Tom

Software Engineer
Symfony | Healthcare APIs | Agentic engineering
Science • Freedom • Responsibility

[Tom @laure_th]

L’enfer est pavé de bonnes intentions comme on dit

[Vilain Syndicaliste @Jean1494642]

Se plaindre de la canicule c'est bien.

Voter pour une planification écologique (et donc pour LFI), c'est mieux.

[Tom @laure_th]

@CarolineRivir10 @Draagonfire2 Du coup, j’ai acheté la légendaire Portasplit

[Tom @laure_th]

@CarolineRivir10 @Draagonfire2 Les gens en télétravail ont juste le droit de vivre dans le noir c’est ça ?
Juste pour info, j’ai déjà tenté l’expérience 2 étés dans un bâtiment bien isolé, eh bien même avec tout fermé le jour et tout ouvert la nuit, je monte à plus de 30ºC

[Tom @laure_th]

@davidlisnard ou @knafo_sarah, le reste c’est du nationaliste sénile, du socialiste mou ou du communiste.
Ça dégage.
Mon ancien moi me mettrait des claques

[Astéride @AstridQuiTwitte]

Je trouve que ce candidat apporte un vrai vent de fraîcheur.
Pas vous ?

[Tom @laure_th]

@AstridQuiTwitte Éclaté au sol

[Tom @laure_th]

@grm_off Et moi j’sais pas écrire

[Tom @laure_th]

@grm_off Son gros défaut : resterez derrière Zemmour

[Tom @laure_th]

@brivael @knafo_sarah @ALeaument @Thinker_View Le problème, c’est qu’elle restera derrière Zemmour qui est lui réellement insupportable

[Tom @laure_th]

@starks_ C’est qui Macron ?

[Andrew Curran @AndrewCurran_]

https://t.co/yUVogvdruU

[Tom @laure_th]

@siliconcarnesf Toujours la même rengaine.
À chaque problème, la seule solution qu’on nous propose c’est soit plus d’État, soit plus de taxes

[Tom @laure_th]

Le boss de Doctolib était en faveur de la taxe Zucman, cherche pas plus loin

[Defend Intelligence (Anis Ayari) @DFintelligence]

Vraiment du foutage de gueule. Doctolib qui n’est pas rentable sur une plateforme en ligne avec un quasi-monopole, alors que la BPI et l’État français l’ont massivement financé, et qu’en plus de ça, ils demandent des subventions en boucle, c’est vraiment n'importe quoi.

Et après, on se demande où va l’argent des Français.

Non mais n’importe quoi.

Pour info, publiquement, la BPI a « investi » 211 M€ dans Doctolib depuis sa création, hors État en plus, hors subventions en plus.

Jusqu’à quand on va tolérer ça ? Ça s’appelle profiter du système pour moi.

[Tom @laure_th]

@dr_l_alexandre @EPhilippe_LH @knafo_sarah @JeromeGuedj @GabrielAttal @laurentwauquiez N'oublie pas @davidlisnard

[Dario Amodei @DarioAmodei]

Today I'm publishing a new essay, Policy on the AI Exponential. AI is progressing extremely fast—much faster than the policy process was built to handle. The essay lays out where I think the technology is now, and the action needed to close the gap: https://t.co/Lh6PWae178

[Tom @laure_th]

@davidlisnard ou rien

[Nicolas Chéron @NCheron_bourse]

En France, depuis 50 ans, le coût d'un employé augmente plus vite que son salaire net.

Je n'ai pas les mots.

[blue @bluewmist]

I'm finally reading Dune. This quote, which is in the first few pages, hits hard:

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

[Tom @laure_th]

🇫🇷

[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.

[Tom @laure_th]

Augmenter le SMIC c’est dévaluer tous les métiers qui n’y sont pas.
Dès que l’État fixe des seuils ou des quotas, ça finit en fausse bonne idée et des pénuries (cf. les médecins)

[Tom @laure_th]

@LiiorC Non mais c’est toujours plus chiant. On pousse à faire plus sans analyser le besoin. C’est du FOMO bullshit driven lifestyle