Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- In 2006, in my first job after uni in France, I wrote a toy PaaS system called CASIMIR based on qemu. It was a lot of fun, I could via a web UI launch VMs, access them via VNC, etc..
I've always had a lot of admiration for Fabrice Bellard, I always wished I was as good an engineer as he is.
by fguerraz - My jaw dropped when I read this guy wrote ffmpeg AND QEMU!!? Thats insane levels of talent and capability. I remember looking through the source for QEMU and it appeared monstrous in its scale. Dude is a legend, no wonder Carmack is complimenting him.by redlewel
- To be clear, while he is the original author of both those programs, both are now developed by other people and have been for many years.
- Very very tangential, and at the risk of down-votes, the recent trend of X-articles (or whatever they call them) is extremely irksome. When I try to view on mobile it takes 3-4 hops to get to the article, and the articles always look hyper-optimized for engagement with low-attention-span readers, sort of like LinkedIn posts.
Also there's irony in the stark contrast between this x-article and the Bellard's own website.
by d4rkp4ttern - It's a bit sad that people who are already big VIPs in the tech industry feel the need to spend time writing such tweets, or even worse, hire a PR firm to do it. It's usual for celebrities with the same net worth from other industries, but to me it feels weird.by bflesch
- It's obvious that those that write the tools/infrastructure are less visible than those that create the end product.
I don't know a single name behind the construction of the AI tensor core in Nvidia's chips but it is effectively what runs all of AI.
by evilturnip - They can't hear you, they're on a yacht
- I think Fabrice is actually quite noticeable. His name kept on coming up again and again in the past. He is definitely not incognito as such, even if he may not be that interest in hyping up his own name either.by shevy-java
- I think that undersells Bellard. The engineers that made NVidia’s chips made a trade: they give their achievements and potential public recognition to their employer in return for generous compensation. Bellard’s work is overwhelmingly free and open source.by afavour
- I have wondered if I sequentially ask people who is the smartest living person they know, and ask that person next, would it lead me toward the same small group of geniuses. If I were doing that with the best living coder I might well start with Carmack. So next I'd have to go to Bellard, and hope that his answer isn't Carmack.by delichon
- I can list a dozen or so co-workers from my time at Apple that I would choose in an instant.by JKCalhoun
- There's a story along these lines about all the scientists / physicists involved in the Manhattan Project, ending with the answer being John von Neumann.by sib
- > Today FFmpeg is the invisible engine of the internet.
I get what the author is saying but I really dislike this hyperbole. The Internet will be absolutely fine if FFmpeg suddenly disappears.
Companies that rely on it in the core of their product may not, but the Internet absolutely will, and the vast majority of websites and other Internet services will keep working just fine.
by cassianoleal - It’s the invisible engine of what makes up the majority of today’s internet. I don’t think that’s hyperbole. Tomorrows internet might not be the same.by afavour
- Without YouTube and porn, is there really an internet?by newsclues
- It's how LLMs write. The tweet / article is written by an LLM and that's how it does.by ekelsen
- Bellard has a very interesting project that is `ts_zip`, a compression algorithm powered by LLMs. It's just an "experiment" and should never be used in production, but very smart.
The description on his website is amusing: "The ts_zip utility can compress (and hopefully decompress) text files using a Large Language Model"
- There is a field of competitive compression algorithms, where time and computation are not factors. People have made compressors that take hours (days?) to compress the test corpus.
A long-running kinda-joke in the field is that the upper-bound of compression is "AI-complete", where instead of compressing, say, the text data of the complete works of Shakespeare, the compressor just encodes "The Complete Works of Shakespeare", and the AI decompressor re-generates the output from that prompt.
With the advent of LLMs, Bellard just made that joke a reality.
by AceJohnny2 - But that's exactly what LLMs are. :)
My mental model and go to ELI5 is "imagine you compressed the whole internet into a zip-like archive and you have an extremely clever and efficient way to search it for data".
I'm old enough to remember the time when you could order wikipedia on CDs and I don't see much difference between that and downloading LLM.
by zeroq - > (and hopefully decompress)
If the decompression is optional, I've got a really impressive compression algorithm in mind!
by hbn - First time I see his picture, and it’s a bit like someone’s revealed the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto when it’s clear they are going out of their way to protect their privacy and stay out of the limelight.
My impression is the guy had always better things to do than engage with the greater internet, like thinking real hard and solving difficult problems. Much respect to his work, but even more respect to his work ethic. When you have a strong vision, you need the ivory tower style of development rather than spending your days arguing and defending your choices with internet strangers.
by sph - I imagined him with wild, long hair; possibly tattoos, huge and heavy set. The picture destroyed my imagination - and now I want my imagination back. :(by shevy-java
- Sad that him can't show the same respect for "Burguer" Rebecca Ann Heineman.by Zardoz84
- Honestly, two mythologized figures (Carmack and Bellard).
They're good (like, quite good), but as soon as their names come up people start talking about some weird expectation of what they are supposed to think rather than the actual things they did.
Somehow, that mythologizing diminishes their accomplishments.
by gaigalas - As I say, Bellard is Mozart when most of us can't even hope to be Salieri.by bitwize
- No he never hid his identity, if you looked him up, you found his picture.
Satoshi shouldn't be compared, I don't hold bitcoins nor am I interested, but the name is a lore. It was stamped on the original document.
Fabrice Bellard is a real person shipping code; not an internet anonymous identity.
by keyle - "Fabrice Bellard" by Andy Gocke and Nick Pizzolato
https://www.ipaidia.gr/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/117-2020-f...
by leonidasrup - Jesus... has that ever been submitted to HN!? It should be.
- It's pretty dated since he's done more stuff since!by ShinyLeftPad
- Do you know if that's the same Nick Pizzolato who wrote True Detective?by companycalls