Steppe and Stones

Bridging consciousness.

[Steppe and Stones @steppestones]

@MihajlovicMike Much appreciated! Looking forward to it!

[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.

[Steppe and Stones @steppestones]

@manymiaows @RnaudBertrand Man of substance and conrarian thinkning doesn't necessarily mean man of people.

[Steppe and Stones @steppestones]

@LajosPhd9236 You'd need to blow up 4 bridges and a dam, which holds all that reservoir upstream. Largest HEPP in Europe. You'd need to deal with an island armed to the max. And enormous industrial areas (gray). And 300k civilians at least. M-18 would need to be cut too.

[Steppe and Stones @steppestones]

@LajosPhd9236 No, they didn't. Not even close.

[Steppe and Stones @steppestones]

@LajosPhd9236 @TheCradleMedia @GeopoliticsDH Nice. Shows it all.

[Steppe and Stones @steppestones]

@AleksBMA Hey Aleks, hope you are fine. I reread your analysis regularly. Thank you for taking the time to write it. Would you care to write an overview update on the situation in the world? Especially wrt war in Ukraine.

[Steppe and Stones @steppestones]

@Molson_Hart Yes. But then how do you create the social unrest and radicalize people?

[Steppe and Stones @steppestones]

@anasalhajji I don't see why it should be opened or even freed until curtain parties fully achieve their objectives.

[Steppe and Stones @steppestones]

@DamonZumbroegel @vangeorgh Thanks Damon. I have never been to Burma, something to look forward to. Nepal was an interesting experience for me. Still can't put my finger on it.

[kasey @kaseyklimes]

it’s called “brand harvesting” and we could fix it
https://t.co/AIJ5DhL3lS

[Steppe and Stones @steppestones]

@DamonZumbroegel @vangeorgh Even rural/island Thailand? Used to be nice.
What about Malaysia? Hear good things about it.
Where do you feel truly comfortable these days location wise?

[Steppe and Stones @steppestones]

@KingKong9888 That's quite a track record! Also entertaining deluvery at that! Thanks for all you share, appreciated.

[Steppe and Stones @steppestones]

@DamonZumbroegel @vangeorgh This is exactly my experience. Been a long time though, maybe something has changed.

[Steppe and Stones @steppestones]

@TaylorOgan @ZacksJerryRig would be the guy to do it.

[Steppe and Stones @steppestones]

@davidgpeterson @ProtonVPN That's very nice of both the judges! Thanks! Replied in DMs.

[Steppe and Stones @steppestones]

@davidgpeterson @ProtonVPN If this is correct, my research was this thread only. In one of the posts yiu mentioned the two Filipino languages. And in other you said very close buy Malay is wrong, Indonesian was there 😁

[Steppe and Stones @steppestones]

@davidgpeterson @ProtonVPN 37+
Filipino (Latin) and
Filipino (Baybayin)
Thai
Vietnamese
Arabic
Indonesian

[Steppe and Stones @steppestones]

@davidgpeterson @ProtonVPN 😁