elana elkhouri

What won't fit on a resume

I taught myself how to use ADMIXTOOLS in my sophomore year of high school and used to make like 2k a month doing archaeogenetic admixture analyses for people on the internet, but decided to open source my population rotation scripts instead of gatekeeping them. I still did some free labour bc ppl didn’t know how to use my stuff (well, how to read a README…), but a bunch of Albanian guys figured out how to do it and started to sell worse analyses for double my former prices on Balkan Facebook. The joys of open source. I’m the kingpin of a random video game’s cosmetic trading community; I run a few Discord bots and have made basically a mini Palantir with insane data processing pipelines that have fed on 5 years of constant trading and investigation data. This is how I got started with CV, LLMs, allat in the first place. I even learnt how to do DirectX shader and texture harvesting shenanigans to get the highest quality sprites possible for my auto advertisement maker thing. I do this all for free (on my own dime even) because I genuinely care abt the members and feel a lot of pride in what I’ve created. Honestly my favorite part is seeing how ppl interact with my bots— I made a random profile customization feature about 2 years ago, and every week I see ppl updating their themes just because it’s cute. Imo having ppl use it is more impressive than the technical stuff lol I know too much abt IQ testing/psychometrics. I’m a freak for history. I’ve worked on a mainframe from the 70s before. I did a quantitative analysis of how Charlie Kirk became a meme and regularly spent time digging (mostly useless, very schizo) internet anthropology rabbit holes. Idk man ppl say I must have more time in my day than they do, but it’s mostly a question of Doing Shit Immediately instead of putting it off for later. I do shit immediately. I was in and out of the hospital in HS due to serious medical problems that I’ve now recovered from. When I was in school I would zone out all class, not do my HW, do well on the exams and be pushed forward. I’ve always been good at standardized tests, but had no work ethic. This year, I’ve gone through a sort of ego death where I’ve realized that I wasted basically all of that time, and am now locked tf in. “You can get what you want or you can just get old” and I’m getting what I want dammit I use Linux btw