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Fun fact of the day: ffmpeg is written by Fabrice Bellard, who among other impressive things, wrote the JS PC emulator capable of running windows 2000 in a browser over 10 years ago that got me fascinated with emulators in general.

https://bellard.org/jslinux/tech.html



Fabrice has not been involved in ffmpeg for well over 15 years now.


“Did you know that Dennis Ritchie wrote macOS? Just look at stdio.h, it’s still there.”


From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FFmpeg

> Original author(s) Fabrice Bellard [...]

Your point?


His point is probably that FFmpeg was written by Fabrice Bellard.


Tense is important.


Fabrice is superhuman for sure, but in 20 years the urban legend will go like ...

Fabrice Bellard once read all of TAOCP in 20 minutes before being absorbed into his own AI and is now ascended in the ethereal ethernet silently fixing bugs in your code. Blessed be the bits.


... before being absorbed into his own AI and is now ascended in the Ethernet plane silently generating endless frames of international scandi-noir thriller serials for Netflix.


I'd love to borrow FB's brain for one week so that I could get an entire year's worth of work done.


“Even in death, I serve the Omnissiah.”


Chuck Norris once opened Windows and created the Macintosh.


That's not true. When I opened Windows the telemetry disappeared.


When Chuck Norris opens Windows, he only receives telemetry from Microsoft.


Xerox...it was xerox for both.


Chuck Norris once opened Windows and no bugs came in.


Blessed be His bits.

Amen.


Under His vi


No no it's vee-eye


May the port open


He also wrote QEMU, which is probably far more impressive.


https://smartbear.com/blog/fabrice-bellard-portrait-of-a-sup...


This is missing QuickJS :) https://bellard.org/


Sorry, windows 98 running in JS is way way WAY more impressive. It's just insane.


Also LZEXE back in time...


The most impressive thing is the LTE modem


We probably should have a Fabrice Bellard accomplishments auto-comment on HN that starts by "Did you know…?" on those submissions.


If we studied Fabrice from the perspective of "how can all be more like him/as productive as him/as innovative/as smart", do you think the findings would basically come back "he's just genetically gifted"?

He's like the Lebron James of the tech world from what I can deduct.


He’s good at creating useful MVPs that are architected well enough to attract other people to finish the remaining 99% of the work as he moves on to the next project.


ffmpeg is largely written by Michael Niedermayer if it's anyone.


He's been gone from ffmpeg for many years.


He still appears to be the fourth highest contributor for 2022 according to the github mirror?


This is ridiculous. Not only is Bellard no longer involved, but to say 'written' implies he did this by himself.

You wouldn't say Linux Torvalds wrote Linux. It's literally written by thousands of people.

I work with people like this, and I hate it when people say "I wrote X feature." No, no you didn't. It was written by a whole team.


I don't see anything wrong with this. It's like saying "Apple is built by Steve Jobs" even though obviously a lot more people are involved, and even if Jobs is no longer even around.


No. That's not a good comparison. No one would say that about a company. A product, yes, but not a company. Steve Jobs founded, and led Apple.


Relevant - a question I asked on this topic not long ago: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/74828879/how-much-of-mod....




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