Jonathan Yaloussa

Christian, part-time extrovert, PR specialist, poetry and philosophy lover, sarcastic, and slightly boring. Find the right blending, and you'll love me.

[Jonathan Yaloussa @JonYalusa]

@PhilipChase90 @binding_broken Since we've got you here, @PhilipChase90, are you still considering translating Malazan's closing poem in old English?
I really enjoyed your translation of the opening one and your chat with SE about said poem.

[Jonathan Yaloussa @JonYalusa]

@VisInBlue @boycereads 🕯

[Jonathan Yaloussa @JonYalusa]

@boycereads Let us know once you've read Chapter 7 of The Bonehunters.

[Jonathan Yaloussa @JonYalusa]

@NadavIsHere The Original Metal Face Starks!

[Jonathan Yaloussa @JonYalusa]

@Iskarjarak1 I consider not loving Lord Anomander Rake a flaw of character.

[Jonathan Yaloussa @JonYalusa]

@AgitpropMaster Gondolin, my beloved.

[alaska @145k4]

everyone wants to say "this poem sucks" that poem sucks"" etc but very few brave enough to say Helllo, here is a poem i LIKE!! This is my taste!

[Angelo Dawkins @AngeloDawkins]

I got South Africa beating Canada today #FIFAWorldCup

[John Collison @collision]

As you become an adult, you realize that things around you weren't just always there; people made them happen. But only recently have I started to internalize how much tenacity *everything* requires. That hotel, that park, that railway. The world is a museum of passion projects.

[Jonathan Yaloussa @JonYalusa]

Not every social media post needs background music. The world is already loud enough as it is — please!

[𝖬𝖺𝗍𝗍 𝖲𝗍𝖺𝗆𝗉𝖾𝗋 🐍 @Sneketoshi]

I want to introduce you to Steve. He’s 83. His wife died a few months ago and he comes to this lodge in Spring Mill, Indiana and draws. He taught art in Terre Haute, IN his whole life. He also did courtroom sketches in court cases. In the comments I’ll share some pics from his sketchbook. He was excited when I said I was going to share his sketches with the world.

[Bridget Foley @wonderfoleyonx]

Just tossing this into the dating discourse.

[terminally onλine εngineer @tekbog]

he needs a cold one with the boys

[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.

[Jonathan Yaloussa @JonYalusa]

@jacqueboatman If Jacque quits Twitter, I will riot. Calmly and peacefully.

[Clark H @Clarksterh]

This study, which has been replicated many times, shows dramatic increase in creative idea generation from walking (vs sitting).

Seems obvious and I have (infamously) done this for decades - but it gets a lot of side-eye, even soto voce disapproval.

[The Resurrection of The Christ @ResurrectFilm]

THE RESURRECTION OF THE CHRIST: PART ONE - coming to theaters May 6, 2027.

[Mandevil @Mandevil23]

@DiscussingFilm

[jacque boatman @jacqueboatman]

“Responsibility is food for the will, guilt is food for the feelings only.”

- Owen Barfield, Modern Idolatry

[Jonathan Yaloussa @JonYalusa]

@SketchesbyBoze Yours seems both more tasteful and personal than The Guardian's list—and a lot more sincere.

I'm not particularly a fan, I would have included—at n#91, perhaps—HP & The Philosopher Stone based on influence alone.

All in all, it's a great list. I'll give a few titles a try.