I’m gonna buy right away.” Stocks – “Oh man, the stock just fell by 20% last week. I am gonna sell off everything I’ve got.” Humans are brilliant. #investing #investment #stock #market #human #behaviour

That Reality Makes Me Sad I started fumbling around computers at the age of five, wondering how the hell my computer manages to beat me in chess every time. The fact that it can even play games made me go nuts. Fast forward 10 years or so, I picked up Blender trying to make some pretty pictures using my computer. It took an eternity to render out a clean image without much noise on my PC which had a whopping 4 GB of RAM. Fast forward another 5 years, I stumbled upon the OptiX Denoiser that finally made it possible to do clean noiseless renders at decent resolution in one-tenth of the time on my – then proud of – 1050 Ti card. It felt like magic. Fast forward yet another 5 years, today we have Midjourney and ChatGPTs of the world, and saying that I’m mind-blown or astonished only pales in comparison to what these things are capable of. What I used spend hours on – meticulously placing assets, tweaking the lights and composition, doing post production, etc. – now seems to possible with just a prompt (or few prompts) away. What next? Where are we heading? I am not a fan of predicting the future, but looking at how things have progressed over two decades, I can’t help but to wonder how the world is gonna look in 10 or 20 years. Forgetting about how AI is gonna change this or that, the big picture seems to be clear – more and more of roles in the spectrum of ‘technical’ work are becoming obsolete. In May of 2021, Paul Graham wrote, “There has never been a better time to be a ‘nerd’. In the past century we've seen a continuous transfer of power from ‘dealmakers’ to ‘technicians’ — from the ‘charismatic’ to the ‘competent’ — and I don't see anything on the horizon that will end it.” When I read that article, these words that jumped out of the screen: “transfer of power from ‘dealmakers’ to ‘technicians’ — from the ‘charismatic’ to the ‘competent’”. I wanted to give Paul a high five when I read that. So beautifully worded. But he ended that paragraph with a line that reads “At least not till the nerds end it themselves by bringing about the singularity.” That was just 3 years ago. Today, the world is shifting towards a future where the ‘how’ doesn’t matter anymore, and it’s all about the ‘why’ and the ‘what’. Where ‘expertise’ doesn’t matter anymore, and it’s all about having a ‘vision’ or being able to ‘dream’. Where the ‘technicians’ don’t matter anymore, and it’s all about being a ‘dealmaker’ who knows what they want. In 10 or 20 years from now, who will be the technicians? What will they do? Will we have technicians at all? Are the only technicians going to be people building the AI? If that's how the world is gonna look – a world where I no longer have the opportunity to watch a potter make a pot out of clay, an artist paint a portrait or a landscape from a blank canvas, or to make pretty renders and build things myself, or what not – it doesn’t make me happy when I think about it. That reality makes me ‘sad’. #ai #technicians

Create & Edit Meshes Using BMesh API: The BMesh API in Blender allows you to create or modify meshes programmatically using Python. This can come in handy when you want to do a series of operations on an existing mesh, or when you want to generate models from scratch based on a set of parameters. Let’s see how it works 👇🏻 #b3d #python #bmesh #generative #procedural

Dynamic LODs using the Handler API – Blender Handler API #1: When working on a scene with a lot of assets, it's a good idea to use proportionately lower levels of subdivision as assets get further away from the camera. But how do you do this efficiently when you are dealing with a large number of assets, say 50-100 or more? The Handler API allows you to write simple handlers that get triggered every time a certain condition is met. In this case, we can think of the camera's movement as a trigger. Camera movements, among other things, are captured in the depsgraph_update_pre and depsgraph_update_post handlers which get triggered before and after any change to any objects in the scene respectively. Using this, we can write a simple handler function that gets called every time the camera moves. Roughly, the handler would work something like: 1) For every object in the scene, calculate the distance between the object and the camera. 2) Determine the appropriate subdivision level based on predefined distance thresholds. 3) Assign the calculated subdivision level to the object. Which would create this effect: #python #b3d #handlers

Love the perspective!

Everyday, I come across at least one such post where someone portrays Zerodha as the worst ever broking platform. A few things to be grateful for: 1) Equity delivery is free, while brokers usually charge a percentage of the transaction value or a flat fee even for small transactions. 2) No annoying marketing emails, push notifications or in-app banners. 3) Nudges that do quite the opposite of what industry nudges do: they look out for you instead of the company. 4) Subscribing to primary issues of government securities are free. 5) Mutual funds investments are completely free. People need to step out and try other brokers to be able to appreciate the transparency, simplicity and value Zerodha provides.

Ask successful people who have been working for a long time how many times their initial salary do they earn now. Now compare it with the growth of an index like NIFTY 50 or S&P 500 during the same period. I am pretty sure they would have beaten the market by a WTF margin. 😬

This is the first book I read when I started learning Python back in 2013. Beautifully written and requires no prior knowledge. My favourite part of the book is (not sure if it is still in this edition) the introduction where there is a comparison between how a ‘Hello, World!’ program looks like in the C++ version of the book and how it looks in Python. That’s all it took for me to get convinced Python is THE language I wanted to learn. I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to get started with Python. Unless, of course, you belong to the ‘I-prefer-videos-to-books’ camp, in which case, you are at a loss. :D #python #pythonprogramming #thinkpython