evilstevie @evilstevie@mastod1.ddns.net

10 years ago today, the tory conference had a delightfully unfortunate backdrop.

1298) Hydrabot. Has got a lot of heads. #SmallRobotsRemonstered #Halloween

On me dit que ce texte signé Spencer Baggins @bigaiguy a fort probablement été créé par IA.

Fabrice Bellard

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.

He wrote the code that streams every YouTube video, every Netflix show, every TikTok clip. He wrote the code that runs the virtual servers underneath AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. He calculated more digits of pi than anyone in history. He has no Twitter. He has no marketing. He just keeps shipping.

His name is Fabrice Bellard.

Here is the story, because almost nobody outside the systems programming world knows what one man has built.

Fabrice was born in 1972 in Grenoble, France. He studied at École Polytechnique, the top French engineering school. He never went to Silicon Valley. He never built a startup empire. He just wrote code.

In 2000 he started a project called FFmpeg, an open-source multimedia framework for encoding, decoding, and streaming video. He was 28. The project did one thing nobody else had done well. It handled every video and audio format that existed, in one library, on every operating system. He led it himself for years.

Today FFmpeg is the invisible engine of the internet. YouTube uses it. Netflix uses it. VLC uses it. Chrome and Firefox use parts of it. Every Android phone, every iPhone, every smart TV, every video editing tool you have ever touched runs FFmpeg somewhere underneath. If you have watched a video on a screen in the last 20 years, Fabrice's code processed it.

He was not done.

In 2003 he started QEMU, a machine emulator and virtualizer. He wrote it solo until version 0.7.1 in 2005. QEMU lets you run any operating system on any other operating system. It became the foundation of modern virtualization. KVM, the Linux kernel hypervisor, runs on top of QEMU. Every major cloud provider, AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, runs virtual machines on infrastructure built around it. The Quick Emulator is the most cited piece of cloud infrastructure code on Earth.

He kept going.

In 2001 he won the International Obfuscated C Code Contest with a small C compiler that grew into TCC, the Tiny C Compiler. TCC can compile and boot a Linux kernel from source in under 15 seconds. In 2004 he calculated the most digits of pi ever computed at the time, using a personal desktop computer and an algorithm he derived himself called Bellard's formula. In 2011 he wrote a complete PC emulator in pure JavaScript that runs Linux in your browser, a project called JSLinux that engineers still cannot believe is real.

In 2019 he released QuickJS, a small but complete JavaScript engine that fits where V8 cannot. In 2021 he released NNCP, a neural network based lossless data compressor that immediately took the lead on the Large Text Compression Benchmark.

Then he turned his attention to large language models. He built TextSynth Server, a web server with a REST API for running LLMs locally. He released ts_zip and ts_sms, compression utilities that use language models to compress text and short messages at ratios traditional algorithms cannot reach. He released TSAC, a very low bitrate audio compression system. In December 2025 he released Micro QuickJS, a new JavaScript engine for microcontrollers, separate from QuickJS, designed for environments with almost no memory.

Fabrice co-founded a telecom company called Amarisoft in 2012, where he serves as CTO. Amarisoft builds 4G and 5G base station software used by carriers and labs around the world. He has been running it for over a decade while continuing to ship personal projects from his own home page at bellard dot org

He has no Twitter. He has no Instagram. He gives almost no interviews. His personal website is a flat list of projects with no styling, no fonts, no marketing copy. Just titles and links.

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

He is still shipping.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard

Spencer Baggins @bigaiguy

one of the most important parts of the human body, which despite its hard bone-like microstructure actually forms an integral component of the central nervous system, is a thin, flat organ found in the outside of the upper thigh, called the 'phone'

#silentsunday

If I want to read an article on a website, I want to read it. Throw in a couple of pictures if you like, provided they're actually relevant. But if it's one of those pages that uses scroll based animation, stickies and [shudder] parallax effects, you can jam it up your hoop.

This instance is hosted on a 20 year old laptop, boost to give it a stress test.

In this case, there is also a simple mathematical reason why mass surveillance works like shit.

You have three ingredients:

a very large population,
a tiny number of actual terrorists,
and a detection system with a measurable false-positive rate.

That combination is mathematically nasty.

Assume you monitor one million people and ten of them are actually terrorists. Now assume you have an extraordinarily good detection system: it identifies 90% of the terrorists and has a false-positive rate of only 0.1%.

It will correctly identify nine terrorists.

But among the 999,990 innocent people, a 0.1% false-positive rate produces roughly 1,000 false alarms.

So your supposedly excellent surveillance system gives you about 1,009 alerts, of which only nine are real. More than 99% of your alerts are false positives.

And this example is deliberately generous. A false-positive rate of just 0.1% is unrealistically low for a real-world system trying to infer something as vague and complicated as terrorist intent from communications, behavior, associations, travel patterns, social media activity and other surveillance data. At 1%, the same example would produce roughly 10,000 false positives for nine true positives. At 5%, it would produce nearly 50,000.

This is the base-rate problem. When the thing you are looking for is extremely rare, even a remarkably accurate detection system can produce vastly more false positives than true positives. In the real world, where detection is messy and the criteria themselves are ambiguous, the problem gets much worse.

And now you have created a second problem: alarm fatigue.

Someone has to investigate all those innocent people. Analysts learn that almost every alarm they see is bullshit. Attention becomes the scarce resource. The system designed to find the needle in the haystack responds to the difficulty of finding the needle by continuously adding more hay.

Mass surveillance therefore has a fundamental scaling problem: collecting more data is easy. Producing more alerts is easy. Producing more human attention is not.

Right-wing politicians have always struggled to get creative people to work for them so not surprised they’re eager adopters/promoters of AI-generated content, it’s a resentful fuck-you thing as well as convenience

This is the funniest thing I've seen today, possibly ever

protip: make your handoff documents to team members unhinged so they are motivated to actually read them

Polar bear!

Site: We noticed that you are blocking our ads.

Me: That’s right.

Site: But that’s how we pay for this content. Will you disable your ad-blocker?

Me: No. My ad blocker is how I stop you from spying on me.

Site: But we’re not spying on you.

Me: Then how did you know I’m blocking your ads?

propranolol implies the existence of propranolmao

Good morning dear amazing Tooteroonies of near n far🌞☕
It is Frejasday! Ports of weekend visible, sun 12° n some wind😉
I wish yous a fabulous day filled with happiness, kindness, optimism, camaradery, magic, insight, wisdom, love, funs, joys, smiles, giggles n laughter😊🤙
#Fredag #Frejasday #MorningGreetings #Smiles

I am making a collection of sweary phrases for a grumpy but colourful art project. The whole collection to date is here: https://eclectech.co.uk/ffs

I'm after things you might say when shouting in angry frustration at a news headline (where an exasperated "for fuck's sake" is common in English).

I have been offered the suggestions below for Czech. Please vote for the one(s) you would choose to use, and I will add the top voted to the collection.

If this has landed in your timeline & you don't know what I'm talking about, the original thread about the project is here
https://things.uk/@eclectech/117071859569448514

Díky!

#theFFSproject #Czech

Undocumented #ESP32 behaviour discovered - Raw IQ Capture with Espressif's ESP32 Chips:

> This opens up the possibility of using the ESP32 as a low-cost software-defined radio (SDR) platform

> ESP-SDR currently supports the original ESP32, ESP32-C3, ESP32-C5, ESP32-C6, ESP32-C61, ESP32-S2, ESP32-S3 and ESP32-S31.

https://espargos.net/espsdr/

(first disclosed by h0m3us3r, 3 days ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/esp32/comments/1wq37xz/got_raw_iq_streaming_out_of_an_esp32s3_at_80_mss/)

#espargos #sdr #radio #electronics #makers #embedded #sbr #expressif

@jakecoppinger The ability to decode all 80 channel of Bluetooth in cheap hardware changes the BT security picture substantially

SCADA, or as I like to call it, "involuntary retrocomputing"