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Maybe, but you could also look at it from another angle.

Taking something that’s traditionally been hard and making it dramatically easier, better, and faster unlocks pent-up downstream use-cases.

I’m sure it’s some degree of both selection and execution, but so many industries have been unlocked simply because somebody showed up and figured out how to make a previously difficult thing easy.

My guess would be the hueristic is "I want to do simple thing, why is it so hard?" (Modern computing has an overabundance of "DX tarpits".)

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"

> 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 that

These are your 10x programmers.

Maybe 100x or more in Bertrand’s case.

It’s not about putting in 19 hour days or spitting out more lines of code or PRs or whatever.

It’s coming up with elegant solutions with broad impact that no one else even considered.

Often this is the conundrum in research as well. What should one spend their life working on? Especially if you want to make an impact. Choosing the right problem is often harder than coming up with a relevant solution.

I like that he doesn’t provide a github link but a .zip to download

One way I like to think of it is that Fabrice creates prototypes interesting enough that other people choose to spend their entire careers maintaining them.

This is the more striking thing. An meme I often repeat is that ideas are cheap, execution is key - there's a trope of "I have a great idea for an app, I just need a developer to do all the work", exacerbated with AI doing all the work.

But this guy is the opposite idea of that. In hindsight, sure, a library doing video is obvious. But the other ones? That's something else.

> 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.

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 other effects introduced by the channel. Consequently, implementing a competitive standards compliant decoder involves R&D and is not a case of following a predefined path.

I've always seen Bellard as an engineer who programs rather than a pure programmer.

> ffmpeg (codec specs)

if your mental model is that somebody writes codec specs and then fabrice bellard comes in and turns the specs into C, you are dead wrong. first of all, codecs are usually reverse-engineered, there is no spec. second of all, even when a well specified document describes the codec, that spec does not describe how to efficiently encode or decode with that codec. people like fabrice bellard develop the algorithms that do that.

There was a time when we would spend an enormous amount of time defining a spec, so that we can farm out the code. Now, we farm out the spec so that we can spend an enormous amount of time with the code.

That's actually how I was trained. The spec and the implementation (and the testing) were separate areas; sometimes, done by different people.

These days, I tend to mix them all together, and I think I get good results.

I strongly suspect that a lot of folks, these days, only do the middle one.

If you actually work with ffmpeg, it's rather quite impressive how pluggable the architecture is. The codecs have huge amount of quirks and disagreements about basics (what is a "frame" in audio, subtitle, and video worlds?) and even their environment (passing frames around software and hardware coders is way different).

That fact that you can (almost) freely mix and match processing between such different worlds is quite an achievement and libav (IMO) is decently well designed to allow that.

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

Maybe pi is a spec. Just not written by man.

But I was told “spec implementators” were prime for LLM replacement

I don’t think the distinction is actually that interesting as you could call any piece of software a spec

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.

> These days all he does is hold the copyright

You mean trademark. The copyright is held by the authors of the code (or their employer, etc.), since there is no copyright assignment requirement.

This is similar to how Linus Torvalds owns the "Linux" trademark (in some jurisdictions), but the copyright mostly belongs to other contributors.

I just found this comment from 15y ago on the ffmpeg/libav drama: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/vvdxn/comment/c57zdk...

I don't know ffmpeg but this resonates with my experience with other open source projects.

Thanks, that maybe one side of the coin but it's very one-sided. The man is busy innovating and maybe has no time to carry on as he focuses on other projects. But he was there from the start and made it happen.

Most of the code in the linux kernel today is not from Linus.

1. I don't believe anyone in their right mind thinks that ffmpeg is still maintained and developed by a single person, and definitely not by Fabrice 2. Spaghetti code or not matters very little, especially in the beginning, before you even know or understand the scope of the project and what it can become in the future. You can indeed refactor code when you understand the requirements better, and it's great that it's what the community did. I still think it was the right call to start with the spaghetti mess to not be dragged down by potential future problems that might never materialise because your project became something very different from what you originally had in mind

> He's an unelected dictator

He has no real power. You can fork the project and organize an election.

You could be right. I don't really know much about FFMpeg. But going from 0 to 1 and going from 1 to 100 are different. Usually, people remember the 0 to 1 step more. Symbolic capital tends to go to the first mover. It might feel unfair, but we always remember the first challenger. It might be spaghetti code, there might be countless contributions later, but that's usually how it goes

What you describe is obvious corporate management path. You start with MVP, it gets traction, bosses like you and then others will code for the original author dismantling and rewriting original MVP. And don’t be shy - if one can pull this off he’s worth the credits. There are many who can code and not much who can manage.

> due to FFmpeg back then lacking any framework for code sharing between components and codecs

Funny, I remember this being completely different; FFmpeg bundled ffserver, which transcoded to a bunch of codecs at the same time (sharing motion search and everything) precisely to demonstrate how similar the codecs were and how much could be shared. (Of course, that could easily be spaghetti, but not spaghetti for non-code-sharing reasons.) All on the 400MHz-class machines we had at the time. Do I remember wrong? I haven't looked at these old releases in forever.

Interesting counterpoint. I think this is the Peter principle in software: a lot of people are great at prototyping, but not great at the next stages of the project. Other people step in for those, but their existence is mostly ignored, since they can't easily fit inside a narrative.

One think to note though is unelected dictators do have their benefits, even if they come with obvious downsides.

You alright, mate?

Also it's worth mentioning that gstreamer is far more superior than ffmpeg, with its bindings, plugin architecture, control over stream (valves, tees, etc) and overall quality of code.

The psyop about "only shipping clean code" has been a big drag on projects

On the real world, if it runs and solves their problem nobody gives a fucc. Period

Props on him.

That's just, like, your opinion man

> (and hopefully decompress)

If the decompression is optional, I've got a really impressive compression algorithm in mind!

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.

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.

Great programmers often also have great personal website design, everything is so clear and not one bit of redundance.

Do you know if that's the same Nick Pizzolato who wrote True Detective?

It's pretty dated since he's done more stuff since!

Jesus... has that ever been submitted to HN!? It should be.

No he never hid his identity, if you looked him up, you found his picture.

Satoshi shouldn't be compared, I don't hold bitcoins nor am I interested, but the name is a lore. It was stamped on the original document.

Fabrice Bellard is a real person shipping code; not an internet anonymous identity.

As I say, Bellard is Mozart when most of us can't even hope to be Salieri.

Honestly, two mythologized figures (Carmack and Bellard).

They're good (like, quite good), but as soon as their names come up people start talking about some weird expectation of what they are supposed to think rather than the actual things they did.

Somehow, that mythologizing diminishes their accomplishments.

Sad that him can't show the same respect for "Burguer" Rebecca Ann Heineman.

I imagined him with wild, long hair; possibly tattoos, huge and heavy set. The picture destroyed my imagination - and now I want my imagination back. :(

To be clear, while he is the original author of both those programs, both are now developed by other people and have been for many years.

It's how LLMs write. The tweet / article is written by an LLM and that's how it does.

Without YouTube and porn, is there really an internet?

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.

I think that undersells Bellard. The engineers that made NVidia’s chips made a trade: they give their achievements and potential public recognition to their employer in return for generous compensation. Bellard’s work is overwhelmingly free and open source.

I think Fabrice is actually quite noticeable. His name kept on coming up again and again in the past. He is definitely not incognito as such, even if he may not be that interest in hyping up his own name either.

They can't hear you, they're on a yacht

It didn't strike me as modest, to compare oneself to another who is known to be great.

"Van Gogh is almost certainly a better painter than I am" -Monet

I wouldn’t call comparing yourself to Fabrice Ballard and not just saying he’s a better programmer modest.

"He is almost certainly a better overall programmer than I am."

That is a work of art in and of itself. It's genius narcissism.

"almost certainly", "overall programmer", are we really going there? Are we 16?

Why even do the comparison? Fabrice is not a "programmer". He is an engineer. Programming is a medium he often works in and that medium is completely meaningless in and of itself. I would be offended if someone called me a "programmer".

Rather than potentially 1000 HN readers each spending 15 minutes on Google trying to work out what you are talking about, may I suggest that you expand that with a few plain English sentences that tell us what that means?

I have no idea what "ATSC" means, and I've been in tech for nearly 40 years now so I have a fairly good handle on this stuff.

Why wouldn't it be real?

anyone have a free photo for wikipedia?

I thought it was rather sad when they removed those. That removal was fairly recent, too. I'm sure plenty of people were saying "who is Dan Bricklin?" but it added some needed character to the store.

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 :-)

Our sexual life would be failing dates and still images.

He gives virtually no interviews and will not talk about himself, here's an example from 2014 where only replies to technical questions: https://www.macplus.net/depeche-82364-interview-le-createur-...

Biography - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46377862

My previous comment with links - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46372370

dang's links - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46379975

Thanks!

He says that Bellard is a better overall programmer, and for some reason you take this as evidence of a lack of humility?

Programmers are notoriously nitpicky, and avoid making absolute statements in most cases (wait, I'm doing it too!).

This is because we've been trained to be humble by the machines we work with. Computers expose a lot of our mistakes, and over time they remove any illusion that we can be quickly confident about things.

I would take the qualifiers in his post as an indication of his general disinclination towards making absolute statements, not as a lack of humility.

I suspect being a "better programmer" cannot be said unequivocally at their level. At that percentile of achievement, it depends on the specific dimension you are talking about. It's true of the highest skill in any field.

Carmack might think that there are certain areas he will be better due to decades of experience. Overall programmer isn’t a bad qualifier at all, it’s actually making it sound less offhand and more honest.

True, it's a weird thing to say. I am in no position to rank them, I assume they are both excellent at their niches (granted bellard seems to be interested in a lot of niches) but it never hurt anybody to be humble in this position.

It's just a tweet, no need to over-analyze everything.

Depends on what we mean by programmer.

Fabrice is more clever and faster, I guess.

But John Carmack is in my mind a better software engineer. He writes elegant code that can be used and maintained for a long time. At least from Quake 2ish, but you can see signs of solid code architecture already in Doom.

Doom code will live almost as-is forever. The code Fabrice wrote for ffmpeg has been entirely replaced

Carmack seems arrogant[1]. Which is why I take that statement as high praise.

It’s also a nod to his own fame.

[1] This is based on Masters of Doom. And the anecdotes are probably from the 90’s. And being arrogant does not mean that being confident in one’s ability is unjustified or that they are in fact not skilled. Being arrogant and being highly skilled are completely orthogonal.

You’re not the only one who noticed. I think the unspoken idea is that Carmack thinks he’s better without ever having met him or seen his code at all. That deserves a few qualifiers.

I'll be honest. I discovered him with this post. And I studied in France. I am also familiar with his projects, the obfuscated C code contest and more. Just don't remember seeing his name.

I guess that if people aren't loud on social media, people tend to ignore them.

Respect to those who posted their praise of someone else on social media. We need more of this.

I think I've known about him for 20 years right now, ever since I discovered his code to compute pi to an ungodly amount of digits. The man sure was prolific.

I've been around for a long time and I know of him. Most people don't bother looking up where stuff comes from.

He's a lifelong familiar name since the LZEXE days.

no, most people wouldn't know. you're in an echo chamber if you think he is well known.

I have an explicit rule not to meet or look up my heroes. Been burned way too many times.

I don't need to know who is building VLC, curl, ffmpeg or any of the other essentials in my life. I just appreciate their work and pitch in some money if possible.

First time hearing the name too.

>programming circles

Well, not all tech people are part of some curcles I guess.

And you can just email him. He's just this guy, that writes stuff, and likes to help answer questions about it.

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.

"Tech people" aren't one single homogeneous mass. His name is unlikely to show up in the same conversation as, say, DHH.

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

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 world and the rich portions of poor countries.

I'm not even sure how you'd define a great programmer. Like Justice Potter Stewart I sort of "know it when I see it". For example, I don't think anybody is going to put Rasmus Lerdorf on the Mount Rushmore of Great Programmers, but man alive is PHP really important and quite good, even at the time of release.

Don't use LLMs except for the most menial things. Get as much practice in creating various things. Study expert-level books on related subjects. Foster your creativity in other areas too (i.e. writing, drawing, music). Don't pass up the chance to work with veteran developers; be ready for that opportunity when it comes.

The smart path: Find good mentors (and return the favor); use LLMs not to do the work but to help you learn and exercise your brain: make them test you, using something aking to teacher/Socratic method, make mistakes and get the mentor/LLM to review in a way you figure out the answer.

Find an itch, then scratch it. If many people have the same itch and can use your solution, you win.

Simple as that.

Find a problem and work on a solution for 20+ years.

Start fixing the unfixable and doing the undoable things ;)

Yeah, I can't finish reading tweet. Is that even made for human consumption?

Pepperidge Farms remembers...

It used to have a lot less stuff about AI in it. It'd be great if we could just filter off all the posts about LLMs and LLM-related crap.

Presumably because "money".

Or they just don't know tech outside of SV, which is understandable, considering the rest doesn't do nearly the same amount of self-promotion and, well, they're not from SV anyway so why should SV care?

The other day there was this article: something something nerds, which assumed (almost) everyone in tech was looking up to Jobs and Wozniak.

I think I saw my first Mac in 2006 or so and only for a brief moment - it belonged to an artist the parents of my high school friend employed. The next time it was a musician. That was really the stereotype in my corner of the world at the time and using Apple devices for programming seemed like a weird idea.

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.

I had assumed it was slop but whether or not it is, that is kind of a revealing default isn't it?

Some assume that everything noteworthy regarding the internet is SV based.

Pretty sure this is just AI writing style, and yes it's a huge turnoff.

He is also wrong. Saying "KVM runs on top of QEMU" is a very funny way of looking at it. And the claim that QEMU backs Google Cloud or AWS or Azure(???) is just plain incorrect. Not downplaying Fabrice's contributions - this tweet is just dumb.

> He kept going.

> He is still shipping.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/schiffen#Etymology_2

:-P

It's an AI generated profile that posts this kind of slop weekly about popular developers and entrepreneurs. The type of feel good shit that makes the front page of social media. Not even Carmack is immune.

My “favourite” was “a project called JSLinux that engineers still cannot believe is real”. Such dumb hyperbole.

Obviously an LLM and sad Carmack engages with slop to normalize it.

The tweet also reads a bit off to me too. Carmack positions himself as if he is a some sort of a litmus test for being a great and successful programmer, which I don't doubt that he is but it's a bit strange. Egotripping.

This has gotten a ton of upvotes, then a ton of downvotes. Yet no one has yet answered the question. If you are downvoting, presumably you believe there is a point to linking to Carmack’s tweet. That it somehow adds more value than the alternative. So please explain why. Like I said before, I am asking genuinely.

The actual greatest programmer is the one who gets compensated according to their output.