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[Ozan Bellik @BellikOzan]

Yes, this went from utter fantasy to probably a few years late relative to the late end of the estimated time range.

Compare to past public program projections for context. We were supposed to have boots on Martian soil in the 80s.

"Oh but that wasn't funded!"

Yes, exactly. And these guys built an engine for funding it (and a way to do it cost effectively) almost from scratch. I'm not complaining if it takes them 25 years instead of 10-20 when the American public and American politicians were unwilling to fund expensive flag and footprint missions for over 50 years, and NASA failed to propose a compelling plan for over 50 years.

[Spacer First Class @SpacerFC]

@dan_tmt No it's not, he's not selling Mars colony, the TAM doesn't include Mars at all, and he's been upfront that there's no profit in colonizing Mars.

If you think Starship is only for Mars, you really have no idea what SpaceX is working on.

[Gordon D Comstock @GordonDComstock]

Not so long ago Christians were being told not to wear a cross at work, the NHS was one place where it happened. Now we are being told that carrying a knife is permitted if you are a Sikh. The contrast is stark and utterly indefensible.

[Spacer First Class @SpacerFC]

@dan_tmt Starship and Starlink is what will help them build an AI company, both in terms of providing free cash flow, and the foundation for building space data center.

[Milei in English - Official Account @jmilei_english]

For the first time in 123 years, Argentina has achieved a sustained fiscal surplus without being in default. We are one of only 5 countries in the world in this position.

LONG LIVE FREEDOM, DAMN IT...!!!

[Sophie Corcoran @sophielouisecc]

Wait so Sikhs are allowed to carry a literal knife on a plane - but I couldn’t carry my big bottle of shampoo for ‘safety reasons’

Absolutely mad

[🖤 { Spookyonyx } 🖤 @MbvBaryonix]

Dinosaurs opressed mammals so badly we still have PTSD from them 66 million years after the space rock

[Spacer First Class @SpacerFC]

@deltaIV9250 Dude you haven't been monitoring the situation.

These were part of a PR campaign starting from mid last year to really push BO as challenger to SpaceX, at the time a lot of spitters thought they seem unstoppable and catching up to SpaceX fast, the reality is quite different...

[fool me can’t get fooled again @foolmealex]

Dating your coworker used to be one of the top ways to meet your spouse and now there’s a massive social taboo against it

[Signal @signalapp]

Our statement on the UK government’s demand that all content on all devices sold or used in the country be scanned, on the presumption of nudity, using a dystopian combination of age verification and content scanning. This proposal will not safeguard children. It endangers us all.

https://t.co/VdWe9uhi8p

[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.

[Video Nasties🇵🇲 @53gaDr3amca5t]

Not to play down the horrors & violence of the Western Front of WWII, but it is always funny seeing just how people almost universally would rather fight there than the Pacific
Like do you wanna get smooched by pretty Dutch ladies or do you wanna knifefight on Malaria Rape Atoll

[malmesburyman @malmesburyman]

If Europeans realize we have a country full of places like this and they all have air conditioning, America is liable to get another wave of European immigration this century.

[Phil Magness @PhilWMagness]

Here's something many people don't know about me -

Before I publicly dissected the long list of problems in the 1619 Project, I contacted the New York Times through their official channels to request a series of corrections to unambiguous factual errors in its content. The editor - Jake Silverstein - brushed me off and refused any correction - a pattern he also exhibited toward other critics from across the spectrum.

Before I publicly broke the story about Kevin Kruse's plagiarism in Reason, I contacted Princeton's academic integrity officer and alerted him to the problems I had found, giving them a chance to respond and address it internally. They ignored my email and later claimed to have lost my email after I went public.

Before I published my findings on Quinn Slobodian's habitual manipulation of source materials to alter its plain meaning through misquotation, I submitted an article to Contemporary European History (the journal where the worst examples appeared), highlighting the problems with the passages and asking for a correction through their official process. They desk-rejected it, brushed me off, and falsely claimed that Slobodian's piece had been thoroughly vetted in peer review. In fact, one of their own referees had flagged the same problems over a year earlier and recommended rejection of the article.

Before I published an expose on Nancy MacLean & Sandy Darity's similar manipulation of W.H. Hutt quotations in their article for History of Economics Review, I (along with 2 coauthors) submitted a response comment to this journal asking for a correction through its official processes. The editor gave us a complete runaround where he imposed an arbitrary length limit requiring us to cut the content, sent the trimmed version to a referee, then rejected the piece because the referee said we didn't sufficiently address the very same things we were forced by the editor to cut. When I then asked the editor to issue a simple corrigendum to the most egregious misquotation (one that transformed Hutt's explicit attack on the racism of white Afrikaners into a defense of Apartheid), he refused and tried to pass it off as a difference of "interpretation."

Before I published an expose of a leading covid masking model in the Wall Street Journal, I sent a comment to the medical journal that published it alerting them to a math error that changed their entire set of results. The journal acknowledged the error was real but refused to publish my piece on the grounds that the "next release" of the model would be updated to reflect it - even as politicians up to and including Joe Biden were trumpeting the erroneous results all over the news.

[Michael Kasper @KasperStats]

i'm not kidding, the US travel/tourism board (whatever that is at a Federal level lol) should sponsor the rest of that German guy's trip through the US, dude is doing insanely good PR for the South

[EV_Trapper @EV_Trapper]

It's June 8th 2026 & we still cannot easily or openly buy NGO Silicon Steel in the USA. It's time to fix this because everybody else has had enough time. We are looking for investors in this endeavor, but it would be preferable if you lived in Louisiana! The warehouse & facility that will distribute & sell this will be located in Louisiana.

We are looking to serve the commercial robotics, drone & industrial industry who are already using chinese stators & chinese motors in general. The entire point here is to offer companies the ability to make their own stators & motors here in the USA.🇺🇸

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

Because America has made the wise decision to compensate blood donors, it has ended up supplying some 70% of the world's blood plasma.

This is one of America's top exports, and each year, America saves hundreds of thousands of lives because it does this.

[Electra @Electrarythm]

Most people don't know this, but Salvador Dalí built his entire career on tapping into his unconscious mind on purpose.

Dalí's most famous trick was a micro-nap he called "slumber with a key." He'd sit in a heavy Spanish-style armchair, head tilted back against the leather, both arms hanging completely limp off the armrests, and in his left hand he'd hold a heavy metal key pinched lightly between his thumb and forefinger.

Directly under that hand, on the floor, he'd place an upside-down plate. He'd then let himself drift into sleep. The instant he actually fell asleep, his muscles would go slack, the key would slip out of his fingers, hit the upside-down plate, and the clang would jolt him awake.

The whole nap was meant to last less than a quarter of a second. He called that half-second window the "taut and invisible wire which separates sleeping from waking," and he'd immediately sketch the hallucinations he saw in that flash.

The melting clocks, the elephants on stilts, the burning giraffes, a lot of that came straight out of those quarter-second naps. He picked the trick up from Capuchin monks and wrote it down as one of his "50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship."