Unintended computations, sideways thinking, rigorous craft.
I'm a software security engineer, and this is my personal website. I love hunting for beauty and accidental logic where neither belongs. I turn printers into game consoles, specs into bugs, and Swiss mountains into GPX routes. Selected pieces:
Upcoming Talks
Unintended Computations: from unexpected computers to a security methodology for finding hidden execution surfaces.
Computation - Turing machines where nobody meant to create one
🎰 A Minsky machine in ncurses terminfo (October 2026)
ncurses terminfo parameter expansion can simulate 2-counter Minsky machines. Use /usr/bin/top to clock a Minsky machine computing Fibonacci._
🦄 Unicode's Transliteration Rules Are Turing-Complete (July 2026)
Just three lines of Unicode transliteration rules (UTS #35) can compute Collatz on stock ICU, which ships with every major OS. Featuring Rule 110 and a prime number generator.
🧩 Computiles (PagedOut! #9, July 2026) A geometric binary calculator built from 10 tile shapes, co-designed with my son Émilien. Addition and subtraction become tiling puzzles in which only the correct result fits. (wooden tiles)
Security - Specifications, implementations, and wrong assumptions
💥 CFXMLParser crashes on a 7 bytes input
💥 IPC Panic, a four-call kernel panic in Apple XNU, up to macOS and iOS 26 included
💣 Parsing JSON is a Minefield (2016–2018)
The spec fits on a business card, yet no two parsers agree on what valid JSON is. Widely cited since 2016.
Drawing - Computational graphics, maps and visual experiments
🗺️ Cartopolis (July 2026)
OpenStreetMap compiled into static binary packs that a browser rasterizes in 1999-style GIFs. No server, no post-processing. The aesthetic emerges from enforced constraints.
PostScript - A programming language disguised as a document format
🖨️ Programming in PostScript (2025)
This printer language is a full programming environment. Enough to run Tetris and Sokoban, or even chess directly on the printer.
Contact: nicolas at seriot dot ch.
