I build production systems that handle real money,
and I publish the dead ends as openly as the wins.
Open-Alpha-Lab (live) · guillain@poulpe.us · FR / EN / ES · near Venice
Contract engineer, three careers deep.
I ran a systematic global-macro fund, spent a decade reverse-engineering closed protocols, and today I run a legal-grade transcription platform on my own.
Same thread throughout: systems that work in production, and a healthy suspicion of clever ideas that don't survive a test.
Everything below has a repository you can open.
I take trading ideas apart and publish a plain verdict on each: a real edge, or a mirage.
Folklore, well-known factors, viral "90% win-rate" threads — all run through the same reproducible, tested engine. No cherry-picking.
Hundreds of studies. Most are mirages. A few are real but fragile.
Only three hold up as genuinely investable. The busts get published too.
→ Browse the live, interactive results
A custom openFPGA core that runs the original Game Boy Camera on the Analogue Pocket with the sensor live — new photos, no cartridge limit.
PocketRoll — the core plus the research that
cracked it: SRAM format, checksum fix, .sta save decoding, sensor passthrough. Documented for
newcomers and for byte-wranglers.
MugDump — pull the photos back off and develop them into real images.
Now — a legal-grade transcription platform, end to end, solo. The product (a Whisper + LLM pipeline with anti-hallucination guardrails), the 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 engineered 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.
DS2-Anywhere — open decoder for the Olympus DS2/DSS dictation format, closed for ten years. Now heading upstream into FFmpeg (ticket #6091, open since 2017).
FLAC Detective — catches MP3s smuggled into lossless files. The good part is the honest ML write-up: four approaches that failed, and an "AUC 0.99" false discovery I caught before it fooled me.
Prometheus-Station — solar Raspberry Pi serving offline Wikipedia over a long-range LoRa mesh, for when there's no grid.
HAP-Revival — keeping Sony's HAP-Z1ES and HAP-S1 audiophile players alive after Sony stepped away in 2021.
A few contract engagements a year — systems that have to work, not demo.
Production LLM and Whisper pipelines (billing infrastructure included), file-format and legacy reverse-engineering, trading and market-data plumbing (FIX, low latency, backtest to production).