yerart

telecom engineer, AI enthusiast, British POP follower, chess aficionado, IoT friendly

[yerart @yerart]

@fjsaiz no sé ... igual un puñado de cuñagents bien orquestaos ... 🤔

[Science Magazine @ScienceMagazine]

The Venus flytrap is renowned for its ultrafast snap traps, which can capture insects in a fraction of a second.

New research reveals that trap closure is triggered by a rapid softening of the epidermal cell walls, uncovering the physical mechanism behind this remarkable movement.

Learn more this week in Science: https://t.co/35uDGps8Qe

[Andy Greenberg (@agreenberg at the other places) @a_greenberg]

Developers from Signal (including its protocol's co-creator) along with Microsoft and Harvard unveil Encrypted Spaces, an open-source codebase for a new generation of private collaboration apps. Think Slack, Discord, Google Docs, all end-to-end encrypted. https://t.co/t93oHWn4C3

[Phys.org @physorg_com]

A palm-sized rover reached the moon as a compact sphere, then changed shape and roamed on its own for nearly two hours. @SciRobotics https://t.co/tnwu0bplQl

[TechXplore @TechXplore_com]

A new AI architecture drops the global clock and updates only the neurons needed at each step, cutting computing energy by orders of magnitude. @umassamherst @NatureComms https://t.co/0NnuRmrNAm

[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.

[Signal @signalapp]

Our statement on the UK government’s demand that all content on all devices sold or used in the country be scanned, on the presumption of nudity, using a dystopian combination of age verification and content scanning. This proposal will not safeguard children. It endangers us all.

https://t.co/VdWe9uhi8p

[Tuta @TutaPrivacy]

Euro-Office just launched its first stable version 🇪🇺🔥

We're excited to be part of this movement to bring digital sovereignty to Europe and beyond with @Nextclouders @XWiki @openproject @xwikiorg @soverinteam #eurostack 🎉

[LeRobot @LeRobotHF]

VLA-JEPA just dropped in LeRobot 🤖

What makes this model special is that it does not just learn what action to take from a given observation, it also leverages a JEPA world model to learn action-relevant dynamics.

During training, the VLA leverages V-JEPA2 by conditioning its predictor. This clever trick adds a world modeling objective to the training, which also allows pretraining on human videos.
At inference, the world model is dropped entirely, keeping only a standard VLA architecture: Qwen backbone and action head.

The demo here was only fine-tuned on 13 examples, showing great pretraining capability and running in real time on @NVIDIARobotics DGX Spark!

VLA-JEPA is the first world model to be ported to LeRobot, and I feel like it won't be the last 🚀

@Thom_Wolf @ClementDelangue

[Science Magazine @ScienceMagazine]

Of all the myriad animal senses, the most mysterious and controversial is the perception of magnetism.

Somehow, migratory songbirds, sea turtles, and other creatures detect Earth’s magnetic field and use its directionality to help them navigate.

Now, a new paper has found a surprising mechanism: Iron-rich immune cells within homing pigeons’ livers seem to give the birds their magnetic compass. Learn more: https://t.co/3TjOZ6fJpm @NewsfromScience

[Arturo Pérez-Reverte @perezreverte]

"Vende a su madre, pero entrega la nuestra".
En vista del actual panorama, algunos amigos han desempolvado esto de hace dos años. Aunque tampoco hacía falta ser un lince para verlo venir.
https://t.co/aR2IsaWGg3

[Matthieu wyart @MatthieuWyart]

LLMs learn by predicting tokens. World models (JEPA, data2vec) learn by predicting their own abstractions. Which needs more data? For data with hidden hierarchy, we prove the gap is exponential. https://t.co/r2uuX0lBCu

[yerart @yerart]

@CherryCatalanr ay no, que te botan ahorita luego de todos sitios 🤭

[Science Magazine @ScienceMagazine]

Argus, a spherical robot with 20 symmetric legs and cameras, can monitor and navigate diverse terrains, climb walls, and move while carrying payloads.

Learn more in @SciRobotics: https://t.co/NzswaZUNHr

[yerart @yerart]

@CherryCatalanr Oh, luego esa belleza se torna en una cosa oblonga y peluda ... 😦

[Pirat_Nation 🔴 @Pirat_Nation]

European governments are moving away from WhatsApp and Signal for official communications and switching to their own secure messaging systems that they fully control.

Countries including France, Germany, Belgium, Poland, the Netherlands and Luxembourg have adopted in-house platforms such as BEAM, Wire and Matrix-based tools.
The European Commission will complete its switch by the end of 2026, and NATO already runs its own dedicated system.

The issue is not encryption strength. Both WhatsApp and Signal use strong end-to-end encryption, their real concern is that these apps are run by US companies under US law and the governments want complete control over servers, metadata, data and access rules.

For individuals and organisations wanting the same level of control, Wire is a strong and accessible choice. It is Swiss-made, open-source, uses modern encryption, and can be self-hosted so your data stays under your control.
It is already used by thousands of German officials.

[FootballFantasy @FFantasy_ES]

La salvajada de chilena de Villalibre en El Sardinero para encaminar el ya histórico 16 de mayo del 2026.

Un día y un gol que estarán marcados en el calendario para siempre.

[Phi @FatherPhi]

Monday wasn’t invited to the D party 😢

[José Antonio Bustelo @DivuLCC]

Este es mi relato #PVparadojas para @hypatiacafe

Creo que os sorprenderá.⬇️
https://t.co/RY5YrNt6eh

[Scientific American @sciam]

A genomic analysis of people buried on the border of the ancient Roman Empire show how distinct groups combined after the empire’s fall
https://t.co/OoKOcTfOUb