I.W.M.

cinematographer

[sxwrkr @sxwrkr_]

They installed a new heart valve upside down, told the family we don’t know why she’s declining would u like to donate organs, the family transfers to another hospital and they find the upside down valve, fix it, and she’s ok now

[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.

[Nēa "Dracula" Ching @TheGayChingy]

From listening to 7 seasons of Mad Men episode commentary, i’d hazard the answer is he’s more than a little bit odd, even for an actor.

[Meech @MediumSizeMeech]

LOLOLOLOLLL

[wendell sandico @wendellsandico]

kinda obsessed with the fact that Madonna did the whole Madonna bootcamp thing and chose Julia Garner but couldn't get the film made so she just invites Julia to things now

[julia @juumelo_]

you’re on thick fucking ice. I love u

[harry @harryc1018]

oh i’m sure

[You’re Innocent When You Dream @5gheg]

I feel like grey text all the time

[@ratlimit @ratlimit]

COOKING SHOW IDEA: Contestants must sneak as much sawdust as possible into a dish. Most sawdust wins. They're kicked off if restaurant patrons don't finish the meal. The catch?—Patrons are told that child chefs w/ leukemia made the food. Bald child actors watch them expectantly

[pia @reaptides]

the drama (2026) vs before sunset (2004)

[Ben ꕤ @bentolate]

Opened Pinterest and this is the first image I saw

[Longswordwife @Longswordwife]

Backrooms if Clark met famed renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer

[domestic grace @holyhomemaking]

was asking my husband if he cared about the baby shower theme and he was like what is that? do you mean like space or like mafia themed? and now he wont let go of the mafia idea. he says the invitations would say "welcome a new member of the family" and we could do italian food

[tex @texmeplease]

my neighbor did the hvac system on spongebob’s house and he said that he doesn’t really live there he just goes there to film the show

[bmw e39 cupholder @twobarwifi]

there are really Scarboroughs everywhere for those with the eyes to see

[❤️‍🔥ᛉNaomi Richmondᛣ🌲 @MYTHOTROPOS]

The darkness that lives within Costanza is the same darkness that lives within us all

[AppFlyer @wbridgefa]

Went to see Backrooms last night. Couldn’t use the kiosk. Asked the kid at the door why, he said “it’s rated R, use the app”

So, like an absolute idiot, I used the app.

$10 convenience fee.

I complained, they said customer service could refund it for me.

Customer service: of course sir, we can refund the tickets—but not the convenience fee.

wtf @AMCTheatres

[jordí @theonlyjordan__]

Casino Royale if 9/11 never happened

[Kuuhaku ☭ @Kuuhaku3993]

What's important here is that he spent the entire production trying to bait Muslims into assaulting him for acting flamboyantly gay. Only for that to never happen, except with a group of Israelis. It's the only time he broke character during production, to tell them he was acting

[Handsome B. Charming @CTachio83984]

THIS FIRES ME UP , THIS MAKES ME FEEL FUCKING EXCITED !!!!