Colophon
I'm making this website as a way to share things that I find cool and/or that I've created.
Hello there! My name's Anatole, I'm 20 years old, and a student at EPFL, in Switzerland. In the past, I've also lived in France (where I grew up), as well as in Sweden and the Netherlands.
My interests trace a weird shape in semantic space, spanning elements of robotics perception, machine learning, and mechanism design, with bits of ethics. Sometimes, small spikes pop up to reach topics like urbanism or compute management. One common thread is that I've been consistently interested in things that involve multiple agents interacting together and causing complex behaviors to emerge – I was mesmerized by protocols like Bitcoin or voting systems in high school, long before I'd heard of CS+Econ or complex systems.
When I learned programming in middle school, it was nothing but a means to an end: I was working on building an everything app that did all the things the school wouldn't build. That included a way to track your GPA, and a way to rate the cafeteria's dishes (french fries came out on top). I put a lot of thought into making something that not only worked, but was also nice to interact with. It turned out to be an exhilarating process, like making art. Building this very simple blog (or, more accurately, telling Claude to) threw me back to that era.
So, why did I build this website? Well, I'm trying to write more things down, including concerning my projects –1 I've developed the bad habit of stopping my projects when I'm 90% of the way there, as soon as I've uncovered most of what I wanted to know. Now that I have a spot to publicly share documents, my hope is that it'll act as a motivator for me to get that figure up to 99%.
To make up for lost time, I'm planning to write up a temporary article about my past projects in aggregate.
1 I shall shamelessly copy Terence Tao's em-dash disclaimer, and assert that any you read on this website will be typed manually by myself.