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Posted by apitman 14 hours ago

I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer(twitter.com)
https://xcancel.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2064095424420487226
746 points | 358 commentspage 2
redlewel 4 hours ago|
My jaw dropped when I read this guy wrote ffmpeg AND QEMU!!? Thats insane levels of talent and capability. I remember looking through the source for QEMU and it appeared monstrous in its scale. Dude is a legend, no wonder Carmack is complimenting him.
Georgelemental 4 hours ago|
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.
andrehacker 3 hours ago||
Isn't that how it is supposed to work ? Stroke of genius (over and over again) to get something working given constraints of the day followed by hundreds of engineers who will improve on the foundations, basically like Wozniak ?
Georgelemental 3 hours ago||
Yes, also to be clear, I am not diminishing Bellard's achievement
MisterTea 5 hours ago||
Fabrice Bellard is the kind of programmer I admire, respect and aspire to emulate. Extremely humble, yet incredibly talented with a massive corpus of work. Bravo Fabrice!
evilturnip 13 hours ago||
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.

afavour 8 hours ago||
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.
shevy-java 12 hours ago|||
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.
anyfoo 12 hours ago||
He's basically a rock star here. (And well deservedly so.)
brcmthrowaway 12 hours ago||
They can't hear you, they're on a yacht
fguerraz 10 hours ago||
In 2006, in my first job after uni in France, I wrote a toy PaaS system called CASIMIR based on qemu. It was a lot of fun, I could via a web UI launch VMs, access them via VNC, etc..

I've always had a lot of admiration for Fabrice Bellard, I always wished I was as good an engineer as he is.

lambdaone 9 hours ago||
Bellard is a genius. Carmack's modesty about his own genius is impressive too.
Upvoter33 6 hours ago||
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

gmm1990 8 hours ago|||
I wouldn’t call comparing yourself to Fabrice Ballard and not just saying he’s a better programmer modest.
uberex 7 hours ago||
Yeah he phrases it odd. Like with the "almost certainly" and "overall" qualifiers. Not "he is a better programmer than I would dream to be..."
fdsfsdsd 7 hours ago||
"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".

slibhb 7 hours ago|||
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.

fdsfsdsd 6 hours ago||
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.
energy123 4 hours 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.
ozgrakkurt 6 hours ago||||
Him thinking or saying that he is a great programmer isn’t narcissistic in the grand scheme of things.

Especially if you consider ignorant people who don’t even know how to program are writing about “the future of programming” now and a ton of people are reading them.

Same about mathematics and w/e unlucky subject is attacked by the slopmasters.

It is fair for a person who programmed his whole life to assume he is a good programmer IMO

psychoslave 5 hours ago|||
HN audience is almost certainly overall more mature than a 16 year old nerd.
p0w3n3d 11 hours ago||
I'm a psychofan of Fabrice Bellard. He's unbeatable. He made DVB-T using VGA connector. It's like crazy!
fjfaase 2 hours ago||
Many people have complained about the quality of TCC code. It sometimes feel the code id one big unittest including all nasty C edge cases. I found this out when developing an even tinnier C compiler to compile TCC 0.9.26.
ar7hur 8 hours ago||
I emailed Fabrice in early 2013 when I was starting wit.ai. He replied quickly with a very nice, humble, valuable response.
drmpeg 9 hours ago||
Little known Fabrice Bellard project. He worked with the ATSC to test the ATSC 3.0 PHY layer when he was consulting at DekTec.
lproven 8 hours ago|
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.

drmpeg 8 hours ago||
Advanced Television Systems Committee. It's the US standards organization for terrestrial digital television. ATSC 3.0 is a new standard that's very similar to DVB-T2 (used in the UK for HDTV) at the PHY layer.
drivers99 2 hours ago||
Looks like "PHY layer" means physical layer.
kzrdude 10 hours ago|
The picture appears to be real, if we trust this source:

https://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/january/6/

backscratches 9 hours ago||
Why wouldn't it be real?
kzrdude 6 hours ago|||
If the rest of the tweet is ai-generated, why not the picture?

In fact, if you ask me, I think the tweet's picture is semi-real; I trust the computer history museum to have the original and the tweet has an AI-upscaled photo with artificial details.

rozab 5 hours ago||
I think you are right, the checked pattern on the shirt is not directionally consistent
stymaar 8 hours ago|||
Better safe than sorry in today's internet.
brokensegue 5 hours ago||
anyone have a free photo for wikipedia?
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