Hi! I'm Simar. I recently graduated from Penn State with a degree in Mathematics. For the past year and a half, I've worked as a research assistant in a materials science lab, building desktop applications for TEM image analysis that reduce researcher workflows from days to seconds. You can read more about that work here We're currently finishing the project and preparing a manuscript for publication. I'm open to opportunities and collaborations across industry, startups, and research. I'm especially interested in high-autonomy environments where I can work on challenging technical problems. My current interests include C, model interpretability (particularly for vision models), AI/Tech policy.

2026/06/14

• [9:16am] Futarchy: Vote Values, But Bet Beliefs (2000). A form of goverency where the elected define wellbeing measures and prediction markets determine the best policies.
• [!W]PORTMANTEAU

2026/06/09

• [4:49pm] Some interpretability resources:
  • ARENA: "deeper dives into specific areas of technical AI safety like interpretability, RLHF, and evals."
  • How To Become A Mechanistic Interpretability Researcher
    More broadly, check out similar posts at Alignment Forum
  • A Comprehensive Mechanistic Interpretability Explainer & Glossary

2026/05/28

• [8:53am] Here is a timeline to almost being employed:
  • [Tue, Apr 14, 1:50 PM] Applied to job. Pretty cool startup in NYC which leverages AI in private equity/Investment banks from a compliance pov.
  • [Wen, Apr 15, 1:00 PM] Call with CTO; one of the perks of applying to startups is process is usually very fast.
  • [Thurs, Apr 16 3:00 PM] Call with recruiter; they used a third party agency, genuinely, my whole process was so pleasent; s.o Nikki @higher people!
  • [Thurs, Apr 28, 4:00 PM] Call with CEO; in a way was my worst interview, happens.
  • [Thurs, May 11, 4:00 PM] Technical interview, med leetcode + AI-assisted system design. First for me and I think will be helpful in the future.
  • [Fri, May 15, 10:00 PM- 4:00 PM] Onsite in NYC; 1 Hr chat with CTO and CEO each; Lunch; 2 hr product design/ impl followed by 30 min discussion about it.
  • [Tue, May 26, 11:06 AM] Rejected. "We thought you did well on the technical side, but after discussing internally, we don't think the working style is quite the right fit for what we need at this stage.".
    Oh well, back to 0 again but with some valuable experience.

2026/05/25

• [7:31pm] What if interest stopped existing today?
  In [PDF link]"The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest" by Edward Chancellor, the first chapter retells the vision of a man named Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, "an anarchist, best known for his statement 'Interest is theft'." He argues that "The reduction in interest (to half a percent to cover the banks' operating costs) would instantly produce incalculable results all over the Republic and across Europe. There would be no more debt, insolvencies and bankruptcies would decline, consumption would increase, and labour would be guaranteed employment. Once interest was no longer taken by the parasitic class of lenders, worker incomes would rise."
  I'm wondering how fun it'd be to write about this as a thought experiment; I've always been fascinated by how federal policy, interest rates, and their indirect effects — mortgage rates, treasury yields, etc. — interact.
• [4:26pm] Co-creator of the Unix OS, Dennis Ritchie's, homepage
• [5:13am] Overnight, I also worked on a prototype for vimiumrc; vim is a text-editor which essentially makes the mouse obselte, super useful for programming; vimium is a chrome extension that lets you use vim like keyboard shortcuts to browse the web.
  Even when I was a kid, I could never sit still; memories of me walking in circles around my room while my mother quized me for school is still fresh in my mind, she would beg me to sit down, lest she get a headache just watching me; that habit still hasn't left me, but since I spend a lot of time at my desk, reading things on my monitor, it's hard for me to continue this since I eventually have to come back to my keyboard/mouse to scroll (lets ignore the fact that I'm blind so I can't read from afar in the first place :p ); henceforth, I am working on this tool which essentially make your phone a remote controller for your broswer; read more at the link.
• [5:09am] Been reading about AI verification this morning; also will be linking cool people and their websites I come across, check out @jasmine!;
• [12:46am] I tried to spend some time thinking what kind of work I want to do for the first time in my life. I don't mean a specific role as 'software enginerr' vs 'ml research', but more along the lines of purpose I guess. 20 days after your graduation feels like the right time to be doing this y'know.
  One thing that I could come up with was policy making; well, I'm not the maker, but I can do my part in make the jobs of the ones who are, easier, effective, and in line with current priorities.
  A way I could see myself doing that is working at institutions that already work alongside the government, and at this level to growth, what seems to be approachable are think-tanks.
  I will not lie, I have not done my homework in understanding if they actually have any net positive effect in the grand scheme of things. Hence, I've been reaching out to many people and applying for relevant roles.
• Looking for journalism (i) I enjoy reading (ii) is tractable (iii) whose funding sources I'm okay with. Some of which I found and read:
  • The Associated Press
  • ProPublica; more investigative and long horizon
  • Council on Foreign Relations; here is a cool read from them.

2026/05/21

• Gas Flaring for Compute.
  • Crusoe does this; [PATENT] Systems and Methods for Generating and Consuming Power from Natural Gas

2026/05/19

• Whats gets factored into choosing which exchange to primarily list a company on?
• Auto industry in the late 2000s; Obama administration's intervention.
  • [PAPER][!OPEN ACCESS] Restructuring of the U.S. Auto Industry in the 2008-2009 Recession