ABOUT

I'm Saad. I'm from a small city in Pakistani Kashmir called Mirpur, located next to a large dam called Mangla. I suspect this is somehow relevant to everything.

My origin story is that I used to play too much of my uncle's bootlegged Civ III on his computer as a 6-year-old.

I grew up loving history and spent the COVID pandemic collecting the largest dataset of fortresses in Pakistan with over 170 sites recorded. Pakistani embassies and members of parliament shared it on Twitter. I'm building a dedicated site for it next.

I achieved Enlightenment when I read The Selfish Gene in high school. It introduced me to the simplest evolutionary simulation, the hawk-dove game , which I recreated while first teaching myself coding. Wait, so it's that simple? You can just make things out of thin air? This coding stuff is neat.

I guess I can just do things.

I came to SF at 16 to study Computer Science at Minerva University graduating in 2025 after having lived across 6 countries in 4 years. Along the way, I worked on ML research and spent my senior year at a YC-backed startup as a founding AI engineer.

Recently I have been asking myself: do I want to be on the receiving end of culture, or create it? I built this site to think out loud and to push myself to write more in a structured way.