I open what others lock, and ship systems that survive a test — not a demo.
ex-$9B/mo systematic fund · a decade reverse-engineering closed formats · production systems that bill
Open-Alpha-Lab, live · guillain@poulpe.us · FR / EN / ES · near Venice
Most software is locked, most hardware gets abandoned, and most "edges" are just claims repeated until they sound true. I open the formats, revive the hardware, and put the claims through a test that doesn't care what I hoped to find.
What survives goes to production — real money, on call, no demo mode. What doesn't gets published anyway. The dead ends aren't failures to hide; they're the receipts. Intellectual honesty is the only edge that compounds.
Open-Alpha-Lab — a quant research desk, in public. Hundreds of trading "edges" — folklore, the factor zoo, viral 90%-win-rate threads — run through one reproducible, cost-aware engine that returns a plain verdict: real, fragile, or mirage. Most are mirages. A handful survive. The busts get published too.
PocketRoll — the original Game Boy Camera, running live on the Analogue Pocket from a custom openFPGA core, with no cartridge photo limit. Ships with the reverse-engineering that cracked it: SRAM layout, checksum fix, .sta save decoding, sensor passthrough — documented for newcomers and byte-wranglers alike.
FLAC Detective — catches MP3s smuggled into lossless files: an 11-rule spectral analysis plus a CNN. The best part is the honest ML write-up — four approaches that failed, and an "AUC 0.99" false discovery I caught before it fooled me.
- Seedforger — a .NET 8 revival of RatioMaster that fakes torrent stats convincingly, then ships the formal proof that even a perfect version optimises the wrong variable.
- DS2-Anywhere — an open decoder for Olympus's DS2/DSS dictation format, closed for ten years; now heading upstream into FFmpeg.
- HAP-Revival — keeping Sony's HAP-Z1ES and HAP-S1 audiophile players alive after Sony walked away in 2021.
- Prometheus-Station — a solar Raspberry Pi serving offline Wikipedia over a long-range LoRa mesh, for when there's no grid.
- MugDump — pulls the Game Boy Camera photos back off the hardware and develops them into real images.
Now — a legal-grade transcription platform, end to end, solo: a Whisper + LLM pipeline with anti-hallucination guardrails, a nine-server fleet, and the whole money chain most engineers never touch — invoicing, SEPA, dunning, reconciliation, fraud. On call. Real invoices.
Before — a fully systematic global-macro fund. I built the entire trading stack and took monthly volume from under $100M to more than $9B, on a low-latency FIX path into LMAX.
Before that — roughly ten years reverse-engineering protocols and copy protections for the paid security press.
A few contract engagements a year — systems that have to work, not demo. Production LLM / Whisper pipelines (billing infrastructure included), file-format and legacy reverse-engineering, and trading / market-data plumbing (FIX, low latency, backtest to production).