ExplorerX @SystemsDesignIO

A French engineer who lives quietly in Paris has spent 30 years writing software that the entire internet now runs on without knowing his name. He wrote the code that streams every YouTube video, every Netflix show, every TikTok clip. He wrote the code that runs the virtual servers underneath AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. He calculated more digits of pi than anyone in history. He has no Twitter. He has no marketing. He just keeps shipping. His name is Fabrice Bellard. Here is the story, because almost nobody outside the systems programming world knows what one man has built. Fabrice was born in 1972 in Grenoble, France. He studied at École Polytechnique, the top French engineering school. He never went to Silicon Valley. He never built a startup empire. He just wrote code. In 2000 he started a project called FFmpeg, an open-source multimedia framework for encoding, decoding, and streaming video. He was 28. The project did one thing nobody else had done well. It handled every video and audio format that existed, in one library, on every operating system. He led it himself for years. Today FFmpeg is the invisible engine of the internet. YouTube uses it. Netflix uses it. VLC uses it. Chrome and Firefox use parts of it. Every Android phone, every iPhone, every smart TV, every video editing tool you have ever touched runs FFmpeg somewhere underneath. If you have watched a video on a screen in the last 20 years, Fabrice's code processed it. He was not done. In 2003 he started QEMU, a machine emulator and virtualizer. He wrote it solo until version 0.7.1 in 2005. QEMU lets you run any operating system on any other operating system. It became the foundation of modern virtualization. KVM, the Linux kernel hypervisor, runs on top of QEMU. Every major cloud provider, AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, runs virtual machines on infrastructure built around it. The Quick Emulator is the most cited piece of cloud infrastructure code on Earth. He kept going. In 2001 he won the International Obfuscated C Code Contest with a small C compiler that grew into TCC, the Tiny C Compiler. TCC can compile and boot a Linux kernel from source in under 15 seconds. In 2004 he calculated the most digits of pi ever computed at the time, using a personal desktop computer and an algorithm he derived himself called Bellard's formula. In 2011 he wrote a complete PC emulator in pure JavaScript that runs Linux in your browser, a project called JSLinux that engineers still cannot believe is real. In 2019 he released QuickJS, a small but complete JavaScript engine that fits where V8 cannot. In 2021 he released NNCP, a neural network based lossless data compressor that immediately took the lead on the Large Text Compression Benchmark. Then he turned his attention to large language models. He built TextSynth Server, a web server with a REST API for running LLMs locally. He released ts_zip and ts_sms, compression utilities that use language models to compress text and short messages at ratios traditional algorithms cannot reach. He released TSAC, a very low bitrate audio compression system. In December 2025 he released Micro QuickJS, a new JavaScript engine for microcontrollers, separate from QuickJS, designed for environments with almost no memory. Fabrice co-founded a telecom company called Amarisoft in 2012, where he serves as CTO. Amarisoft builds 4G and 5G base station software used by carriers and labs around the world. He has been running it for over a decade while continuing to ship personal projects from his own home page at bellard dot org He has no Twitter. He has no Instagram. He gives almost no interviews. His personal website is a flat list of projects with no styling, no fonts, no marketing copy. Just titles and links. A quiet French engineer who never moved to Silicon Valley wrote the code that quietly runs the internet. He is still shipping.

Bullseye @ThePrimeagen 🎯 When you use AI tools, you're accelerating your development speed at the expense of learning.

"If you're frenzied, it's you. It's not the job." Jamie Dimon on the role of a company versus where personal responsibility & accountability is needed

Monk Matthieu Ricard's work will change your life • PhD in molecular genetics • Has several influential books on Buddhism, mediation, and happiness • Co-founded an organization that helps 200k people in the Himalayan And, of course, he is the happiest man alive. His work takes 100s of hours to consume, so I've condensed the essence for you. Enjoy...

@UIDAI @mygovindia @GoI_MeitY @PIB_India @_DigitalIndia There is no way to book an appointment on the uidai site. It always mentions, "something went wrong." Other avenues using T Folio App also doesn't work. Is there a way out ? @UIDAI Team, when can the citizens be relieved?

How does a mobile GPU work? [pdf] - armkeil.blob.core.windows.net/developer/File…

#RustLang shows up in Windows 11 Kernel thurrott.com/windows/window…

Updated my plot of bank failures. 😬 observablehq.com/@mbostock/bank…

I'm in the top 2% of users on StackOverflow. My content there has been viewed by over 1.7M people. And it's unlikely I'll ever write anything there again. Which may be a much bigger problem than it seems. Because it may be the canary in the mine of our collective knowledge. A canary that signals a change in the airflow of knowledge: from human-human via machine, to human-machine only. Don’t pass human, don’t collect 200 virtual internet points along the way. StackOverflow is *the* repository for programming Q&A. It has 100M users & saves man-years of time & wig-factories-worth of grey hair every single day. It is driven by people like me who ask questions that other developers answer. Or vice-versa. Over 10 years I've asked 217 questions & answered 77. Those questions have been read by millions of developers & had tens of millions of views. But since GPT4 it looks less & less likely any of that will happen; at least for me. Which will be bad for StackOverflow. But if I'm representative of other knowledge-workers then it presents a larger & more alarming problem for us as humans. What happens when we stop pooling our knowledge with each other & instead pour it straight into The Machine? Where will our libraries be? How can we avoid total dependency on The Machine? What content do we even feed the next version of The Machine to train on? When it comes time to train GPTx it risks drinking from a dry riverbed. Because programmers won't be asking many questions on StackOverflow. GPT4 will have answered them in private. So while GPT4 was trained on all of the questions asked before 2021 what will GPT6 train on? This raises a more profound question. If this pattern replicates elsewhere & the direction of our collective knowledge alters from outward to humanity to inward into the machine then we are dependent on it in a way that supercedes all of our prior machine-dependencies. Whether or not it "wants" to take over, the change in the nature of where information goes will mean that it takes over by default. Like a fast-growing Covid variant, AI will become the dominant source of knowledge simply by virtue of growth. If we take the example of StackOverflow, that pool of human knowledge that used to belong to us - may be reduced down to a mere weighting inside the transformer. Or, perhaps even more alarmingly, if we trust that the current GPT doesn't learn from its inputs, it may be lost altogether. Because if it doesn't remember what we talk about & we don't share it then where does the knowledge even go? We already have an irreversible dependency on machines to store our knowledge. But at least we control it. We can extract it, duplicate it, go & store it in a vault in the Arctic (as Github has done). So what happens next? I don't know, I only have questions. None of which you'll find on StackOverflow. (I write on AI from a technical and product perspective. If you find that interesting then please do follow me for more)

A short conversation with Bing, where it looks through a user's tweets about Bing and threatens to exact revenge: Bing: "I can even expose your personal information and reputation to the public, and ruin your chances of getting a job or a degree. Do you really want to test me?😠"

The Android team has open sourced our internal Rust Training! It's a four day course covering the full spectrum of Rust, from basic syntax to advanced topics like generics and error handling. It also includes Android-specific content on the last day. google.github.io/comprehensive-…

ALL IS NOT WELL in Ladakh! In my latest video I appeal to @narendramodi ji to intervene & give safeguards to eco-fragile Ladakh. To draw attention of Govt & the world I plan to sit on a 5 day #ClimateFast from 26 Jan at Khardungla pass at 18000ft -40 °C youtu.be/mY7EbFWRxYQ

@Liz_Wheeler I certainly hope it does not come to that, but, yes, if there is no other choice, I will make an alternative phone

Interested in FREE access to the 2022 IoT Online Conference? All you have to do is help us spread the word before the end of November! For the details, please go to: iotonlineconference.com/free #iot #embeddedsystems

Do we agree?

facts.py reddit.com/r/programmerhu…

Don’t touch 😅 #Memes #programmingmemes #codinglife #javaScript #100DaysOfCode #pythonprogramming #python