No he never hid his identity, if you looked him up, you found his picture.

Satoshi shouldn't be compared, I don't hold bitcoins nor am I interested, but the name is a lore. It was stamped on the original document.

Fabrice Bellard is a real person shipping code; not an internet anonymous identity.

As I say, Bellard is Mozart when most of us can't even hope to be Salieri.

Honestly, two mythologized figures (Carmack and Bellard).

They're good (like, quite good), but as soon as their names come up people start talking about some weird expectation of what they are supposed to think rather than the actual things they did.

Somehow, that mythologizing diminishes their accomplishments.

I imagined him with wild, long hair; possibly tattoos, huge and heavy set. The picture destroyed my imagination - and now I want my imagination back. :(

Jesus... has that ever been submitted to HN!? It should be.

I think Fabrice is actually quite noticeable. His name kept on coming up again and again in the past. He is definitely not incognito as such, even if he may not be that interest in hyping up his own name either.

They can't hear you, they're on a yacht

He gives virtually no interviews and will not talk about himself, here's an example from 2014 where only replies to technical questions: https://www.macplus.net/depeche-82364-interview-le-createur-...

Yeah, I can't finish reading tweet. Is that even made for human consumption?

I'll be honest. I discovered him with this post. And I studied in France. I am also familiar with his projects, the obfuscated C code contest and more. Just don't remember seeing his name.

I guess that if people aren't loud on social media, people tend to ignore them.

Respect to those who posted their praise of someone else on social media. We need more of this.

I've been around for a long time and I know of him. Most people don't bother looking up where stuff comes from.

He's a lifelong familiar name since the LZEXE days.

no, most people wouldn't know. you're in an echo chamber if you think he is well known.

I have an explicit rule not to meet or look up my heroes. Been burned way too many times.

I don't need to know who is building VLC, curl, ffmpeg or any of the other essentials in my life. I just appreciate their work and pitch in some money if possible.

First time hearing the name too.

>programming circles

Well, not all tech people are part of some curcles I guess.

And you can just email him. He's just this guy, that writes stuff, and likes to help answer questions about it.

"Tech people" aren't one single homogeneous mass. His name is unlikely to show up in the same conversation as, say, DHH.

The tweet also reads a bit off to me too. Carmack positions himself as if he is a some sort of a litmus test for being a great and successful programmer, which I don't doubt that he is but it's a bit strange. Egotripping.

The smart path: Find good mentors (and return the favor); use LLMs not to do the work but to help you learn and exercise your brain: make them test you, using something aking to teacher/Socratic method, make mistakes and get the mentor/LLM to review in a way you figure out the answer.

Find an itch, then scratch it. If many people have the same itch and can use your solution, you win.

Simple as that.

Find a problem and work on a solution for 20+ years.

Start fixing the unfixable and doing the undoable things ;)

Pretty sure this is just AI writing style, and yes it's a huge turnoff.

> He kept going.

> He is still shipping.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/schiffen#Etymology_2

:-P

He is also wrong. Saying "KVM runs on top of QEMU" is a very funny way of looking at it. And the claim that QEMU backs Google Cloud or AWS or Azure(???) is just plain incorrect. Not downplaying Fabrice's contributions - this tweet is just dumb.

Obviously an LLM and sad Carmack engages with slop to normalize it.

My “favourite” was “a project called JSLinux that engineers still cannot believe is real”. Such dumb hyperbole.

Presumably because "money".

Or they just don't know tech outside of SV, which is understandable, considering the rest doesn't do nearly the same amount of self-promotion and, well, they're not from SV anyway so why should SV care?

The other day there was this article: something something nerds, which assumed (almost) everyone in tech was looking up to Jobs and Wozniak.

I think I saw my first Mac in 2006 or so and only for a brief moment - it belonged to an artist the parents of my high school friend employed. The next time it was a musician. That was really the stereotype in my corner of the world at the time and using Apple devices for programming seemed like a weird idea.

There’s a strong narrative that it’s unreasonable to stay in the EU (“too regulated”, etc.) if you want to hack on real stuff. Yet plenty of us do — Bellard being exhibit A.

Some assume that everything noteworthy regarding the internet is SV based.

I had assumed it was slop but whether or not it is, that is kind of a revealing default isn't it?

It used to have a lot less stuff about AI in it. It'd be great if we could just filter off all the posts about LLMs and LLM-related crap.

Pepperidge Farms remembers...

He says that Bellard is a better overall programmer, and for some reason you take this as evidence of a lack of humility?

It's just a tweet, no need to over-analyze everything.

Carmack might think that there are certain areas he will be better due to decades of experience. Overall programmer isn’t a bad qualifier at all, it’s actually making it sound less offhand and more honest.

I suspect being a "better programmer" cannot be said unequivocally at their level. At that percentile of achievement, it depends on the specific dimension you are talking about. It's true of the highest skill in any field.

Depends on what we mean by programmer.

Fabrice is more clever and faster, I guess.

But John Carmack is in my mind a better software engineer. He writes elegant code that can be used and maintained for a long time. At least from Quake 2ish, but you can see signs of solid code architecture already in Doom.

Doom code will live almost as-is forever. The code Fabrice wrote for ffmpeg has been entirely replaced

You’re not the only one who noticed. I think the unspoken idea is that Carmack thinks he’s better without ever having met him or seen his code at all. That deserves a few qualifiers.

Carmack seems arrogant[1]. Which is why I take that statement as high praise.

It’s also a nod to his own fame.

[1] This is based on Masters of Doom. And the anecdotes are probably from the 90’s. And being arrogant does not mean that being confident in one’s ability is unjustified or that they are in fact not skilled. Being arrogant and being highly skilled are completely orthogonal.

True, it's a weird thing to say. I am in no position to rank them, I assume they are both excellent at their niches (granted bellard seems to be interested in a lot of niches) but it never hurt anybody to be humble in this position.

> These days all he does is hold the copyright

You mean trademark. The copyright is owned by the authors of the code (or their employer, etc.), since there is no copyright assignment requirement.

This is similar to how Linus Torvalds owns the "Linux" trademark (in some jurisdictions), but the copyright mostly belongs to other contributors.

What you describe is obvious corporate management path. You start with MVP, it gets traction, bosses like you and then others will code for the original author dismantling and rewriting original MVP. And don’t be shy - if one can pull this off he’s worth the credits. There are many who can code and not much who can manage.

We mustn’t forget the context: FFmpeg and Videolan got their start in dorm rooms, where students used them to stream TV in the dorm and share movies.

The Polytechnique and École Centrale campuses are just a few kilometers apart, and both projects began around 1997–1998.

I don’t know about you, but as a student, I was too busy drinking beer to write clean code.

You could be right. I don't really know much about FFMpeg. But going from 0 to 1 and going from 1 to 100 are different. Usually, people remember the 0 to 1 step more. Symbolic capital tends to go to the first mover. It might feel unfair, but we always remember the first challenger. It might be spaghetti code, there might be countless contributions later, but that's usually how it goes

Thanks, that maybe one side of the coin but it's very one-sided. The man is busy innovating and maybe has no time to carry on as he focuses on other projects. But he was there from the start and made it happen.

Most of the code in the linux kernel today is not from Linus.

I just found this comment from 15y ago on the ffmpeg/libav drama: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/vvdxn/comment/c57zdk...

I don't know ffmpeg but this resonates with my experience with other open source projects.

You alright, mate?

The psyop about "only shipping clean code" has been a big drag on projects

On the real world, if it runs and solves their problem nobody gives a fucc. Period

Props on him.

No, bro, you don’t understand. He’s a messiah, God Emperor, a visionary, a prophet, an omnissiah running the internet, because social media kids grew up with the idea that they need some kind of idol to do something. Don’t know what causes this defect, but it is certainly a hard pill to swallow that most of the things in life are done by a combination of armies of people and chances of becoming one of those “rockstars” are as slim as being hit by an asteroid. So they resort to huffing a copium that you “just ship more bro, one more commit and you’ll be the musk bro, I promise bro”.

That's just, like, your opinion man