Samuel Buffet

🇫🇷 Vie, EV, Eve, ad astra 🚀

[Samuel Buffet @samuel_buffet]

@areid602 @MaximoMustero @Hippophaee @Mr_Mat_fr 🤡 never heard of nEUROn with Italy, Spain, Sweden Switzerland or the VOORTEX-S with OHB Germany ?

[Samuel Buffet @samuel_buffet]

@DennaTyska @Oitajpn 🤡

[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.

[Samuel Buffet @samuel_buffet]

@OldMajorBlair @RonFilipkowski 🤡

[Samuel Buffet @samuel_buffet]

@ColbyBadhwar @Etienne_Marcuz This comment alone should be enough to go for a french made product.

[Nicolas Batum @nicolas88batum]

Great sport day for our country 🇫🇷

[Samuel Buffet @samuel_buffet]

@RADeMita dylan is but not stephon

[Samuel Buffet @samuel_buffet]

@fashKuh @tesgoulo En août si probablement. Il l'a dit dans une itw

[MalikDubNation🦉🧊 @MalikDubNation]

Les fans de basket samedi soir 🥸

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

Starship flip and landing burn at the end of its twelfth flight test

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Fully reusable rockets bias towards higher T/W, as propellant cost dominates cost per ton to orbit.

Even for Falcon 9, which is ~80% reusable, losing the upper stage costs way more than the propellant, so relatively inefficient use of propellant (low T/W) still reduces $/ton to orbit.

[Samuel Buffet @samuel_buffet]

@astro_samira_b @TintinMilou_ @Simouss_35 Ha ha ha. J'adore les donneurs de leçons qui n'ont jamais rien fait de leur vie.

[Wendy’s @Wendys]

might change my name to Wemby’s and only serve french fries after last night’s game

[ɴᴏsᴇ @nosebreathhh]

@espn Victor wembanyama has defence like prime dikembe mutombo, offence like a giannis that can actually shoot, height that would make most centers look small, and a mentality that kobe would've been proud of, he is the final evolution of basketball 🔥

[Carrington Harrison @cdotharrison]

What Wemby did tonight is why we have to quit calling every top pick a generational prospect. There’s been 3 in 40 years. Shaq, LeBron, Wemby.

[Samuel Buffet @samuel_buffet]

@MaximoMustero @CCharpentreau 🤡

[Samuel Buffet @samuel_buffet]

@MaximoMustero @CCharpentreau 🤡

[Samuel Buffet @samuel_buffet]

@MaximoMustero @CCharpentreau 🤡

[⚡ GREG ⚡ @Goldengreg]

Kenji Oba, l'interprète de X-Or est décédé.

Il se battait contre la maladie depuis de nombreuses années déjà...

Tous les enfants qui sautaient sur le canapé en criant "il ne faut que 5 centièmes de seconde..." dans les années 80 sont orphelins😢

[Annick De Ridder @AnnickDeRidder]

📢 Breaking
Ik heb naar aanleiding van het Tesla FSD-testproject in Nederland aan @Tesla gevraagd hun dossier aan ons over te maken. Dat ligt nu bij mijn administratie, die ik de opdracht heb gegeven om tegen het einde van de week duidelijkheid te verschaffen over een mogelijke snelle homologatie. Want innovatie moet je niet afremmen, maar doordacht en veilig mogelijk maken. Zo houden we Vlaanderen op kop als vooruitstrevende regio.
@elonmusk

https://t.co/NyIsGCIwTy