First time I see his picture, and it’s a bit like someone’s revealed the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto when it’s clear they are going out of their way to protect their privacy and stay out of the limelight.

My impression is the guy had always better things to do than engage with the greater internet, like thinking real hard and solving difficult problems. Much respect to his work, but even more respect to his work ethic. When you have a strong vision, you need the ivory tower style of development rather than spending your days arguing and defending your choices with internet strangers.

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

Hedging the claim with a lot of qualifiers. What's wrong with admitting someone is a better programmer? even giving someone else the benefit of the doubt?

It's obvious that those that write the tools/infrastructure are less visible than those that create the end product.

I don't know a single name behind the construction of the AI tensor core in Nvidia's chips but it is effectively what runs all of AI.

From the tweet he's replying to:

>A quiet French engineer who never moved to Silicon Valley wrote the code that quietly runs the internet.

Why do some assume you need to move to SV to make an impact in tech?

Fabrice is kind of like a space explorer. He goes where few people went before.

I think I first noticed this either with regard to JSLinux, or possibly some software he wrote before that; don't fully remember which year. It's like some people go deliberately to more unique problems with regards to software that actually works in achieving that outcome, whatever the outcome may be.

> A French engineer who lives quietly in Paris has spent 30 years writing software that the entire internet now runs on without knowing his name.

... do tech people really not know who Fabrice Bellard is?

He's kind of a household name in a lot of programming circles

> He just keeps shipping.

> He just wrote code.

> He was not done.

> He kept going.

> He is still shipping.

That guy talks like a scrum master, this linkedin bullshit writing style is just so bad...

remember when HN was interesting?

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 building upon his wise framework since time immemorial. These days all he does is hold the copyright, which lets him, *and only him*, elect which project/leader may call itself FFmpeg. He's an unelected dictator, who already used his powers once to ostracize libav developers in favor of another dictator.

"... that the entire Internet runs on without knowing his name"

I'd hazard a guess that most people who run Internet things know who Fabrice Bellard is, and may indeed have spoken to him at some point.

How on earth were those people able to create such amazing things? Will I ever be able to create something that brilliant someday? What should I even make? I have so many more tools than they did, even LLMs. Where can I learn the ideas and skills they had?