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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

#471

Post by bflesch »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #466
bflesch wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously it's advanced work, but the problems might be harder due to the Apple-specific circumstances and tech debt; and not because they are globally hard for humanity.

No, you're right. No one at Apple is solving world hunger. And FWIW, these are engineers who, like I had, started at Apple in the 90's. There were of course no glass icons, etc., then. Few of us can steer the ship any longer. Back when I began though (1995) the engineers more or less were driving—not the designers, management. (Were there even designers in the 90's at Apple?) Of course history will show how well that…

Appreciate your response - that was definitely a meaningful time for the company. I'm jealous. You can be proud of your contributions. I still remember my music teacher using an old Mac with the black/white UI for many years because it was so damn robust and performant.

My biggest problem with today's Apple is that every shithole dictator can hack the iPhone and there are zero ways to defend against it. First Facebook and Google stole and uploaded our full phone contact lists, then they kept the camera recording when the phone screen was turned off, and nowadays there is a christian-fundamentalist government controlling all of that.

As a European all this data is gathered from us and our families just so Epstein's colleagues in five eyes intelligence can use it to sabotage European interests.

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

#472

Post by suslik »

gspetr wrote: post #463
suslik wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this as a balance between effort and impact. I don't know anything about politics - maybe this is how it should work - but I do know corporate IT bureaucracy. In many cases, the activation energy required to move the needle on rather trivial things just isn't worth the effor; so you look for workarounds, forgotten corners of the infra, or other rogue ways to actually do stuff. When an IT department says to me -…

> formalize these 20 pages of requirements, death by powerpoint style, and put it in our suggestion box - I just pass on that. Why pass on it now? There has never been a better time in history to deal with it than today: AI can oneshot most of what you've described.

AI might write a report in 30 seconds, but the suggestion box will be emptied at the same speed as in 1960s.

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

#473

Post by gaigalas »

MomsAVoxell wrote: post #469
gaigalas wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I sincerely doubt you have any clue what you are talking about.

Possibly. You are always free to correct me with accurate information though. Your choice.

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

#474

Post by bitwize »

hnlmorg wrote: post #97
audunw wrote: post #66

Earlier 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 developers sometimes get too obsessed with code quality thinking that smarter code makes them a better developer. In fact I’ve seen developers fall into the trap of mistaking their code as the product and thus spend so much time beautifying it that that fail to ever release anything. Then you have the other end of the spectrum where people are too focused on hacking stuff together that the end result is unmai…

If your code is a low-stakes one-and-done and it works in the end, messy code is forgivable. Undertale looks like Yandere Simulator inside; nobody cares.

But if your code is something that needs to be maintained over time and/or has constraints in terms of security, availability, etc., like virtually all code is, then yes: clearer, better factored, more readable code is a big part of the product because it's a massive favor both to yourself and your successors when changes have to be made and results in quicker changes, lowered costs for changes, and higher quality on metrics like security. Even if I'm writing a game—I'm auDHD, so if the initial code is garbage (and I've written a lot of garbage code) I'd be loath to touch it later. Better factored code is easier for me to revisit and improve upon with time. So I make it a point to continuously improve how I structure code from the jump to stave off it turning into an unpleasant quagmire later. This is especially important when you consider that oftentimes in business, the first draft that could possibly work goes right into production. Rewrite? What do you mean, rewrite?

Fabrice is still fucking brill though. He'll slap something together that's a holy shit idea as easily as I take a dump.

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

#475

Post by femto »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #454
femto wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concept is similar, in that with MPEG it is the encoder that is the harder of the two, since it has to deal with the noise and real-world effects in the source image. What I should have written is that the "hard" part, which is generally left unspecified, is the part that removes redundancy. An MPEG encoder removes redundancy whilst its decoder adds redundancy. An FEC/communications encoder adds redundancy whilst…

It's not really about difficulty (although encoding is definitely far more difficult), it's about there being multiple valid encodings. If you have two red boxes on a black background in one frame, and a single red box in the middle on the next, UIUI there are at least two ways to encode this: "left box moved right a bit; right box disappears" and "right box mounts left a bit; let box disappears". In a complex scene,…

I agree. We are in danger of arguing about semantics/language, despite the effects of the words we are using being the same. I guess that's why Information Theorists use mathematics over words.

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

#476

Post by bitwize »

hnlmorg wrote: post #139
nixon_why69 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the opposite, better-factored code makes me, a mediocre developer, capable of making progress instead of hitting a complexity wall. It's separate from striving for "beautiful" code, beauty within well-factored boundaries yields dimishing returns compared to just having the boundaries.

You’re ostensibly arguing the same thing I am though. Focusing on building the thing rather than designing the code to look pretty.

It's not about "looking pretty". Beautiful code is easy to read, comprehend, and change; it's not simply nice formatting.

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

#477

Post by avadodin »

Shish2k wrote: post #265
bananaflag wrote: post #108

When I saw the title I first thought of Fabien Sanglard.

... I'm only now realising thanks to this comment that they are two different people >.>

That's how I check SHA-1s for commits as well.

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

#478

Post by [deleted] »

gitanovic wrote: post #59
thibaut_barrere wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a strong narrative that it’s unreasonable to stay in the EU (“too regulated”, etc.) if you want to hack on real stuff. Yet plenty of us do — Bellard being exhibit A.

Salvatore Sanfilippo (a.k.a. Antirez) exhibit B

[deleted]

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

#479

Post by avadodin »

jimbokun wrote: post #422
wswin wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting observation, similar manner of work as Linus Torvalds. These guys implement existing ideas well, consistent and open, but are not inventors.

Git?

That's his point. I do not agree with it at all, though.

Linus himself phrased it as git being about applying his filesystems knowledge to source management. You can't take that statement at its face value.

Many of Bellard's projects boil down to applied tcc but just being able to understand tcc in the first place is out of the reach of most people who call themselves "programmers". And then applying it to a novel field solving problems people didn't even know they had.

That's exactly what "inventing" is.

Carmack didn't invent logarithms. But without people like him who innovated building on someone else's innovation, and on many people's common knowledge, we'd be still running away from lions in the Savannah.

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

#480

Post by baobabKoodaa »

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.

Go take an algorithms 101 class. That's literally all it is: learning how to write different algorithms to do the same thing more efficiently.
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