Thomas Corvazier

SRE with skin in the game. Cyclist and trail runner.

[Castor @pprcstr]

On ne parle pas assez de l'autre boîte coulée par Thierry Breton, qui passe son temps à critiquer Elon Musk par ailleurs

Il a littéralement ravagé toutes les organisations qu'il a dirigées, c'est vraiment un sans faute

[Thomas Corvazier @tcorvazier]

@Sardoche_Lol

[Pierre-Louis Biojout (PLB) @plbiojout]

A booking calendar for doctors burned €800M and took 12 years to turn a profit. With a quasi monopoly.
And €211M of French taxpayer money.

Tesla raised ~$300M in private capital before its IPO.

That bought the Roadster and the Model S program. Reinventing the car cost the same order of magnitude as reinventing the waiting room.

Yes, Tesla took a $465M government loan. @elonmusk repaid it in 2013, nine years early, with interest.

Bpifrance holds 12% of a company that lost money for over a decade. A loan repaid is not the same thing as the state becoming your largest patient shareholder.

The deeper problem is not Doctolib. It is the model.

Innovation is not playing a game of Civilization. There are no officials at Bercy placing settlement points on a map and watching tech trees unlock. An economy is millions of people with skin in the game making bets with their own money, their own time, their own downside.

A fonctionnaire allocating capital has no downside. If the bet fails, nothing happens to him. If it works, he gets nothing. Broken incentives produce broken allocation. Every time. This is not a bug of the French state, it is the physics of the system.

Everyone knows the fix. Take less from builders, both in tax and in regulatory friction, and stop recycling it through committees.

Capital allocation belongs to people who bleed when they are wrong.

[Thomas Corvazier @tcorvazier]

@LucJager Opus 4.5 avec RAG bien configuré >>>> Fable 5 sans RAG

[Thomas Corvazier @tcorvazier]

@thismacapital Yep 💯

[Thomas Corvazier @tcorvazier]

@daedalium L'open source aura juste quelques mois de retard et ils auront 95% des perfs pour 5% du tarif actuel. Anthropic est mort le jour où ils commencent à ralentir, c'est une course ultra violente.

[Mehdi Cornilliet - Éducation & Finance @MCornilliet]

SpaceX vaudra autant que les 10 plus grandes capitalisations françaises : LVMH, L’Oréal, Hermès, TotalÉnergies, Schneider, Airbus, Safran, Air Liquide, BNP Paribas et Sanofi ⤵️

[Thomas Corvazier @tcorvazier]

@LeroyRemy @RobJardin C'est pas grave et bien sur les gens vont pas recompiler l'app, c'est juste une preuve de confiance supplémentaire

[gabriel @gabriel1]

every job will turn into explaining your intentions to ai

explaining what you want to ai is surpringly time consuming, coders already spend 80% of their time doing it, and this will be true for everyone

[Thomas Corvazier @tcorvazier]

@OlivierRoland Hâte de voir ça mais quoi qu'il arrive du débat je pense que je continuerai à vous apprécier tous les deux😂vous êtes des gens très inspirants

[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.

[Thomas Corvazier @tcorvazier]

@SteveOnSpeed Maybe mining incentives are decreasing due to AI

[Thomas Corvazier @tcorvazier]

@TiboInShape 💯keto

[Flo Crivello @Altimor]

Pulled the trigger today and switched 100% of Lindy traffic to DeepSeek v4, churning from Anthropic models.
Saves us millions of $ and we're actually seeing an *increase* in performance on many core use cases. Transformative for the business.

[Thomas Corvazier @tcorvazier]

@wkotweet @VirgoWhallala Pas forcément: si les rentes du patrimoine sont considérées comme des revenus.

[Thomas Corvazier @tcorvazier]

@brivael ok mais qui va assurer la succession de Musk?

[Thomas Corvazier @tcorvazier]

@0xmaxou L'entre deux est en train de builder

[Thomas Corvazier @tcorvazier]

@DFintelligence

[Thomas Corvazier @tcorvazier]

@Adrien_B_A Been 20y in french riviera in tech, number of successful tech companies is very limited. Awesome place to retire but not great for tech startup or work in general. Not sure for solopreneurship yet, I will tell you in 5y mate.