bio Biography

tl;dr

Hey there! Most people call me Fab in real life. I am an orphan, atheist, empirical, totalitarian, versatile and creative professional with a results-oriented mindset and liberalist views. I'm often facing higher entropy which means more uncertainty or randomness in outcomes. I feel completely detached from any country, group or dogmas. I am a metaphysically displaced person. This dislocation and alienation is explained below by several factors, including repeated attacks on my family due to antisemitism, my Baháʼí faith, the concept of Catholic free will—which, in my view, should not apply to atheists (especially after what happened to Einstein)—and a strong ideological divergence with the Republic of France, the least liberal country in Europe. My background combines business acumen with a transdisciplinary perspective, allowing me to craft innovative and contemporary solutions by utilizing a broad, critical, analytical, strategic, creative, and cross-functional approach. My professional purpose and inspiration lie in harnessing the synergy between human intelligence and technological capabilities, driven by a desire and commitment to create a meaningful impact and contribute to value creation. I use Value Engineering to drive growth and efficiency through a quick technology adoption while unlocking the potential of technology and achieve remarkable results. I also design interfaces for educational purposes in the fields of economics, finance, algorithms, biology, and quantum science. The idea is to extend scientific concepts to stimulate thought and open new lines of research. I will write here few reflections as an independent thinker about my experience in consulting, sciences, emerging technology and travel.

Genetic affiliations

I was born the same day than Albert Camus, Marie Curie, the day of the establishment for the Nobel Prizes and Leo Tolstoy's death in the Julian calendar (November 20th in the Gregorian calendar). My first girlfriend was named Lisa, and I have roots in Bern, Switzerland 🇨🇭. I once worked for Steve Jobs, who had a Bernese Mountain Dog and named his daughter Lisa. My longest love was Australian. I'm a multiethnic being with some German Swiss 🇨🇭 🇩🇪, Jewish 🇮🇱, French 🇫🇷, Italian 🇮🇹 & Greek 🇬🇷 origins, prior to be an Eritrean like everyone 🇪🇷. If I was a dog, I'd be in a hell of a mess! My journey between Eritrea and Israel deeply intrigues me. I would be curious to know if my ancestries followed the traditional Eastern migration to India & China before coming back to Europe, or simply stayed in the Syrian and Egyptian zones before crossing the Mediterranean. My descendants were famous in France and in the expat world. One being a famous French assassinated writer in the nineteenth century, the other one being the first aggregate of mathematics in Morocco, with an expertise in algebra 🇲🇦👣 My deceased parents had a special connection to Linus Torvalds 🇫🇮 during their wedding in Villefranche-sur-Mer, as he shares the same birthday. Santa, if you catch my drift, is more blue and white—and Finnish. Walking from Villefranche-sur-Mer to the Rock of Monaco—roughly 17 km—is like journeying through the depth of the world: from the Mariana Trench to Everest, if you imagine walking vertically. But after too much injustice and too many disappointments, I have no intention of going back. I don't support organized religion, and I'm far from impressed by Hollywood, Al Pacino, or French politics endlessly playing their trivial games—simply because they refuse to work or evolve. I'd rather turn left in Italy, Switzerland or Belgium to reach Padania, Bernese Oberland or Flanders, which are the Northern industrial parts. This simple radius can be replicated worldwide. I mean by radius, a range (for planes), a radar (for weapons) or a simple circle that can be drawn with a compass on a map: about 3.5 hours of walk for 17km. Geography is super profound to me, because places usually mean something important. More than the superficiality that you can be found in South of France.

Introduction

This biography is an attempt to write hard and clear about what hurts. Like my initials say it, I'm a French entrepreneur, an eternal frequency, a French exception, I like exclusivity & faithfulness, finding enlightenment, fixing embellishment and focusing on exquisitenesses.

I struggled at work. I struggle with writing. I struggle with speaking publicly. I struggle with small talk. I am intimated by really smart people and nothing has been easy for me. Yet, I have been welcoming intentional struggles. Why, you may ask? Because realising the crucial thing is to get it right once and not look at your failures & move on is probably the most important value of entrepreneurship. The secret of getting ahead is getting started and always do what you are afraid to do.

I consider myself as an industrial, and I love markup languages because they act like a concrete slab of a building, are easy to implement and reduce security breaches. I studied traditional marketing at school, the web semantic stack & historical consciousness on my own. If you are wondering what it is, it consists using the present time (which has the advantage of being your own) for delving into the depths of your psyche and far into your past to try to conquer yourself while considering psychogenealogy if it applies. Here are useful quotes for this particular subject:

"There was no need of his telling to others who he was, for had not invisible messengers and unseen lips made known to her that he was to be her own?" — Emile Zola, The Dream, Chapter 6
"Your vision will become clear only when you look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes." — Carl Jung (Jim Rohn is also sharing this point of view)
"If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past." — Spinoza
"Study the past if you would define the future." — Confucius
"The dead are invisible, not absent." — Saint Augustine of Hippo

I read a lot, speak fluent French & English and have few knowledge in ภาษาไทย, Spanish and Latin, which I'm teaching on Instagram. I'm still convinced about the idea that "the more languages you have, the more worlds you belong to" and my knowledge is a little island in a great ocean of nonknowledge.

My musical preferences are very eclectic, ranging to experimental or minimalist jazz to classical music. I'm a DJ, fond of liquid Drum & Bass and underground house music, whether if it's tech, deep or minimal. One of my favorite moment is to find back white labels that I've been searching for 20 years 🤩🎵

My best friends are Labrador Retriever, Newfoundland, Vizsla & Bernese mountain dogs. I’m at my happiest when taking a new flight, hiking in the mountains and playing tennis on hard courts. Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, Pavel Dourov, Tim Berners-Lee, Steven Jobs, René Girard, Michel Serres, Eratosthenes, Galilei, Ptolemy & Pierre-Karl Fabergé are amongst my mentors. Edgar Morin, Michel de Montaigne, Pierre Dac, Pierre Desproges, Albert Camus, Voltaire, Carl Gustav Jung, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Idris Shah, Confucius, Mahatma Gandhi, Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī, Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Benjamin Franklin, Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, Maya Angelou, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, & Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel are my favorite writers to mention a few.

My least favorite words are "buzz", "political collusion", "denunciation", "inquisition" and "anachronism". My least favorite sounds are car alarms, nails down a chalkboard, kids crying, slamming doors & hearing about politics. My favorite sounds are silence or the waves from the ocean during nights. The most stupid sentences I have ever heard are "god bless you" / "god bless America" in English (first, it's a lack of tact and politeness to attribute a god without knowing precisely what your interlocutor thinks about religion. I would probably rephrase "May your god bless you" and finishing silently by thinking "when he isn't laughable or not too busy dealing with wretched situations". Then, almighty isn't powerful in Iran, Irak, China or India so he isn't universal (just like human rights), and the whole story of the Tower of Babel was just a mess and isn't viable as languages are born and die every day (just like species)). Regarding French language, my least favorite sentences are "il faut que je te parle" & "j'aimerais qu'on reste amis". The funniest sound I've heard recently was Tokay Gecko making loud calls at night in Thailand's rainforest. It's particularly funny as it sounds exactly the same as "toqué", which is a French slang for saying "crazy" 😂

Wiseness

The only wisdom is knowing you know nothing. The source of wisdom is pain. Pain is simply the result of your resistance to everything you are powerless to change. The measure of wisdom is silence (or how calm you are when facing any given situation). The ability to stay calm during conflict is a superpower. Nine-tenths of it is being wise in time. I'm planning to be a perpetual learner. Da Vinci was luckily saying "I'm still learning" at the age of 87 and I'm considering him as one of the greatest polymath. One of my favorite quote is "Philosophia Biou Kybernētēs", which means "Love of learning [lit. wisdom] is the guide [lit. helmsman] of life". I think it's important to remember you don't stop learning because you grow old. You grow old because you stop learning 🧠 Science and the pursuit of knowledge have no country, no religion, and no political affiliation. This love of knowledge must be complementary to a defence against the world’s contempt for the ignorant.

If you have an adventurer soul and carry the spirit of the child into old age, you can witness genius in life. Madness is genius too and talent instantly recognizes it; however, it has some limits and requires a lot of patience and efforts (1% inspiration and 99% perspiration). One of my péché mignon is to find new mnemonics or acrostics to create useful shortcuts no one else can see but you, to stretch your memory and strengthen your cultural knowledge 🐿️ An often-used acrostic in math class is: "Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally" for the PEMDAS acronym. This acrostic mnemonic represents the order of operations in algebra and stands for parentheses, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction. I'm a chess player, have studied direct opposition & Thai Language. Chess is commonly called "Hmākruk" (หมากรุก) in Thai while checkmate is commonly called "Rukḳhāt" (รุกฆาต). Just by learning those 2 words, it's possible to create a mnemonic out of it: you can externalise this by seeing an Irish or Scottish man like Sean Connery making a move with his rook ("Rukk" sounds the same than "Rook"), put your opponent in check, and then seeing him raising his hat after checkmate ("hāt" can be perceived as a "hat"). The choice of nationality refers to the "Mc" prefix because it's part of the patronymic surnames in Scotland and Ireland but you can also see Winston Churchill with his hat using a Mac or Red Hat Linux. This polyphonic "merge", can then guide you to other cultural facts, like the human migrations that mostly went from East to West, the fact that the Kingdom of Siam has never been invaded by anyone, or similarities between the oldest languages in the world and Latin (when you hear someone counting in Sanskrit, you can definitely perceive some Latin sounds derived from it)… It's just a way to be forever entertained culturally. I don't think I'll ever understand people being bored.

If considering religion is for people who fear hell and spirituality is for people who have been there, I'm a spiritual person, and I need solitude to empty my mind of people; then I rarely need people to empty my mind of me. I went from living in several megalopolis to extreme solitude in the mountains after having paid early some false company. Authors usually say that a man who either knows more than others, wants to become creative or inventive, or simply lives after his own rather than lives after the world's opinion, becomes lonely; the monotony of his quiet life then stimulates his intellectual mind. So far, my success is limited enhancing all that yet, however, that's an exercice I'm going to pursue to find out more about myself and maintain a recurrent learning cycle because it looks like real life anyway: when the moment is serious, important or difficult, we are always alone. On a separate note, I have realized it’s becoming easier and easier to be social, but exceptional people are often built in solitude. If you want to find out more about solitude, Arthur Schopenhauer is a fantastic author for that subject.

Religion

If God is real, why did he make me an Atheist? That was his first mistake. Well… the talking snake 🐍 was his first mistake 👹 On top of that, he wrote the French constitution with Comic Sans MS and omitted to get rid of the French strikes while being much more efficient in Switzerland regarding business, politics or euthanasia 😤 It's still happening today. Everyone is coding Qubits but the French are still talking about bloody Cubitainers 🥴 🐸 🧀 I still believe a big cloud can be more dangerous rather than 100 million prayers, and don't officially support what has been written in the Book of Genesis, including the viability of myths or third parties. Third parties are mainly there to be alerted when you scapegoat someone but they don't really make sense as they remain invisible to you. You won't be aware of them because you will believe you're doing the right thing, which makes non sense at all.

Out of 2900 gods, Zeus is probably the most viable to me in the Western world (considering he is aware about the final judgment which is not even certain). I believe few uncommon things such as:

  • Geospatial will always have a competitive advantage over Moses, who was probably the worst navigator on the planet 🗺️
  • It is by the book, and not by the sword, that humanity will conquer lies and injustice 📖
  • The more you know, the more you realize how much you still don’t know, which means the Orthodox faith is probably preferable to the Roman view 🇬🇷
  • Nothing tell us Mercury could not be sworn by Zeus to talk about Eros whenever he feels like it 🍝
  • I don't see why it's not recommended to grow your mindset and do your own religious mix (Baháʼí Faith is merging ideas by Abraham, Krishna, Zoroaster, Moses, Buddha, Jesus, and Muḥammad and there is nothing wrong with that) 💿

Religion and racism have a point in common: the world's ignorance create a lot of tensions and preconceived ideas. Most people omit to refer to Ali in Iran 🇮🇷 or Indra in India 🇮🇳 when they're traveling there because they are illiterate in theology. They have no clue about Titans and messengers either despite the fact they are also part of the game, and some of them don't even know the link between anthropology and Eritrea 🤦🏻‍♂️ 🇪🇷 Their excuse is generally pathetic, lazy and selfish as they always simplify everything to their almighty, not caring about the rest 🤷‍♂️ Being also ignorant in that field, at least I'm not showing off and constantly repeat "I believe your god is the best god 😃 I fear no one and respect everyone". Considering we also ignore everything about our own cells, it's probably the wisest attitude to adopt.

My views integrate scientific understanding, philosophical rationality, and a commitment to challenging outdated ideas while embracing complexity and unpredictability.

I’m a Darwinian and support the theory of evolution / linear evolution. I'm aware chaos highlights the complexity and unpredictability of how those mechanisms unfold over time by defying the idea of ​​predictable evolution. Anachronism, causality, and quantum theory sit among the teetering piles on my desk—enigmas demanding the serious study they so richly deserve. One great thing about chaos is that it doesn't erase scientific laws (i.e., the empirical evidence supporting the evolution or its mechanisms). Voltaire made me believe in a rational approach and deism as tools for progress, freedom, challenge outdated traditions, understand the world and reject traditional religious dogma. My tool of predilection is Deus Ordinator during business hours; This term that have been reinvented by scientists from the École normale supérieure in 1955 to translate "computer" in French, following to a request of IBM. A specialist in medieval Latin (Jacques Perret) thought about computer's performance as something very similar to what Saint Thomas Aquinas said about the understanding of God, whom he called "Deus Ordinator" [lit. god of knowledge, also known as "Thoth" in Ancient Egypt 🇪🇬].

The hallmark of independent thinking is disbelief in the fashionable religions of the day. It’s a strange myth that atheists have nothing to live for. It’s the opposite. We have nothing to die for. We have everything to live for. I like true facts that are scientifically proven, because beliefs do not change facts; but facts, if one is rational, should change beliefs. Being said differently, knowledge is something which you can use but belief is something which uses you. This is particularly relevant in our time when everything has become radical and based on approximations and not on well-founded knowledge. Pure knowledge is also the ultimate form of leverage because it creates enthusiasm. There is a ≠ between empirical knowledge (knowing that something is true) and explanatory knowledge (understanding why it is true). Knowing a fact is awareness; knowing the reason behind it is understanding. Facts tell us what happens, reasons explain why. Progress lies in the why.

My best advice is to laugh in the face of adversity, realize "no one else knows what they’re doing either" and remain happy (it really annoys negative people). People who criticize you have usually never achieved anywhere near what you have. Most of them would be too scared to even try, so keep going! Staying positive is an essential thing to do because in the end, everything will work out if you're doing your best. Japanese people condensed this idea with the なんくるないさ word (I have absolutely nothing against Shinto or Buddhism of course).

Travel

Despite what Audrey Hepburn wrote ("Nothing is impossible, the word itself says 'I'm possible'!"), the dialogic between my reason (remaining free) & my passion (fulfilling my bucket list) became impossible at my age because of a time issue. I have found an alternative which consists in staying a perpetual learner, focusing on wisdom, chess, deep learning and epistemology. I have a vagabond soul and lived 6 years on both cost of the US 🇺🇸, 6 years in the UK 🇬🇧, 2 years in Spain 🇪🇸, and 1 year in Tallinn 🇪🇪 + Dubai 🇦🇪 + สุราษฎร์ธานี (← which is Surat Thani province in Thailand 🇹🇭) for a crypto project. I wouldn't mind living in any continent on earth and I traveled too much to live with preconceived ideas; furthermore, the Bahá'í faith call for a borderless world is not such a bad idea in my sense.

I'm traveling a lot to extend my education & gain real life experience. I enjoy learning silently about their customs, work, traditions, architecture, etymology, culture (which I assimilate as a co-operating system for humans) & sciences because that's knowledge that books don't provide to me and it avoids to be doomed on certain things. The written word has taught me to listen to the human voice and life has thrown light for me on the meaning of books. I love scents, piece of art, five-minute conversations, a sunset in my rearview mirror, a story, a written note, a daydream. Nature is my kindergarten and I can also be easily dazzled by amazing landscapes, like mountains, lakes or forests. St Petersburg, Bruges, Zeeland, Firenze, Lucca, Verona, Treviso, the Dolomites, Tel Aviv, München, Hamburg, Pest, Tallinn, Pärnu, Ljubljana, Gstaad, Zermatt, Zürich, Del Mar, Big Sur are amongst my favorite places. So far, I have ventured to 9 US States, 37 countries (including 5 dependencies), and about half of the French Departments, most beautiful French villages, Spanish & Italian provinces. Like St Augustine said: “the world is a book, and the ones who do not travel read only one page”. There are 90 countries & 100 Unesco Worldwide Heritage sites on my bucket list and I'm resolute to see as many as possible, sort of feat for a long-distance runner 🙃 I will always have more options than time.

I often use those mottos as an Occam's razor at the end of a day where I haven't traveled "In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years… The reason isn't to escape life but for life not to escape myself… I'm not a son and citizen of a race or a fixed place, but a citizen of the world, beyond any land or time… The great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude… In life, you will find yourself walking down paths completely alone, but just because you don't have anyone to share your journey with does not mean you are going the wrong way… If you are able to be happy when you are alone, you have learned the secret of happiness". Patience is probably one of the hardest thing to have in life and we can't consider it as an ability to wait, but the ability to keep a good attitude while waiting. In others words, "Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass… It’s about learning to dance in the rain" — Vivian Greene

Economy

I’m much more influenced by Friedman, Von Mises and Hayek theories rather than the ones by Keynes, Piketti or Marx. I’m a strong advocate of liberalism, which isn’t a political doctrine and even less a political ideology, but a quite simply legal practice imbued with the most total pragmatism seeking to establish in a country what is agreed upon… Most people in France think that the functioning of the economy is linked to state spending although what makes a society strong is when the profitability of capital is greater than the cost of capital. Even French Economic teachers working in a sixth form college or respectable newspapers, such as Les Echos (which is owned by Bernard Arnault, the richest man in France) are certifying students inflation is an increase of prices 😄 It is important to understand here that it is not prices that rise but the value of the currency that falls. The rank-and-file politician always explains that if prices rise, it's because there are bastards who line their pockets, while it is he and he alone who is responsible for the drop in value of the currency. We must understand once and for all that if the price index rises, this does not mean that prices are rising but that the value of the currency is continually falling and that this is something that the politician has organized from scratch. Keynes was calling it the euthanasia of the rentier. That's something you can also understand by reading The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I tend to disagree with the politic currently being applied in the EU right now, because we systematically chose, each time we had a crisis, to increase the weight of the State in the economy. Europeans no longer live in a capitalist system, but in a Soviet system. By realizing the simple fact that European soil is devoid of raw materials, it doesn't really make sense. I believe the Internet should be an apolitical refugee and that it's essential to study economics and philosophy to be free, just like studying mathematics is required to understand physics, physics to understand chemistry, chemistry to understand biology, biology to understand psychology and psychology to understand economics. Freedom consists of choosing between two slaveries. Selfishness and consciousness. He who chooses consciousness is usually the free man. This is close to the growth mindset / continuous learning mindset I'm detailing hereinafter. Then, it's about always saying what you think and doing what you said. Blogging (maintaining a journal or a social account) is still a recommended option because it will enhance your interpersonal skills. Web3 and ChatGPT are more individualistic and proprietaries systems but they also worth an interest. Being passionated will keep enough curiosity in you, while wiseness will bring doubt. Then, you can simply wonder why environmentalists absolutely need to be leftists or why is it so hard to explain puns to kleptomaniacs as they always take things literally? 🐬

Science

Science has seen a number of major paradigm shifts, which have been driven by the advent and advancement of core underlying technology. I started my career in the Big Data-driven science era which was the fourth scientific paradigm. It quickly evolved in an accelerated discovery era in only two decades. At the present year (2024), AI is facing a data shortage, due to an unexpected speed bump: a data drought (as AI models grow ever smarter, they're starving for high-quality, real-world data to munch on). Major tech players investing heavily in artificial data generation, and these models mimic real-life scenarios, providing AI with a custom-built playground for specific tasks. Balancing synthetic and real-world information will be crucial for shaping the future of AI, as it is a high-stakes game with implications beyond the tech world.

I picked IT because I was seduced by this first "two-way communication" medium that is intelligent and allows customers to choose what they want to see, when they want to see it, and by the idea to work remotely and fix problems for my clients 24/7 wherever I am in the world… I believe in the progress of reason though sciences because no happiness is possible in ignorance, certainty alone makes life calm. It is only from knowledge of the truth that a better social state can be born. Albert Camus wrote "Man is the only creature who refuses to be who he is", and I consider it's great to perform iterations on systems to extend your memory, learn new things or simply removing barriers to adoption. If you don't belong to the IT environment, so far, the secret has been to give Boolean options to people Boolean (with "if" you can redo the world) while telling them there are two types of people in this world: the ones extrapolating from incomplete data 🫣🤭

Now, nature's cupboard is kind of bare and you have to reach really hard to make a modest discovery. And maybe that's just sort of a self-serving excuse of baby boomers who didn't do as much as the generations that came before, but it is very striking. One way to quantify this, if we say the rate of progress in broad fields is the same as it was 100 years ago, not that it's slow, but even if we say it's the same… If you think of PhDs, there are probably 100 times as many PhDs today as there were a century ago. It's the same rate of progress and the average PhD is 99% less productive than people were 100 years ago. That doesn't seem like a very healthy scientific ecosystem and it probably slowed. Another problem with postmodern theorists is that scientists mimic science with jargon and big theories to gain prestige, but lack its rigor. Obscurity replaces clarity, and ideology shields them from critique. It’s style over substance in the humanities’ quest for relevance.

I'm a problem-solver interested in open standards, interoperability & internationalization to scale content while trying to simplify people's lives in a pragmatic manner. I have always liked the initial idea of the Internet, which consisted in enabling everyone to read international press and communicate easily without any boundaries. I gave up being in the light long time ago because I've started from zero and already know I'll arrive at nothing. Like Twain was saying, it's difficult to make predictions especially about the future 🤭 The goal of science is to predict and not to understand. However, you don't know a science completely until you know its history. Usually, the shoemaker always wears the worst shoes, and in every technological job, you deal with constraints which lead to trials.

I always adopt a growth mindset to learn true facts ("I fail all the time… so I'm trying it again, telling myself that I'm capable, that I can learn or adapt, or become more flexible"). Curiosity leads to knowledge. Belief leads to ignorance. The statements of science are not of what is true and what is not true, but statements of what is known with different degrees of certainty. Fixed mindsets ("I already know this… if I tried once or twice maybe using the same technique, and if I don't succeed, then, I'm probably not capable of doing that…") are usually not recommended in sciences. Carol Dweck, psychology professor at Stanford, talks about it better than me on this video.

I’m passionate about large-scale design projects, minimalistic and functional designs, typography, simplicity, utility, the media and tools of my craft, and believe design plays a key role in the interpretation and associations of a brand or message. "Design can encourage examination and generate intrigue. Good design can help organize, prioritize, and enlighten. While design appeals to our sense of aesthetic, it must not stand in the way of delivery, cause complications, or introduce stumbling blocks. Design should ultimately simplify and facilitate our everyday life, enable us to accomplish our tasks more effectively, and ideally, delight us along the way." — Doug Bowman. I prefer websites over applications, especially the ones using a clean semantic and robust coding languages, configurability, and this enthusiasm is complemented by industry best-practices mentality, like:

  • CI/CD pipelines
  • ISO norms, progressive web-standards (W3C/i18n) and WCAG for Accessibility
  • 6 Sigma principles, Agile, Lean methods (such as Poka yoke [ポカヨケ] for mistake-proofing or error prevention in processes, or the Kaizen module [改善]), condensed in a sentence written by Mark Twain "continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection".
  • WPO (Performance = Potential minus Interference) & improved time responses…
  • Mach Alliance
  • ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) for Relational Database systems (SQL)

I’m astounded by change makers everywhere because it’s like watching a garden bloom, and I really enjoyed the DHTML scripting/XHTML/DIV-based design era because websites were not looking like "over-scripted lego blocks". Sun's Looking Glass, the Aqua interface, Movable Type blogs, Elementary OS or CSS Zen Garden were really pleasant interfaces to watch. Right now, I feel domination of the quantitative (number of devices/RWD) came to the detriment of the qualitative, however this might change again in the future.

Over the years, despite rare exceptions, I must say I'm somewhat disappointed by universality nowadays because only few people take a competitive advantage of what it can brings culturally and intellectually. Besides politics and economics, I think the web is interesting mainly because some people are still passionate about what they do and talk about their passions with their heart. It looks like the only way to avoid being a victim of State propaganda. In my eyes, it's still a crucial thing to "connect the dots", find gates to compare an industry with another one so that everyone can understand things with simplicity, externalise complexity in a simple image and use mnemonics to remember it, learn how to code or how to speak a foreign language, find local people when you're traveling to avoid routine and preconceived ideas, understand cultural differences and what's going on in every part of the world within few clicks, etc… I realise engines have issues because they mainly index sub-directories. Personal homepages are hard to find, content is segregated by countries, social networks are closed models dictated by algorithms and/or governments, and there are way too much patches & technological restrictions on some computing languages. Paradoxically, search results often brought more accuracy in 1997 with hierarchical engines (Lycos, Altavista, Yahoo, Infoseek) or few years later when Google brought so much innovation with algebra and data mining, disrupting everyone else with zero fanfare or marketing effort (the less buzz there is, the happier I become).

I am a determinist and do not believe in free will. The Jews believe in free will. They believe that man shapes his own life. I reject that doctrine philosophically. Especially since I noticed putrid literature, the squalid aspects of the human environment and a seamy side of human nature. In that respect, I am not a Jew. The conjunction of reflection and hypothesis undoubtedly constitutes the lifeblood of research, and the sciences only exist and progress through the conflict of ideas and theories as well as through the difficult victory of a deviant theory on the dominant and received ideas. European human sciences thinkers chased by Nazism are usually finding refuge elsewhere, while people of the hard sciences (the accurate ones) — whose thinking is impoverished —, cannot really use their mother tongue because they submit their work to journals which are only English-speaking. The use of English has disastrous effects on scholars who were born with other mother tongues. This is the case of many superior minds, like Léo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, Hannah Arendt, Judith Clark, Hans Kohn, Theodor W. Adorno, and so many others, who were educated in German, and who continued their work in English during the war because of the Nazi persecutions. Apparently, their thoughts were not formatted or impoverished 🙂 However, they endured a terrible intellectual and physical persecution prior to their moving 🙁

My best memories associated with the growth of nascent technologies include IBM's weak AI, IBM Seer 🎾, the transition on Mac OSX, the minification work of Bertrand Serlet on Snow Leopard, the innovative browser tabs initiated on Chimera browser, hybrid cloud architecture/containerization/kubernetes on Linux, server-side technologies such as Perl, Regex & Unix scripting, or generative AI. AI is great because it enables people to learn more from the data itself and be more deterministic when it comes to do some competition, form some equations, read some conclusions, make decisions, or say it's maybe rule based systems based on inputs. Many of these things can be sort of dramatically or trivalized. You can even find examples from the past that may fit AI. At the end of the day, if you're trying to mimic these biological systems, learn from the data or work on patent matching and learning, that is a useful AI. I believe they made progress on puns and black humour, however, systemic inequalities & historical discrimination are still a major issue. It looks like it's correlated to the democrats' problems, which can't really reduce inequalities or face the absurdity of racism despite reason. If you talk French, you might have to wait before answering questions like "Dis Siri, y a-t-il une scierie en Syrie ?" 😄 Current solutions are still evolving but there are still ethical, technical & practical concerns when it comes to understanding failures or risk in critical domains.

Quantum computing is going to bring many benefits by replacing binary data and bringing more accuracy in encryption, forecasting, AI, pattern matching, and new algorithms for pharmaceuticals and the stock market. Its potential for massively faster & efficient calculations alongside interoperability and kubernetes should solve a big amount of problems in big data (it's been a while that "the saddest aspect of life is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom" — Isaac Asimov). The main difference between technology and literature is easy to understand: on one hand, you have people raising questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago and only the reading of all good books can provide a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries, and on the other hand, inexact science that rules a good part of IT is a progressive idea mainly relying on people still living today, adjoining finance, surveillance & control, the absorption of economic cycles and predictive analytics (not just for digital, but also for raw materials). Unfortunately, very few layers or protocols are close to certainty today (Aethero plans on improving AI which is too fragile today to send it to space). "zero-error environments") like HTML (the "anti-seismic" predominant language of the Internet), genetic research, or military purposes, to name a few… Alan Turing wrote "If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent" while considering the Enigma machine as a tool for encryption rather than a machine with any form of intelligence.

To follow Alan Turing's idea, people have always said the definition of AI is passing the Turing test. To first approximation, we weren't even close to passing it in 2021, and it was more important for us humans, because it's either a compliment or a substitute to humans. ChatGPT's advancements effectively passed the Turing Test at least for an IQ 120 average person, marking a major milestone in AI development, allowing AI to convincingly mimic human conversation. The debate between Nick Bostrom's concerns about superintelligence and Kai-Fu Lee's focus on AI as a tool for surveillance may have been influenced by a kind of psychological or sociological suppression. The idea here is that these debates might have diverted attention from the imminent achievement of passing the Turing Test—the long-sought "holy grail" of AI research for the previous 60 years—because it was such a profound and disruptive possibility that people subconsciously avoided thinking about it. I'm tempted to give us almost a psychological repression theory of this 2010s debate, and I keep thinking that the Turing test is more important than the AGI debate, because it has the potential to drastically reshape society in ways that are more immediate and profound, while AGI is a vague concept and sort of an ambiguous thing. The assimilation between general intelligence and a generally smart human being still have unanswered questions like would it be a person with an IQ of 130? would it be superintelligence or godlike intelligence? Some people even went beyond this debate with the 3Q method (SQ/IQ/EQ), considering IQ might not be the only thing to define intelligence. There is a growing AI risk for companies that highlights how the emerging technology could bring about sweeping industrial transformation and few ethical issues around data collection and privacy that are already being patched with concepts like Edge AI or the TriSM framework. The future of tech will probably be rooted in integrity, and civic science should be the answer to social progress, civil empowerment, and aristocratic discourse. It's a common thing to say only a life of integrity pays off. It just takes a very long time. IT won't be just about advancing technology; it will be about advancing humanity. Innovations will reflect values, ensuring that progress is driven by ethics, not just by profit, and companies will probably continue seeking to integrate diverse perspectives with non-conventional ideologies (new computing languages are disruptive themselves to their own industry).

The story I generally tell about the last 50 years, since the early 1970s, is not one of complete stagnation, but of relative stagnation, where progress has slowed down in many areas. Back then, 'technology' meant more than just computers; it also included rockets, supersonic airplanes, new medicines, the Green Revolution in agriculture, and even ideas like underwater cities. Technology was broadly defined as anything that was advancing and bringing about change. We've seen limited progress in the physical world—the world of atoms. For example, we're not moving any faster physically. The Concorde, a supersonic plane, was decommissioned in 2003, and today, with added security measures at airports, it actually takes longer to fly from one city to another. Highways are more congested than ever, with no real solutions to traffic jams, so we're literally moving slower than we were 40 or 50 years ago. Moreover, our screens and devices often distract us from this stagnation. For instance, when you're riding a 100-year-old subway in New York City and looking at your iPhone, it's easy to be impressed by the latest gadget. But at the same time, you're being distracted from the fact that your physical environment hasn't changed much in a century. On the other hand, there's been significant advancement in the digital world (the world of bits). We've made great strides in information technology, including computers, the internet, mobile devices, and now AI. We could wonder if this stagnation is a feature or a bug? It’s frustrating that so much has been inert. But if we had continued accelerating in every field—like developing supersonic and hypersonic planes, hypersonic weapons, and modular nuclear reactors—maybe the world would have already blown itself up by now. So, we might be on the stagnant path of the multiverse because it offered some protection. Even though this stagnation has, in many ways, negatively affected our society, it might have prevented worse outcomes. If technology such as faster-than-light travel, like a warp drive, exists, it would revolutionize military power. You could send weapons at warp speed, and they would hit their target before anyone even saw them coming. There would be no defense against a warp-speed weapon, allowing you to potentially take over the entire universe before anyone had a chance to react. Universe is not mathematical. It’s algorithmic, so we are fine. If it was possible, something extreme would have to be true on a cultural, political, or social level. I can only think of two main possibilities: either you might need a completely totalitarian society where individuals have no free will. In such a society, everyone could be connected through some sort of psychic mind-meld, preventing anyone from launching a warp drive weapon independently. No one could act outside of the collective consciousness. Alternatively, the civilization would have to be made up of beings who are perfectly altruistic, with no self-interest—essentially, they would have to be angels. So, the conclusion I come to is that the suppression of free speech is either made by demons with total control over their society (we can think of dictatorships, modern democracies, dystopians, introverts, rational & ethical egoism, ignorant people, free will, collusion, politics (in general), lobbying, big tech companies with no ethics…), or angels with perfect altruism (we can think of rejected determinism, agent causation, old democracies, extraverts, hedonism, objectivism, philosophical realism, libertarians, non-political philanthropists, "enthusiastic" sales people working in IT, poor & middle "innocent" class not trying to control the mass, non-profit inventors, Open-source environments…), everything being a fiction of course, with demons & angels belonging to all parts of the political spectrum ⁉️ while mysticism & supernaturalism persist (I wish they'd disappear to simplify the whole thing!). Best thing to do is probably try to seek to understand before you seek to judge, for only through understanding can true wisdom be found. Never let a single judgment fill your entire view, for every rule has its exception, and every one-sided truth conceals another.

I still read and learn about science on a daily basis because it doesn't claim to know all the answers. Science will progress steps by steps by elucidating enigmas and discovering mysteries — like a carrot and stick of reality — with daring tests, followed by corrections (that's what scientists call iterations). It should be an object of passion for philosophers. Not as a set of certainties, but as an endless well of those enigmas, an inextricable mixture of light and darkness, testimony to an incomprehensible encounter between our imaginations and what is. "I keep the subject constantly before me, and wait till the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light." — Isaac Newton.

I think women's equality is also a prerequisite for development. I did my best to increase the presence and number of women entrepreneurs so that they could control what they can. It's not always easy to stay genuine and never let what somebody else says distract you from your goals. The key is very often to privilege friendships between women, while making them realize failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result. Fear often grows from our vulnerabilities, feeding on self-doubt and sometimes being amplified intentionally. Where fear resides, there lies your challenge, and it must stay a test to overcome. Murphy's Law: the fear of missing out drives you to miss everything ("He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears" — Michel de Montaigne.)

Work

I started my career at the beginning of the fourth scientifical paradigm in Holland, where we were studying people's incentives to predict a person's behavior and set incentives to control a person's behavior. This beautiful country is also well-known for Guido van Rossum, the inventor of Python. I have previous roles at Apple, Google & IBM and had the opportunity to work on Pixel codes technology, Internet-ready Oracle Database, 10X sales cycle (under the direction of Mr Steven Paul Jobs, one of my greatest mentor), Social Monitoring (SMM), as well as a self-taught front-end developer for The Brewery in Richmond, London, under the direction of Dr Paul Stead, (formerly CEO of the Fitch Design Group) and Christopher Dangtran, famous for its Benetton campaign in the eighties. The great thing about engineering is that you are in a position to change the world - not just study it. I have been dealing mostly with modern aspersion refusal, syntax and semantic optimization, HTTP & Windows errors for SME's and consulting for large accounts. I enjoy helping entrepreneurs reaching their endeavors because they always refuse to be who they are. It's great to make your people first priority so the rest can follow, because there is nothing better than a faithful customer (especially when obsolescence is taken in consideration 😶💰). Progress that has been made between DevOps and Development should be exemplary for the border between Tech and Sales, because there is very few common sense between those two worlds (talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish). Throughout my career, I always kept in mind the words of Pascal regarding transdisciplinarity "It is impossible to know the parts without knowing the whole and likewise to know the whole without knowing the parts" and I clearly did not need persuading to get my hands dirty, but it wasn't my role to debate with politicians which doesn't care about the details anyway (Aquila non capit muscas in Latin which translates in "the eagle does not catch flies" 🦅) because they don't want to be useful but important 💩 The same way I'm not going to start using buzzwords, I'm also not going to buy into the fake politeness, the lying, the office politics, backstabbing, and the passive aggressiveness. If you want to be a clear thinker you cannot pay attention to politics because it’ll destroy your ability to think. It's a well-know fact to realize most companies end up being either sales-driven or engineering-driven and, if you want to be customer-focused, you can't be either of those. It's like talking about the French ethnic slur "Travail Arabe" (poorly, lazily executed work) without telling the truth (Haroun al-Rachid's clepsydra was offered to Charlemagne to measure the flow of time and appeared too complex for French). I enjoy people who intuit business values, but I regret they won't understand the techniques to understand computation or data structures because they have to consider a great amount of laws, which is often a sign of malady for a country. The best government is where less unuseful people are. Groucho Marx was saying "Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies".

Influence

Between 2017 and 2014, I've created French Riviera guide to talk about my birthplace, to inspire globe-trotters from around the world & to contribute to the happiness of others. I used to live in Provence & the French Riviera for about 20 years, back in the golden age that followed the 30 glorious years. I was acting as the founder and individual contributor on French Riviera Guide, which became a reference to showcase the publications of the most talented photographers in the southeast corner of France, help enthusiasts discovering must-see spots or hidden gems in a fun and intuitive way, inspire thousands of globe-trotters and Côte d'Azur lovers in the world and represent the French elegance & cultural heritage. The community reached 380.000 followers on July 2024.

My personal boilerplate regarding my social activity is still available here and below is my favorite statement regarding social media: "I think a social system must be both closed and open. Closed to safeguard its organization and identity. Open to feed on foreign contributions that it integrates and assimilates. Do your best to magnify people's strengths, rather than their weaknesses. It's not always an easy thing to do, but it's truly a peaceful way to be, and a beautiful legacy to leave."

Being an influencer has very little to do with your title or where you rank in an organization. It's mainly linked to a blend of passion, hard work, tenacity, altruism, patience, empathy and discipline. Be patient, it takes 10 years to build a career in anything. You’re never too old to set another goal, create a vision, reinvent what you have learnt (learning was easy, unlearning will be hard), think like a scientist, practice critical thinking, performative utterance or unlimit your brain. The goal is to become the best at what you do, and keep redefining what you do until this is true. When working, surround yourself with people more successful than you. When playing, surround yourself with people happier than you. Anyone can do it and I'm happy to answer your questions if you have a similar goal. Also, it's not about being the biggest or writing to be read. A mistake any performer can make is to look at the audience (if you don’t care to be liked, they can’t touch you). You usually lead by distilling knowledge from the noise, applying 10.000 iterations, and being willing to walk alone… Twitter is irreplaceable for intelligent introverts, and Instagram is a great tool to feature places. There are a lot to see in this area, and many local influencers have talent throughout the world.

France

Most of my childhood was spent in France (Provence, the French Riviera, Normandy, Paris and the Pyrénées mountains) and from now, I won't have distraction there. I don't like the idea of a country where people are hanged that much if they talk; Thomas J. Watson said once "A man's greatest care should be for that place where he lives longest". I'm still maintaining an Instagram account for my native place, however years of love in my childhood have been forgot in the hatred of a minute, I've been seriously tormented in the depths of my soul several times there, and it left deep wounds on the destiny of my life. Besides the French anachronism and mimetic system which I dislike because it is used way too much against quiet entrepreneurs or people living in the future, the Southern mentality suffers from laziness ("Dolce Far Niente" is an Italian disease 🇮🇹 meaning the "Sweetness of doing nothing"), and the Parisian microcosm is closely linked to the political world, which encourages continuously its administration while taking the exact opposite direction of my values, openness, business acumen and support for committees. Unless you read books everyday to externalise your mind and learn what's going outside the UE, their medias are dangerously influencing people the same way since decades regardless your political views (each channel is colluding with a specific party, and Arcom (which looks like the headquarters in The Lives of Others) is dissecting personalities and intellectuals to redistribute fairly those political opinions across all TV channels). They don't ban hate speech directly, they ban speech they hate.

We live in a world where we have invented machines to do almost everything. We absolutely do not need hands, we need a qualified population in order to operate those machines. It certainly isn't by importing illiterate which will live on social transfers and exporting our doctorates who prefer to leave due to harmful economic conditions, that France will ever progress or succeed in maintaining the age pyramid of social security.

Two famous quotes by Plato helped me realise most people were lying and made me leave the country forever: "Never discourage anyone who continually makes progress, no matter how slow" regarding business, and "No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth" regarding politicians. I think the French will bitterly regret not reading or writing more often in silence. My best answer to their social hubbub is to combat mental health stigma by promoting public awareness campaigns, education, advocacy, industrial and heritage strengths, travel tips or transmitting passion or know-how. It became the great patient of Europe and is also, by far, the least liberal country of the Fifteen. I am currently not under any illusion for this ossified country because it is perpetuating an anachronistic pattern (things have stopped changing and research is exclusive and reserved to experts). I was also fed up with the monolingual aspect, the fact remote work isn’t generalised, the doctrine of the catholic church, the huge taxation rate applied for some entrepreneurs, the paradox between the intellectual collapse applied by the Lisbon Treaty on traditional medias with a 80/20 ratio and the fact knowledge increases everyday, the disappointing career perspectives or a myriad of educational lies. The reason is explained by the fact that the State is aware about everything and wants to control the private sector and your destiny if you live there. Think twice before moving! Bare in mind roosters are the only animals singing while walking in the poo, and that they are usually afraid by the sky falling on their head, that might be the reason why they always try to put talents down 😊

The French constitution recently inverted their motto by placing equality on top of liberty (which is freedom) in order to delete them both, following Milton Friedman's following quote: "a society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both". Thomas Jefferson also wrote "The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not." That's what happened to me there so many times. You can definitely live a happier and less stressful life in a dictatorship. France is a disguised democracy with an authoritarian state, promoting golden parachutes or their army, and I don't think deindustrialization is a clever way to look at things. It will become harder to compete with the Brics because of the lack of raw materials. No need to mention most digital progress is either American or Chinese. There is this terrible quote by Orwell, already confirmed by Sir Bill William Gates regarding AI: "If you want a picture of the European future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever" 🇮🇹.

California vs London

The crazy thing about California is that there is a sort of a right wing or libertarian critique always saying it's such a ridiculous place that should just collapse under its own ridiculousness. It doesn't quite happen because the macroeconomics are pretty good. 40 million people and the GDP is around 4 trillion. It's about the same as Germany with 80 million or Japan with 125 million. Japan has three times the population of California. Same GDP means one third per capita GDP. So there's some level on which California as a whole is working, even though it doesn't work from a governance point of view, it doesn't work for a lot of the people who live there. A rough model for how to think of California is Saudi Arabia. California's culture of Wokeism and Saudi Arabia's adherence to Wahhabism represent two very different but equally fervent belief systems. Not that many people believe it, but it distorts everything. And then, and then you have like oil fields in Saudi Arabia, and you have the big tech companies in California, and the oil pays for everything. The government sector is completely bloated and you have distortions in the real estate market, where people makes lots of money. The government and real estate are ways you redistribute the oil wealth or the big tech money. It's not the way you might want to design a system from scratch, but it's pretty stable. People have been saying for 40 or 50 years that Saudi Arabia is ridiculous and that it's going to collapse any year now, but if you have a giant oil field, you can pay for a lot of ridiculousness. I think that's, that's the way to think of California today.

For sure, my experience in London was a great experience to strengthen reflection, enhance force of character and amount of energy to refute what you don't like, learn about victory which requires no battle, or kill any idea unless it is an opportunity. England is a taste for concreteness and spoken truths. A Londoner told me one day "if you live in London, you can live in any other place in the world". I started by considering "winners never quit" or alternatively the famous "Never Give up" by Churchill, followed by Seth Godin's iteration who countered with "knowing when it's ok to quit". Winners quit all the time, they just quit the right stuff at the right time. It's about never giving up and create your own path. Nowadays, the US is still the best place to make money in the tech industry and Europe is one of the best place to spend it. So if you're in the making money part of your life, it's hard to beat the US. I didn't appreciate the American economy until I left it. People start from yes here. How can we work together? How can we build something together? How can we make money together? London, it's sort of like a very plight, indefinite maybe. There's very little actual organic value creation in London. It's people servicing other people's wealth that they made elsewhere. There's nothing like America that says to a young person. If you work your ass off and you're really good and you get a little bit lucky, things can happen for you here. That's a personal parenthesis after living both in the US and in the UK. No one book contains everything you'll need to know for starting any kind of business. Heavens & illusions are made to disappear, while time & knowledge are also escaping you, so nothing is easy 🙁 After applying consistency, results should follow and few surprises should help your guidance.

7 things to remember:
· Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises.
· There is a woman at the beginning of all great things.
· Nothing great in the world was accomplished without passion.
· It's important to always do what you are afraid to do.
· Create new things every day and contribute online (it's selfish to keep it to yourself).
· Teach everything you know (it helps you learning better).
· Work at the intersection of your heart (doing what you love) and helping others.

In cujus fide; Écr.l'inf.
fabien@linuxmail.org

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