evilstevie @evilstevie@mastod1.ddns.net

Getting married to this gorgeous girl tomorrow, so I'll see you folks later.

We've (finally) roadmapped IPv6 support for www.bbc.co.uk & www.bbc.com!

Via the same workstream, we'll also support v6 on BBC Account (login) and more (maybe all) of media (iPlayer and Sounds) plus our mediation layer.

Yeah I know it's 2026 and others have been doing v6 for aaaaages but we had some awkward blockers and coordination between www and media to sort out.

No firm timelines yet but I'm expecting it to be in the first half of 2027 assuming no delays 🤞🏻

#IPv6

Happy 90th birthday to the living legend that is Brian Blessed!

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2026/oct/08/brian-blessed-90-emma-thompson-adrian-lester-derek-jacobi-brian-may

If you've got an opinion you want on here - submit it to the form: https://forms.gle/1gNMupaNHQf8xeRE6

Coding agents reduce software development to a simple matter of:

* specifying requirements
* verifying correctness and quality
* maintaining and operating software you didn't write

As we all know, those have always been the easiest, most well-understood parts of the craft, so everything is fine!

EDIT: done!!! thanks for the help and the boosts, apparently a mutual of mine (@eOliviaaa) had the bag and bought the rat literally the next day just to take those photos: https://shitpost.trade/@xyla/117407579075628400

(boost pls 🥺)

i NEED a person who owns the winrar bag.
like, not in the romantic sense,,
i just wanna have a photo of it with the ikea rat plushie placed on top of it. i can arrange the details, ship the rat to you, pay for the shipping, whatever. i just need the photo

picrel

I’ve said this many times - have a playbook for Advanced Persistent Teenagers, ransomware and extortion groups. Practice it.

It’s far more likely to need to be used than nation-state espionage playbooks - and these incidents are far more damaging if not well handled.

You need to flood the zone with messaging, put it on the front page of your website, be calm and upfront with customers. If you have 15 lawyers on a call debating legal risks, you’ll lose customer trust. Get the CEO on BBC News.

My latest cartoon for @newscientist.com@bsky.brid.gy

1427) Ogrebot. Grumpy, hulking henchbot. One up from Orcbot, one down from Giantbot. #SmallRobotsRemonstered #Halloween

#thePoint #mastodon #degrowth #burnTheRich

I don’t care where you started out on the political spectrum.

If your kid comes out as trans & you don’t become a rainbow-clad, parade-cheering ally & rock-solid supportive girl/boy/enby dad/mom?

You were never a parent at all.

You were a doll collector furious they didn’t stay in their packaging.

If you can go every level of ham to support their travel hockey league, whether you like hockey or not, you can do it to support their deepest hearts & souls.

For fuck’s sake.

He came, he saw, he conquered

#cats #humor

I had quite a sensible work day today. Since finishing I have put the finishing touches on a very silly parody film poster, and now I've put some googly eyes on some mushies. My evening may have peaked 😁

Thanks to @mock for the source photo:
https://social.cologne/@mock/117387200489844188

#sillyScribbles #googlyEyes #fungi

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.