Ahmad Saeed · Product Engineer
About
Ahmad Saeed builds things that respond: robots and LED rigs, interactive installations, games for activism, generated visuals, and AI tools. This site is a scrapbook of the projects he’s explored over the years.
The etymology of “niltoid”
A made up word that could mean “resembling absolutely nothing” or “having the characteristics of zero.”
- Nil-
- Latin nihil: “nothing” or “zero.”
- -toid
- From Greek-derived -oid: “resembling” or “having the form of.”
Music projects
Solo work
SoundCloud
GOD$
Band · Spotify
Push For Heat
Cover band
AA Bond
DJ act · Instagram
Cold Hands Collective
Former band · YouTube
How this site works
The Ask bar is meant to serve as the main navigation model for this site. Type in a natural language query and receive the posts that are relevant matches.
To accomplish this, this site leverages Jev, a System 1 model built for fast decisions, in contrast with the more deliberate System 2-style processing of reasoning LLMs. It accepts text context and returns one constrained answer per question. Three return types are supported: Noul (a yes/no probability), Choice (from given options), and Score. This limitation allows it to perform incredibly quickly and cheaply for the right kinds of problems. When a query is submitted, we run it against every article in one batch and receive a Noul response for each one. Local rules choose the layout from the query: editorial for general topics, a timeline for chronological questions, or a table for comparisons and skills.
A built-in keyword matcher also searches titles, summaries, tags and skills. If Jev is unavailable or takes too long, or if I spend all my Jev credits, the site uses those results to keep the Ask bar working.
Category and layout suggestions have precomputed answers: prepared selections of posts with a fitting layout, shown immediately. Jev and the keyword matcher also evaluate those prompts in the background so I can compare their results and improve the search. Suggestions that name a specific article open it directly.