Does Fabrice Ballard have any interviews?
Congrats, you are now unbanned: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48538329
Wow, thanks!
I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
441–450 of 488 posts
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#442Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That is true, but I have to be honest and say that I didn’t make the connection until I saw Bellard’s project for the first time, and I said: “ah! That actually makes A LOT of sense”
My biggest gripe about AI is that very few people actually understand that, and many think that LLMs are "thinking" and capable with "coming up with a novel solution".
They are not. The only reason one might think the solution is novel is because they never saw it before, but what they are actually receiving is an excerpt from someone elses blog post or stack overflow answer. [1]
A bit terrifying thought experiment is to accept for a moment that programming is dead and all its left prompt engineering. Fast forward 5-10-15 years and whos left to actually produce new code and ideas to feed LLMs?
[1] one thing I like to do from time to time - especially when I'm asking for something I know little about - is to copy and paste the answer back to google and look where did that answer originated from.
One time I asked a very specific linux shell command and the answer didn't sit right with me. I googled it and it pointed me to a stackoverflow question. It was the first answer with ~1000 upvotes. But it also had a comment with ~700 upvotes explaining why you never ever should do that. :)
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#443Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Ain't no one willing to pay for all of that. That made me think that he didn't think it was possible. I guess I'm a cynic, but I think that many companies, these days, are willing to pay -and pay a great deal-, for exactly that.
> I guess I'm a cynic, but I think that many companies, these days, are willing to pay -and pay a great deal-, for exactly that. lol, where? Outside of the industries I mentioned (and banking/insurance, which falls under the "legal consequences" catch-all)... good luck. Government procurement only cares about price, and you see that confirmed whenever some government "digitalization" project balloons or the balloon i…
I dunno. I regularly use mobile and host software that crashes all the time, goes into memory panics, has terrible UI, is inscrutable, not accessible, and just damn ugly.
Almost every corporate dashboard I use -Web or app- is junk. I was watching old folks wrestling with a terribly-designed UI at a medical lab, recently. If the designers had just given a tiny, tiny little shit, those folks would have had it a lot easier, instead of having to be walked through it, by the receptionist.
I have to restart most of my streaming apps, several times a week.
The folks that wrote those, get paid plenty.
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not gonna lie: it has always struck me as extremely racist to claim that goblins are caricatures of Jews. No normal, reasonable person reads Harry Potter and thinks "Jew" instead of "wacky fantasy creatures".
> No normal, reasonable person reads Harry Potter and thinks "Jew" instead of "wacky fantasy creatures". It was a pretty obvious thing for us Germans when the movie came out. Caricatures of Jews that were used in the time leading up to 1933 are taught and analyzed at schools here. Crooked noses, deal with money, hoard money... it's not that far away. There's a pretty good blog post with actual imagery, if you want to…
Wow, that site was... something. I would have never made that connection in a million years. As a non-German, I might lack some critical context here, but the author seems to be desperately searching for antisemitism, and finding a tiny kernel of it. Of course, 4chan will be 4chan anyway.
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That is true, but I have to be honest and say that I didn’t make the connection until I saw Bellard’s project for the first time, and I said: “ah! That actually makes A LOT of sense”
also a tangent - I can't find it right now - something I feel quite similar, albeit far less practical, was an experiment in which neural network was laid out as a 2D grid, i.e. screen, and it was trained so that specific inputs would fire very specific neurons and in that way the "screen" would show a specific image.
what was particularly interesting about that experiment was the fact that you could pack quite a few images in a very small network.
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#446Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like the navel-gazing-ivory-tower programmer is almost a straw man used by commenters and bloggers to make themselves sound pragmatic. Summoned only be be torn down. Never to be found on an existing software team. I have come across the architecture astronaut before. But I feel like they’re the result of the culture of the ecosystem the language. The Java and C# programmers whose language requires you to juggl…
That maybe true, but the reason we are having this conversation was because people made those kind of comments. Which lead me to defend Bellard’s POCs.
This sub-thread was in reply to someone who stated that "'code is the product' is what IMO caused the downfall of this entire profession".
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I guess I'm a cynic, but I think that many companies, these days, are willing to pay -and pay a great deal-, for exactly that. lol, where? Outside of the industries I mentioned (and banking/insurance, which falls under the "legal consequences" catch-all)... good luck. Government procurement only cares about price, and you see that confirmed whenever some government "digitalization" project balloons or the balloon i…
I dunno. I regularly use mobile and host software that crashes all the time, goes into memory panics, has terrible UI, is inscrutable, not accessible, and just damn ugly . Almost every corporate dashboard I use -Web or app- is junk. I was watching old folks wrestling with a terribly-designed UI at a medical lab, recently. If the designers had just given a tiny, tiny little shit, those folks would have had it a lot ea…
I think perhaps the missing piece here is the suggestion that the status quo is cheaper in the short term but (IIUC you're suggesting) more expensive in the long term. Of course the problem is convincing current management first of this fact followed by why that should matter to them.
But amusingly this all seems to be rapidly changing with the advent of AI agents since they don't work all that well without a clear spec and thorough documentation (and likely comprehensive tests as well).
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#448Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I am of an age with Carmack and wanted to be a game developer when i was young. I very much elevated him very high. In terms of computer graphics he is very informed and talented. But I have watched him do interviews that largely focused on other areas and I find him to be pretty average or even below average. His thoughts on BJJ and AI are quite immature and don't express any special insight.
There’s a reason people say don’t meet your heroes.
No matter how elevated they are in your mind, they’re still just people. One pants leg at a time and all.
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#449Earlier quoted context omitted.
Idolatry is not the same as mythologizing. And I never said there is a banality to it, just that there could be . We don't have enough to know.
In any case, you do seem to have overlooked that there are successful mythologies in the contemporary era - that indeed Fabrice and co., are worth understanding better not just for the nature of their work, but also the means by which their reputation preceded them - and lets not forget that the markets in which they operate are worth multi-millions of dollars worth of economy and they are clearly successful at scale…
You are defending them from an attack that doesn't exist. I explicitly praised them, and claimed that we should understand their work. They're great developers.
Also, what I did was make their myth-making fanbase uncomfortable. If one sees "liking Carmack" as some sort of identity, then offending the fanbase is offending the icon and vice-versa.
One that takes this posture cannot see the difference between criticizing the person and criticizing the myth-making. In their heads, it's the same thing. In reality, it's not.
That's why you (and others in the thread) treated the negative tone, which was towards the fanbase, as an attack to Carmack and Bellard themselves, even though it explicitly wasn't.
In simpler terms, "if he's being negative, he must dislike the idols", which is a product of the mythmaking I foreshadowed since the beginning.
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#450Earlier quoted context omitted.
The oral tradition you're probably trying to refer to is the Rigveda, which is amazing. It's like a human recorder that kept a series of vocalizations intact for thousands of years through chanting, with error correction mechanisms and all sorts of tricks to reduce drift over time. That's our oldest attested oral tradition, 2000 years or so. Stretching to a maximum of 6000 years if we're generous. Buddhism is like, a…
The stories of Narwala Gabarnmang say hi.
Animals, people, clay pots. It's textbook cave painting from that era, and no myth can be recovered from it.
The only myths in cave paintings are the ones modern people project back when romanticizing them.