Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fortnight isn't a video
although, somewhat ironic to your argument, I bet the intro that fornite plays when starting the game uses ffmpeg
It would still be a game without the intro video.
I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
301–310 of 488 posts
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#302> 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.
It's how LLMs write. The tweet / article is written by an LLM and that's how it does.
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
Had the same reaction to Carmack's wording. I don't agree about the distinction between programming and engineering; to me it's all programming, engineering is just the word we started using to make it sound higher status.
Fair enough. I can see your point about engineering, but in this case I find it hard to classify the generic SaaS programmer and the guy calculating Pi to 2700 billion digits on his workstation using his own formula - which actually is the innovation here - under the same rubric, but I guess that boat has sailed a long time ago.
Odd example given the SaaS programmer might be doing actual engineering but the math calculation is not engineering by definition. Which is not to say the latter is not more impressive.
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#304“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
Horrible take given Bellard's lack of general recognition and also the situation in developed-nation-2026. There are 2 billion people not dying in cotton fields or sweatshops, you're not, where's your revolutionary free code that you gave to the world? Over half the planet gets a chance to prove they're smart in this day and age, between gaokao in China and whatever the exams are called in India, plus the western wor…
Ramanujan is a case in point. Some people just have it built into them, most others don't.
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#305Very 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.
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's worth noting that most communications specifications that involve an encoder/decoder pair communicating over a channel only specify the encoder. Standards purposely leave the decoder open to allow systems to progress as technology develops and to allow competition between implementations. This also makes a standard simpler, as a decoder is usually more complex than an encoder since it has to deal with noise and…
It is exactly the opposite for MPEG, which only specifies the decoder (i.e. how frames should be decoded).
Maybe they meant encoding, the file format.
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#307Bellard 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/
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.
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great programmers often also have great personal website design, everything is so clear and not one bit of redundance.
It's really not a great design. It's just nerdy in a HN way. A great website would list projects in approximate order of importance/notability, would use the tiniest bit of CSS to make the text readable on wide screens, and would have images for projects with a visual component. The only reason his site is appealing is because you already know who he is.
> A great website would list projects in approximate order of importance/notability
Why?
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mozart doesn’t feel right. The code isn’t beautiful and elegant. It’s not built to last (at least for ffmpeg) or be some kind of masterpiece. He writes code to get a job done or tickle some intellectual curiosity. It’s not beautiful but that’s OK. I think Unicorn illustrates one of the issues with his style. It wouldn’t have needed to exist of the QEMU code was architected into neat components. But then writing spagh…
> I think there’s actually a sharp contrast with John Carmack here. Fabrice might be smarter and faster but Carmack is perhaps a better software engineer. There’s few things I find more pathetic than trying really hard to show who’s best and ranking things that have no business being ranked. You will find humans are n-dimensional and elude these simplistic categories.
> There’s few things I find more pathetic than trying really hard to show who’s best and ranking things that have no business being ranked.
This seems like a strangely harsh response considering the person you're responding to is just restating the assertion that Carmack made in his tweet.
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#310I 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.