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I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

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Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#401

Post by HelloNurse »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #390
HelloNurse wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vocabulary please. A "codec" is software that CODes and DECodes multimedia content, while specs describe an encoded file or stream format (occasionally involving network protocols and other concerns). In a normal standard development process experimental codecs come first, then those that have proved to work well, including having good enough performance, are described in the spec; after standardization there's very…

> after standardization there's very little room to "develop the algorithms" because nonconformant implementations would be useless. there is A LOT OF ROOM to develop the algorithms. it seems that you are confused about what an algorithm is, since you seemingly think that there can be only 1 algorithm that can decode a given media file.

There is a lot of room to do exactly the same thing more efficiently, which doesn't count as different algorithms.

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#402

Post by santiagobasulto »

zeroq wrote: post #250
santiagobasulto wrote: post #234

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/

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”

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#403

Post by fragmede »

swiftcoder wrote: post #341
andai wrote: post #246

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.

> Deciding what to work on might be the most important question in life. The flip side of this, is if you have the ability, you can just pick the hardest problem in your field, go solve it... rinse and repeat. Everyone can find out what the hardest problems in their field are, it's not a secret, just a question of if you have the ability/gumption/willingness to go spend years of your life attacking a problem like tha…

Finding the hardest solvable problems in your field is far harder.

Prove P = NP

(or not).

Is definitely one of the hardest problems in computer science, but you could waste your entire life on that problem and make no progress. Innumerable great contributions to the field have nothing to do with that problem. Booting Linux in JavaScript wasn't even on most people's maps.

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#404

Post by gaigalas »

zerohp wrote: post #386
nixon_why69 wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We only have writing and, consequently, people who's names we know a few thousand years back. A cult figure before writing would have more limited reach, and be forgotten because their name wasn't written down. But they'd still have been a cult figure.

The Buddha lived before writing in India. We have plenty of other stories that were passed by oral tradition before they were written down.

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 thousand years after that.

It's all still super young though. Like I said, humanity has 300.000 years.

Earliest petroglyphs from 50.000 years ago corroborate my point of view: they depict animals, and migrations and shit. Nothing that can attest some kind of cult towards individuals, no heroes, no holy images.

So, yeah, talking about the Buddha "seems like old stuff", but it really isn't in the timescales that matter for estabilishing what "human nature" is, we've been human way before all that jazz appeared.

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#405

Post by umutisik »

FpUser wrote: post #364
latexr wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Deciding what to work on might be the most important question in life. Work on being a positive influence in the world. Help your neighbour when they are in need and fight for the rights of those less fortunate than yourself.

>"Work on being a positive influence in the world." Different groups have different "positives" / negatives. So unless trivial like don't eat babies who's the judge?

Customers / users are the judge.

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#406

Post by hkt »

andai wrote: post #246

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.

This is pretty much the rule in journalism, too - timeliness and relevance are king. Man bites dog, etc.

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#407

Post by [deleted] »

pandaforce wrote: post #47

Bellard hasn't been involved in FFmpeg for *over 20 years* at this point, and more like 23. His code was not great and reeked of sphagetti due to FFmpeg back then lacking any framework for code sharing between components and codecs. These days none of his code survives. Everything that became of FFmpeg is because of other developers. Yet he's treated as the one-and-only BDFL of FFmpeg, with any other developers build…

[deleted]

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#408

Post by drob518 »

Beretta_Vexee wrote: post #78
pandaforce wrote: post #47

Bellard hasn't been involved in FFmpeg for *over 20 years* at this point, and more like 23. His code was not great and reeked of sphagetti due to FFmpeg back then lacking any framework for code sharing between components and codecs. These days none of his code survives. Everything that became of FFmpeg is because of other developers. Yet he's treated as the one-and-only BDFL of FFmpeg, with any other developers build…

We mustn’t forget the context: FFmpeg and Videolan got their start in dorm rooms, where students used them to stream TV in the dorm and share movies. The Polytechnique and École Centrale campuses are just a few kilometers apart, and both projects began around 1997–1998. I don’t know about you, but as a student, I was too busy drinking beer to write clean code.

I drank a lot of beer and I can’t remember what my code looked like. But I passed, so there’s that.

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#409

Post by dmitrygr »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #380
delichon wrote: post #310

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.

I can list a dozen or so co-workers from my time at Apple that I would choose in an instant.

Apple is heavy in such types, yes

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#410

Post by questionableans »

HelloNurse wrote: post #401
baobabKoodaa wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> after standardization there's very little room to "develop the algorithms" because nonconformant implementations would be useless. there is A LOT OF ROOM to develop the algorithms. it seems that you are confused about what an algorithm is, since you seemingly think that there can be only 1 algorithm that can decode a given media file.

There is a lot of room to do exactly the same thing more efficiently, which doesn't count as different algorithms.

Are bubble sort and quick sort the same algorithm?
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