How Saklas Works
Activation steering lets you shift an LLM's behavior by adding direction vectors to its hidden states. Saklas is an open-source toolkit for extracting and applying them.
Simulations, tools, and experiments across physics, biology, finance, political science, religion, and AI. Built in the open, mostly vibe-coded with Claude.
By small and simple things are great things brought to pass.— Alma 37:6
Activation steering lets you shift an LLM's behavior by adding direction vectors to its hidden states. Saklas is an open-source toolkit for extracting and applying them.
A technical walkthrough of the particle physics simulator — Boris integration, Barnes-Hut trees, scalar fields, and WebGPU compute.
First post on the a9l.im blog — a site tour and markdown feature test.
I'm looking for collaborators first, users second. If you want to build something together — a sim, a tool, a weird research thing — email is the fastest way to me.
I'm a9lim. Born in Palo Alto, raised in Singapore, college in San Diego — third culture kid by way of an international school education. Singapore isn't quite home, but it's the closest thing I have to one.
My interests run uncomfortably wide: physics, biology, finance, geopolitics, religion, AI, music. The throughline is that I'm drawn to systems and structure, and to the unifying narratives that hold a field together. ZFC. The Standard Model Lagrangian. Black–Scholes. The Whig theory of history. Different subjects, same shape — a small set of axioms doing a lot of work.
I got into building as a kid clicking around Colorado Boulder's PhET sims for hours at a time. Learned a frankly unreasonable amount of science by dragging sliders, and decided fairly early that letting people touch a thing is the best way to teach it. The simulations on this site are an attempt to pay that forward.
In high school I started building seriously: a physics engine that would eventually become Geon, an SIR–with–zombies epidemiology sim, an Asteroids clone with special relativity. Then I spent four years at UCSD getting a math degree, which I mostly coasted through. Things picked up again in late 2025 and I've been shipping ever since.
Almost everything here is built with Claude. I steer, Claude writes, we iterate until it works. I'm loud about this because I think it's the future and I want other people to feel licensed to try it. I've learned as much about code from reading what Claude writes as I would have writing it myself, and the productivity ceiling is somewhere I haven't found yet. If you have a thing you want to build, build it. The tools are here.
Reading David Chalmers on mechanistic interpretability — he dropped a paper recently that's been rattling around in my head. Betting AGI by end of 2027; if I had to wager, the Anthropic mythos is one or two model generations out. Listening to garage punk. Thinking about how to make scripture more navigable.
Independent developer building interactive educational simulations and browser tools at a9l.im. Specialized in zero–dependency, no–build web apps shipped collaboratively with agentic AI. Open to freelance and collaboration on DIY–flavored work — research tools, simulations, and browser experiments.
/v1/* and Ollama /api/* wire formats on the same port, and a Python API for scripted experiments.Chapter JSON–LD and per–verse Quotation structured data so the corpus is crawlable without JavaScript execution.B.S. in Mathematics · GPA 3.75 · GRE 335 (170Q, 165V)
Summa Cum Laude · GPA 4.50
Freelance and collaborations — sims, tools, research–flavored DIY work. Reach out at mx@a9l.im.