Hey there!

I'm Mahbod
I live in Bremen, Germany, and I study PhD at the University of Bremen.

I had no idea what else to write here, so I asked ChatGPT, “How would you describe me without being a kiss-ass?”, and it said:

“A systems-thinking nerd with strong taste, low tolerance for bullshit, and a compulsion to turn serious ideas into playful, slightly unhinged experiences.”

Which is neither very informative nor particularly precise. But as I said, I had no idea what else to put here (thank you, Lars!).

Also, take a look at my Latent Space project, where I try to share some nerdy puzzles — hopefully every month.

Interests

I spend a lot of my free time playing Age of Empires II, and I am actively looking for more people to play with. So if you also play or even want to give it a try, feel free to contact me.

Despite my hatred for Ameritrash games, I am generally a board game enthusiast. Recently, Lars introduced Mage Knight to me, which is a game that you can apparently win very easily by first disabling PvP and then body-blocking other honest players. Somehow though, I started to enjoy it way too much. I also never imagined myself sitting alone playing a board game by myself, but the solo mode of this game is surprisingly fun.

At some point, I also started making a board game by myself where—mostly inspired by my own academic difficulties—players try to submit their own jobs (i.e., code) to a shared computer cluster in order to run faster, or sometimes just to mess with their fellow lab members. I did some initial playtesting, and it probably needs more work, but hopefully it will be finished at some point in finite time.

I am not so good at chess (and somehow, I am totally fine with that and never felt like improving myself), yet I still play one or two Blitz matches every day.

I am also a football fan (the one where you use your "feet" to play with a "ball", not the one where you throw an egg and kick each other). I support Real Madrid (¡Hala Madrid!) and play as a goalkeeper for the University of Bremen team. Last year, we became champions of the LBSV league (...of the third division, but still, champions!).
Here is a picture of us with our trophy:

I am also always on the lookout for hackathons; and by hackathons, I mean proper, goddamn in-person events where you spend your weekend fighting for your slice of free pizza and try to squeeze in maybe two hours of sleep on a concrete floor just to ship a project (that you will never look at again for the rest of your life) on time. Not one of those lame personal-project show-and-tells that they call “online hackathons” just to promote their half-working frameworks.

I have always had great experiences at hackathons. Once in Edinburgh, we pitched self-warming socks that you wear inside a car for some reason, and also won an Amazon Echo for a project I can’t even remember.
And once in Oxford, a sponsor gave us a bunch of 3D data (PCD) from their smart cars and asked us to make the best possible visualization. So naturally, we decided to show the data inside Minecraft. And then, obviously, we had to build a tool to scan yourself (using LiDAR) and put yourself into Minecraft.
Somehow, that won us the prize.

Unfortunately, I have not found any interesting hackathons since I moved to Bremen. So, if you found any around here, please let me know!

Programing

Previously, I had this section filled with all the programing languages and libraries I used, as well as the projects I worked on. Recently though, after using a bunch of AI coding models and seeing how impressively good they have become, I started to question whether this is still relevant, or if it will be relevant in the near future. So, I decided to instead make this a very short description of how I feel about the programing languages that I know.

Currently, most of the time (99% of the time) I am using Python. I like it. It is simple, it is enjoyable, it is fun to work with. My past experience has also shown me that “if there is a way to do it in Python, just do it in Python”. Like any other sane human, I do my AI stuff in PyTorch. Sometimes, I even try to write my own custom PyTorch AutoGrad implementations, and then I cry. Back in the day, I also tried some web development with Python and did some Telegram bot development using FastAPI and Flask, which was fun.

I once saw this blog post and I was like “Hell yeah!”. So I started learning Julia and used it for my master’s dissertation, which led to my Spiking Neural Network (SNN) framework, FastSpike.jl, with fast GPU-based simulation. Do not regret it. Will not recommend it.

I had to learn MATLAB and R at some point, which ironically made my life much better — because every day that I do not have to use these abominations of programing languages, I am a bit happier. I used to be able to write decent C++ code, but it has been a long time since I last used it. If there is ever a good excuse, I will happily jump back in and relearn it. I also wrote some Solidity code for a blockchain course at university, and that was fun.

Frequently Asked Questions