JUST IN: Andrej Karpathy, a top AI scientist at Anthropic, is reportedly barred from accessing the company’s most advanced AI model because he is not a U.S. citizen.

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.

‼️ Leaked internal documents written by Microsoft’s top executives reveal that the plan is to “make people addicted” to its new AI, “Scout.” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella seems to have no idea what is going on in his own company, telling staff that he was “not sure what this document is or who is writing and leaking this nonsense.” Another Microsoft employee said, “Luckily for us, Microsoft is pretty bad at making addictive products compared to some of the other big companies.” It’s also remarkable that Nadella claimed Microsoft could not touch OpenClaw because doing so would be like “launching a virus”… And yet here we are, as Microsoft’s own document states: “It takes actions on a real desktop, and it keeps working when you are not watching.”

🚒More fallout from the Mini Shai-Hulud campaign 49 Microsoft, Azure, and Azure-Samples GitHub repos were removed at 16:00 UTC for Terms of Service violations This is linked to news this morning that attackers had regained access, after the previous durabletask compromise

Every company’s AI workflow rn be like 😭💀

"You can run OpenClaw inside your company now." Annoucing our work with @Microsoft to bring OpenClaw to the Microsoft and Windows ecosystems. Claws now work securly in the enterprise.

‼️🚨 BREAKING: Another researcher skipped coordinated disclosure entirely and dropped a critical 1-click GitHub token theft in public because he doesn't want to deal with MSRC. In his own words: "I really don't want to deal with MSRC on VSCode bugs." The bug: just clicking a link can hand an attacker a GitHub token that reads AND writes to all your repos, including private ones. It lives in github[.]dev, GitHub's browser-based VSCode editor, which passes the browser an OAuth token that isn't scoped to a single repo. That token can touch everything you can. Researcher Ammar Askar found that VSCode's sandboxed "webviews" leak keyboard events to the main editor. A malicious repo opened via one link can simulate keystrokes, install a local extension that skips VSCode's publisher-trust check, and exfiltrate your token. He published a working proof-of-concept. He says when he reports github[.]dev bugs, GitHub tells him they're out of scope and to go report to MSRC, and a prior VSCode bug he reported was silently fixed with no credit. One commenter summed up the mood: "MSRC has turned into Feedback Hub."

Who knew a really long string could make an Entra ID login disappear from the logs entirely? In our #blog, @nyxgeek breaks down how overflowing #Azure's sign-in logging mechanism allowed access tokens to be issued without a single log entry. Read it now! hubs.la/Q047xTVc0