Slav

Music Publisher, Tech Advisor, IT Talent Sourcer. Passionate about art, personal growth and cheese.

[alon @alonzuman]

having a wife is crazy cuz its like claude code but it prompts you instead

[Pyrate @CEOLandshark]

If winning was guaranteed &certain, you'd go 10x harder at it.

Paradoxically, if you went 10x harder, the win would almost be a guarantee, on a long enough time horizon, for any goal.

It's easy to mentally recognize this, but it ideally should be felt in the body as a fact.

[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.

[Atlas Press @realAtlasPress]

Leonardo da Vinci's greatest paragraph

[Dr. Julie Gurner @drgurner]

“Your job, throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself.” - G. Doyle

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

reminder

[Darshak Rana ⚡️ @thedarshakrana]

In 1973, this man learned "to exit his physical body."

He "mentally traveled" to Jupiter and described its rings.

6 years later, NASA’s Voyager 1 confirmed EVERY detail he reported.

CIA immediately classified it

But, what he discovered about consciousness will terrify you: 🧵

[𐙚⋆ @voidwithverses]

You believe God looks at us from above but he actually sees us from the inside.

— Rumi

[Axel (fastr) @fastrlife]

So many of you are making this mistake.

You’re looking for:

1. Your life’s purpose
2. Your career path
3. How they relate to being your mission

This is the wrong way to look at it.

Make your purpose to be:

- Present
- Gracious
- Loving
- Individual

Once you have these, you just need to
live life to the fullest and do what you love…

It will figure itself out for you.

“what am I going to do”

Is external pressure, it solves nothing…

“who am I in this moment”

Is internal channeling, it can create the best life imaginable, and yield the highest quality experiences…

[𝘄𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘃𝗲𝗹𝘀 @visualsofearth1]

The Fairy Glen, Isle of Skye, Scotland

[Vala Afshar @ValaAfshar]

“Speak to your children as if they are the wisest, kindest, most beautiful and magical humans on earth, for what they believe is what they will become.”

[Slav @slavrecords]

@PlanetBlue1998 @ThinkingUSD Just to confirm, how many days in the office a week? I'll send the first candidates next week, please enable messaging:)

[Kpaxs @Kpaxs]

Here’s a practical exercise that could change your life in an afternoon.

Get a piece of paper and draw two columns. Left column: WHERE I CURRENTLY GET DOPAMINE, right column: WHERE I WANT TO GET DOPAMINE.

Fill in the left column brutally honestly: phone, social media, news, sugar. alcohol, shopping, gossip, outrage, complaining, pornography … whatever it is, no judgment.

Now fill in the right column: what would you like to feel pulled toward? Creative work, exercise, deep conversation, learning, building, cooking, nature, music-making… whatever calls to you.

Now look at the two columns. The gap between them is the gap between who you are and who you want to be. And the gap is not a character gap but a wiring gap.

Your nervous system is currently wired to seek reward from column A. You want it wired to seek reward from column B. The entire project of personal transformation reduces to this: gradually, patiently, micro-dose by micro-dose, shift the wiring from left to right.

You do that by making column B increasingly available, increasingly rewarding, increasingly easy and simultaneously making column A slightly less available, slightly less convenient, slightly more friction-laden.

You’re not fighting yourself, you’re migrating yourself from one dopamine landscape to another. It’s like moving a river one sandbag at a time. the river doesn’t know it’s being moved. it just follows the path of least resistance. and you’re quietly, patiently, reshaping what “least resistance” means.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

«Raw contrast of human evolution»

[conduct|r @conductr_]

David f*cking Goggins, what a line…

“When your entire day is fucked up, make sure that you achieve something positive before lights out. You’ll probably have to stay up a bit later to read, study, get a workout in, or clean the house. Whatever it takes to go to bed in the black, get it done.“

[Maddi 🇦🇺🪻 @maddimogs]

there's no fucking way dutch is a real language

[ceres @0xCE7E5]

if you're so smart why aren't you having fun