241–250 of 488 posts
It's interesting to me that most of Bellard's work is basically turning specs into C. His most important projects are ffmpeg (codec specs), qEmu (ISA specs), QuickJS (the EcmaScript spec), tinyC (the C spec), and his telecom company (LTE specs). I guess the pi calculations and neural network stuff are exceptions. Just to be clear, this doesn't make his work any less impressive. Highly performant codec and emulator im…
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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.
Ffmpeg has nothing to do with the internet other than being distributed on it
For those unaware, you can find Fabrice's website here: https://bellard.org/ It has a full list of his projects.
Great programmers often also have great personal website design, everything is so clear and not one bit of redundance.
What about the url on the first displayed line?
Not saying it's bad - got me thinking about this self-reference that most modern websites do with the logo on the header.
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I'll continue to do my part as time allows, also curious. Anyway, if enough flag the top [like I did], it'll collapse.
Every so often, ask others just how far their ideas go.
The picture appears to be real, if we trust this source: https://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/january/6/
Why wouldn't it be real?
In fact, if you ask me, I think the tweet's picture is semi-real; I trust the computer history museum to have the original and the tweet has an AI-upscaled photo with artificial details.
He keeps picking stuff to work on that ends up being insanely useful to a massive number of people. That seems somehow even more remarkable than the technical ability.
Deciding what to work on might be the most important question in life.
Bellard is a genius. Carmack's modesty about his own genius is impressive too.
"Van Gogh is almost certainly a better painter than I am" -Monet
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This is one of the reasons I got away from writing commercial software and now only write code as a hobby. To me, the code itself is the product. I want the code to look like a beautiful painting—the fact that it does something is secondary. I’ll sit there for hours working on things like const correctness, and making sure each class has the bare minimum amount of state/instance variables, making sure function argume…
Although in this case it's more like using the paint in the tin to paint the tin itself. It's useless and completely missing the point of why the paint exists in the first place. You do you, I'm sorry if I come across rude and stupid, but I am both things. But "code is the product" is what IMO caused the downfall of this entire profession. No wonder everyone is trying to get rid of us. I wouldn't want a plumber that'…
My take on this is that we need both, because the market is cyclical. It’s just that it’s hard to perceive any of those cycles if you (a) live them (b) are not experienced enough to introspect.
I absolutely would love an obsessed plumber (and got one!) when it comes to deciding that we’re going to do PTFE tubing in our new house. An obsessed electrician in charge to overinvest into our grid, rather than a 3-month timeframe executive. Otherwise our critical infrastructure gets myopically degraded.
I also want the “working within timeframe” outcome.
And we, as an industry, swing wildly in both direction. The Cambrian explosion of shareware was the the former. We course-corrected into cathedrals of good software (I still love Windows 2000’s stability, the pinnacle of NT line), followed by the “reasonable timeframe” 4GB Electron apps, etc.
It will swing. Every complex system from logistic equation upwards will oscillate .
Reading the list of Bellard's contributions, what strikes me is not the raw ability (although certainly there is that too!) but "damn, he knows how to pick 'em!" He keeps picking stuff to work on that ends up being insanely useful to a massive number of people. That seems somehow even more remarkable than the technical ability. Deciding what to work on might be the most important question in life.
Which is funny because, everyone has that experience, right? But then approximately nobody proceeds to do something about it. (Including most people who have the skills to make a difference!)
Like, that's surprisingly mundane, and surprisingly actionable.
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If we distil it into a philosophy, it would be something like...
- things should be good
- they are not so good
- I can learn to make them better
And more broadly: "You can just do things"
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" https://bellard.org/ts_zip/
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.