Riya's Riyaaz

I recently came across a reel on Instagram, by Shawn Kanungo, a recognized strategist and a keynote speaker. There was thrilling excitement in his voice as he announced the Sketchup + Claude partnership. He spoke about how an image of a floor plan can be input to Claude to generate a 3D model. Now, we all saw that coming. We are witnessing the boom of AI with each blink of an eye. I, myself have been chatting with Chat-GPT for under 3 years now. The time for architecture collab was due soon. Shawn's words intrigued me and so, I spent some time Saturday morning doing the same. I took an image of a floor plan of a random apartment and asked Claude Opus 4.6 to generate a CAD file.  1st prompt - "is there a way for me to give you a floor plan and you export it into a cad file or a 2D rhino file?" However, it couldn't produce a CAD file but a dxf file that could be used on various software’s.  The input for the first version was plain and simple. It did not do a good j...

In these cold winter months, I am starting to reminisce about the summer. Past summer, when I and Savan took a mini vacation in the Rocky's of Montana. We visited three national parks - Yellowstone, Grand Teton and Glacier.  We landed at the Bozeman airport and unlike any other major airport that is intimidating, this one was welcoming - a simple wooden structure, where we rented a car and made our way to Yellowstone National Park. We stayed inside the park in a lodge by the lake. Early next morning we witnessed the most beautiful sunrise and a couple bison's roaming in the heavily grown grass between the lake and the lodge. Our food for the entire trip was mainly oatmeal for breakfast and burgers for dinner.  Our first destination was the Old Faithful where we discovered that Yellowstone sits on a super volcano. The last time it exploded was 640,000 years ago. There is no rough estimate of when this can happen again. But when it does, it will wipe out three-quarters of N...