Oliver M.D

[Count Dankula @CountDankulaTV]

And just like that, awful political takes would vanish after 9pm every night.

[Ancient History Hub @AncientHistorry]

In 1750 BC, a man named Nanni bought copper from a Babylonian dealer named Ea-Nasir.

The copper was garbage. So Nanni carved his rage into a clay tablet and had it delivered.

It survived 3,770 years. It is the oldest written complaint on Earth, and it tells you exactly how ancient trade worked.

Here is the wild part.

There were no banks, no contracts you could sue over, no shipping insurance. Long distance trade ran entirely on reputation and trust. A merchant like Ea-Nasir built a network by being reliable. Cheat one customer and the whole city heard about it.

So Nanni was not just venting. He was doing economic warfare. A bad review in 1750 BC could end your career, because your name was your only collateral.

Copper itself traveled insane distances. It came from Oman, sailed up the Persian Gulf, and passed through traders in Dilmun (modern Bahrain) before reaching Mesopotamia. No coins existed yet. People paid in weighed silver, barley, and promises recorded on clay.

And we know all of this because one angry customer refused to let it go.

The tablet is in the British Museum right now. Ea-Nasir has been roasted for nearly four thousand years and he has no idea.

[John Carmack @ID_AA_Carmack]

Trista had never played tabletop Dungeons & Dragons before, so I recently dusted off some old skills and ran a little four player game for her.

I never learned modern 5e rules, and I wanted to keep it simple, so I initially considered going full retro with the original Little Brown Book rules. That was a little too crude, so I wound up with the Rules Cyclopedia version, harkening back to my D&D basic set in the late 70s.

The big change from my old games is that Trista and the other players were already skilled Warhammer figure painters, which meant everyone painted their own figure and they collaborated to give me a full menagerie of painted monsters for the game. The expense of lead miniatures and lack of art talent in my early gaming groups had always meant unpainted player characters and cardboard chits for the monsters.

I had a little bit of a bias towards “it is a game of imagination!”, but visual aids are good, actually.

Everyone had fun, and I may be on the hook for doing this once a quarter.

[Count Dankula @CountDankulaTV]

A boy literally had his eyes stabbed out while a migrant was trying to cut his head off and women will still try to make it all about them lmfao.

[Gematsu @gematsu]

Dragon's Dogma II: Dark Arisen announced for PS5, Xbox Series, Switch 2, and PC https://t.co/EJVVoC7jjx

[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.

[John Carmack @ID_AA_Carmack]

I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer than I am.

[Gematsu @gematsu]

In case there were any doubts to reports about this being a last minute change, the Xbox Podcast gameplay that went up today accidently included a version of the trailer with a PS5 logo. Has since gone private: https://t.co/vlywZVFAA8

Screenshot via: https://t.co/wDxXjbEdQa

[Gematsu @gematsu]

Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee Remastered announced for PS5, Xbox Series, Switch 2, and PC https://t.co/dVBUyT362W

[Grey @GreyofDodeca]

I think Retold looks dope, but I’ll never be able to get behind the miserly shortsighted practice of holding beloved series hostage via remakes.
B-Mask sums up my thoughts pretty well in his Medievil remake video essay:

[Gematsu @gematsu]

Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve 'Walkthrough' trailer https://t.co/qUhLwgiiTg

[Oliver M.D @OliverMD]

Here's hoping this attempt won't be as meh-to-terrible as TG3 was, and ends up being more like the original, as TG2 always should have been.

Adding direct character control in 2 was always a huge mistake, adding more time-wasting bloat than anything genuinely worthwhile.

[Ashborne Games @AshborneGames]

The Guild - Europa 1410 is going into Early Access starting July 16 🏰 Mark your calendars! 🗓️

We're excited to build a great Guild game together with you, our passionate community. ❤️

Help us shape The Guild - Europa 1410—add it to your wishlist: https://t.co/nAYqW9lwoh 🔗

[Oliver M.D @OliverMD]

One hell of a pre-order bonus!

[Ace Combat @AceCombatGames]

That’s where the Wings of Theve comes in… the legendary savior.

ACE COMBAT 8: WINGS OF THEVE releases October 2nd, 2026!
Get the Deluxe Edition for 3 days Early Access and much more!
Pre-order now: https://t.co/GFtC82jcGH

[Count Dankula @CountDankulaTV]

"Russians and Donald Trump are what is causing all the stabbings and phone snatchings."

[MauLer @MauLer93]

The capacity for being stuck or lost in games, even to the point of a casual google or message to a friend is infinitely better for the experience than Yellow Paint TM, insecure NPC dialogue or tool tip spam.

[Oliver M.D @OliverMD]

@TehSnakerer

[The Little Platoon @PlatoonPod]

I haven't had time to touch First Light yet, but I keep seeing posts like this pop up that treat really basic things (like "pedestrians should not be made of concrete") as an unreasonable ask of a AAA game in 2026.

IIRC, Simpsons Hit & Run (2003) had them jump out of the way if you tried to hit them. Even Mixtape has them jump out of the way if you try to hit them.

If you didn't want to put in that effort, just stand the guy on the other side of the fence, since you cannot (I assume) drive through the fence.

It's not a game breaker itself, but it is revealing of design priorities, and (essentially) of a certain laziness. It's often a symptom of a broader problem. Laziness tends to compound.

[Red Letter Media @redlettermedia]

Best of the Worst: Accidental Sean Connery Spotlight Episode https://t.co/APojiIOc1z

[Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus II @Mechanicus40K]

Can you hear that? ...
The Warhammer 40,000 Mechanicus II soundtrack by Guillaume David is on streaming platforms NOW! 🏃