On June 13, 1777, a 19-year-old French teenager landed on a beach in South Carolina, uninvited, to fight in someone else's war. He would become one of the most important men in American history.
The Marquis de Lafayette was one of the richest young aristocrats in France. He had a beautiful wife, a fortune, and zero reason to risk any of it. But he believed in the American cause so fiercely that when the French king forbade him from going, Lafayette bought his own ship and sailed anyway. He literally went AWOL from a life of luxury to bleed for a country that didn't exist yet.
Congress was annoyed at first. Another foreign officer looking for a paycheck? Then Lafayette offered to serve for free and pay his own way. That got their attention.
He met Washington and the two formed one of the great father-son bonds in American history. Washington had no biological children. Lafayette named his only son George Washington Lafayette.
He took a bullet in the leg at Brandywine and kept rallying the retreat. He was instrumental at Yorktown, the battle that won the war. He went home a hero on two continents.
A foreign teenager believed in America before America did. 249 years ago today.
🔥 Jeremy Clarkson had a fiery clash with BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire at the farmers’ protest against Reeves’ inheritance tax raid on family farms.
Victoria went straight for the gotcha:
“So it’s not about you, it’s not about your farm and the fact you bought a farm to avoid inheritance tax?”
Clarkson, visibly stunned:
“Classic BBC there, classic. The ‘fact’ that I bought a farm to avoid inheritance tax? The ‘fact’?”
Victoria doubled down: “You told The Sunday Times in 2021 that’s why you bought it?”
Clarkson, laughing in disbelief:
“These people… BBC. Let’s start from the beginning. I wanted to shoot. That’s even worse to the BBC. Which comes with the benefit of not having to pay inheritance tax.”
He pointed out the tax isn’t even an issue for him personally as he can simply put the farm in a trust, but he’s standing with ordinary family farms that will be hammered.
After sparring over the real numbers affected, Clarkson urged the government to U-turn.
Victoria: “And get the money from where?”
Clarkson: “Walk into any of the offices around here and if you don’t understand what somebody’s job is, fire them.” 😂
Classic Clarkson.
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.
In his final moments, Henry Nowak told police officers nine times “I can’t breathe” and four times that he had been stabbed.
In response police officer dragged him across the gravel, handcuffed and read him his rights.
It was the last thing Henry heard before he died.
Depuis 1980 et la mise en place d'un socialisme massif en France on ne fait que dégringoler dans tous les classements
Un mec sans diplome au salaire le plus bas en Suisse gagne plus que nos ingénieurs Français
C'est presque dur d'imaginer qu'en 1970 on avait le même niveau de vie que les Américains ou les Suisse
We live in an age of miracles.
3D printing and computational geometry make previously unimaginable geometries possible.
From: Kazuki Abe, Riichiro Tadakuma & Kenjiro Tadakuma's 2021 paper – ABENICS: Active Ball Joint Mechanism With Three-DoF Based on Spherical Gear Meshings
Wtf gaat er bij je mis als agent dat je een zwangere vrouw zo behandelt, dit is politie NL en dan zich afvragen waar de verharding in de maatschappij vandaan komt.
😡😡 SCHAAM JE KAPOT 😡😡
#POLITIE#politiegeweld#zwanger#zwangerenvrouw#mishandelt#ziek
🚨LA residents set up fake homeless encampments right outside mayoral candidate Nithya Raman’s home.
After she said she doesn’t care about tents near schools and daycares, angry locals brought the reality to her doorstep.
@Cdenquete j'ajoute que j'ai trouvé moi meme 12 autres victimes du même pédophile et que je les ai aidé à porter plainte, et malgré cela la justice le laisse en liberté.
@Cdenquete j'ai porté plainte il y a 7 ans pour viol sur mineur de moins de 15 ans, la juge a dit a mon avocate que ça fait seulement 7 ans et qu'elle a des dossiers plus vieux, ensuite elle est partie en congé maternité en disant a sa suppléante de ne pas traiter le dossier en son absence
🚨 PETITION : POUR QUE LES PARLEMENTAIRES NOUS COMMUNIQUENT LEURS NOTES DE FRAIS 🚨
Suite à de nombreuses demandes depuis hier et à l'annonce de notre action, nous avons ouvert une pétition pour que vous puissiez, en personne, faire entendre votre voix.
Lisez, signez et surtout : PARTAGEZ !
Mobilisez-vous pour que transparence soit faite ! 👇
https://t.co/4tdJc4qlhO
Notre association a franchi un cap inédit sous la Vᵉ République. Nous avons officiellement demandé à la Présidence de l'Assemblée nationale et du Sénat la communication de l'intégralité des justificatifs de frais de mandat (AFM) de tous les députés et sénateurs français.
Breton n'a pas "fondé sa boîte aux US à 24 ans". Il a été prof de maths au Lycée français de New York pendant son service militaire en coopération. Un enseignant fonctionnaire, pas un entrepreneur.
1981 : retour en France, il crée Forma Systems. Une SSII française parmi des dizaines, sans postérité. Il l'abandonne en 1986 pour rejoindre les cabinets Monory/Raffarin. Voilà pour le "self-made man".
Le vrai CV :
- Thomson : refuse le projet de baladeur MP3 3 ans avant l'iPod. Boîte démantelée.
- France Télécom : conçoit le plan NEXT, qualifié 20 ans plus tard par la justice de "harcèlement moral institutionnalisé". Dizaines de suicides.
- Bercy : brade les autoroutes pour une bouchée de pain. Des dizaines de milliards de profits perdus à perpétuité pour l'État.
- Atos : 4,4 Mds€ de dépréciations d'actifs reconnues APRÈS son départ. Le "fleuron" qu'il a hérité fini en quasi-faillite.
- Commission EU : viré après s'être embrouillé avec von der Leyen.
Donc oui, ingénieur Supélec. Personne ne le conteste. Le diplôme n'est pas le sujet. Le sujet c'est que ce type a détruit de la valeur à chaque poste qu'il a occupé, et qu'à chaque échec on lui confiait quelque chose de plus gros.
Et après ça il vient faire la leçon à Elon Musk — un mec qui a créé Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, refait du lanceur spatial réutilisable une réalité industrielle, et qui emploie 200 000 personnes. Net positif évident pour l'humanité.
Breton, lui, a un bilan net négatif chiffré en milliards et en vies humaines. Mais c'est lui qui se permet de menacer X de sanctions depuis Bruxelles. L'arrogance du raté qui régule le bâtisseur, c'est exactement le symptôme du problème.
Ce type est un clown
Today, we share a breakthrough on the planar unit distance problem, a famous open question first posed by Paul Erdős in 1946.
For nearly 80 years, mathematicians believed the best possible solutions looked roughly like square grids.
An OpenAI model has now disproved that belief, discovering an entirely new family of constructions that performs better.
This marks the first time AI has autonomously solved a prominent open problem central to a field of mathematics.