The tweet Carmack's replying to is such a gross, cloying example of LLM slop. Bellard, of course is a legend.
I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
171–180 of 488 posts
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#172An opinion: there were (and are) many great unknown engineers behind proprietary corporate projects. FFmpeg and QEMU became famous because these are open-source projects, not because nothing similar was done before (it was done, but in the proprietary world).
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#173Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fascinating, I'm not there for other reasons. So, about that costly Tea...
And I'm here wondering if there's a limit to HN's nested replies.
I'll continue to do my part as time allows, also curious. Anyway, if enough flag the top [like I did], it'll collapse.
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#175[flagged]
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, this is human nature and you will find it impossible to avoid this framing of cult figures, because they are indeed cult figures - albeit positively perceived ones, since they appear to not just be doing it for themselves, but altruistically every wonder they produce is for their users - and thus their works have effectively and productively impacted the lives of millions of other people, at economies of scale mo…
Humanity has some 300.000 years of existing, and we can only trace back the prevalence of cult figures a few thousand years back. For all we know, it could be a temporary fluke and we'll snap back to something else. We could be beings with no default to snap back to, ever changing, destined to dissolve the prevalence of cult figures into something else in the following eras. In a few thousand years we could totally s…
> a few thousand years back
I beg to differ, but okay. I don’t disagree to your allusions that there is a banality to mob idolatry, but that’s a discussion for other forums, ironically.
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#177I emailed Fabrice in early 2013 when I was starting wit.ai. He replied quickly with a very nice, humble, valuable response.
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#178An opinion: there were (and are) many great unknown engineers behind proprietary corporate projects. FFmpeg and QEMU became famous because these are open-source projects, not because nothing similar was done before (it was done, but in the proprietary world).
Maybe but I think you are underestimating the achievements Fabrice has accomplished. Among others:
- Improved an algorithm to compute Pi, ran it on a *personal laptop* and broke the world record. That achievement is not even listed on his personal homepage, and it a single line of facts with Zero bragging involved https://www.bellard.org/pi/pi2700e9/
- a PC emulator in vanilla javascript, boot the Linux Kernel in a browser and get a virtual terminal also implemented from scratch
- QuickJS, embeddable, self contained (no libs) and fast JavaScript engine matching almost entirely ES2025
- NNCP, a Neural Networks driven lossless data compression system
And more https://www.bellard.org/
I have been referring to his page for decades as an example of one can have a huge respect without having a fancy web page and no bragging at all. He is a genius :-)
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#179> 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. ... do tech people really not know who Fabrice Bellard is? He's kind of a household name in a lot of programming circles
The HN bubble surfaces mainly those programmers who are either
- active in the startup/VC scene
- "indie hackers"
- chasing platonic elegance with functional languages (for which the world at large doesn't care)
- rewriting everything in Rust
Fabrice doesn't seems to firmly fit any of this.
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#180[flagged]
Why don't you click on the xcancel link and read the whole thing?