Diego

Wheel reinventor 🛞 Slop maker 🧪@aframevr maintainer, Supermedium (YC) cofounder @Mozilla @Apple @Microsoft @UW @ESO @CERN @Ensimag @La_UPM 🇪🇸 🇨🇭 🇫🇷 🇺🇸

[Diego @dmarcos]

Load Gaussian splattings on a single line of HTML

@aframevr community FTW 🥇

Thanks to quadjr, @arkba and @kfarr

Demo: https://t.co/VYF3m1XI4R

Demo code: https://t.co/HeLrI0LLKk

Component: https://t.co/zPafU8WifD

[Diego @dmarcos]

@DavidSHolz just DMed you

[Diego @dmarcos]

not cgi, not a render, not AI

[Diego @dmarcos]

Along the elitism there’s often a humble sense of duty in many engineers educated in the grand école system that I find uniquely french.

[Spencer Baggins @bigaiguy]

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.

[Diego @dmarcos]

Frontier labs should have a pool of money to distribute to open source projects that make their models useful.

Pocket change, would generate so much goodwill and win over many skeptics and even haters.

[Ray @raysan5]

#raylib keeps growing (new version, new features, new tools, new users...), but sponsorship does not, growth has been 0 for the last 6 months.

If you use raylib, what would make you consider supporting the project? 🤔

[Diego @dmarcos]

Computers are pretty simple machines conceptually. It’s the layers of stuff piled up over decades that make them really hard to operate and control.

[Diego @dmarcos]

@Philipp02536795 @Jonathan_Blow Looks i need to like and subscribe more.

[Diego @dmarcos]

3DGS FTW. You can incorporate your own in your apps with @sparkjsdev and its LOD system

https://t.co/AvoGeePHG2

[Radiance Fields @RadianceFields]

Apple just announced gaussian splatting is coming to Apple Maps at WWDC.

[Diego @dmarcos]

Running for 6 hours has consequences 🏃‍♂️

[Diego @dmarcos]

The loops that prompt my agent didn’t work

[Diego @dmarcos]

“If you fall, you get up. if they tie your feet, you grow wings” Marc

Vamos! 💪 🇪🇸

[Diego @dmarcos]

@kirai haz una review

[Diego @dmarcos]

@g3llmannamnesia @yacineMTB Cool. thanks. looking forward to seeing what you cook

[Diego @dmarcos]

@g3llmannamnesia @yacineMTB I’m also interested in games like you

[Diego @dmarcos]

@yacineMTB Yeah. Are there any resource with fun stuff you can do in a single GPU?

[Diego @dmarcos]

@g3llmannamnesia @yacineMTB that sounds fun. what’s good learning material to start with?

[Diego @dmarcos]

@the_danielmason @hunter_spatial true. my mistake. It’s the same issue. supply chain moves to the newer chips. If you don’t update can no longer manufacture.

[Diego @dmarcos]

Smart glasses won’t have a display initially so no overlap with VisionOS. More related to AirPods. Apple glasses with display might not ever ship unless tech improves drastically. Still very rough in fov, resolution, form factor, power managment, color reprod, no opacity… visionOS in current form doesn’t apply much.