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.

GPT-5.5 lies constantly, Grok 4.20 doesn’t. We made a simulation to see if AI lies when the stakes are life & death.🧵

Sources: Amazon has shut down an internal leaderboard that tracked employees' use of AI tools after workers tried to boost their scores with needless tasks (@rafeuddin_ / Financial Times) (Visit Techmeme dot com for the link and full context!)

Today, we share a breakthrough on the planar unit distance problem, a famous open question first posed by Paul Erdős in 1946. For nearly 80 years, mathematicians believed the best possible solutions looked roughly like square grids. An OpenAI model has now disproved that belief, discovering an entirely new family of constructions that performs better. This marks the first time AI has autonomously solved a prominent open problem central to a field of mathematics.

In a recent batch talk, YC General Partner @t_blom broke down how to build a self-improving, AI-native company. He walks through how to create recursive, self-improving AI loops, and why founders who get this right will run companies that improve while they sleep. 00:00 — Companies Are Roman Legions 00:54 — Copilots Are the Wrong Mental Model 01:55 — Extract the Domain Knowledge 02:24 — The Recursive Self-Improving Loop 04:12 — The Holy Shit Moment at YC 05:50 — Self-Optimizing Product and Support Loops 06:29 — Burn Tokens, Not Headcount 07:23 — Middle Management Is Over 08:05 — Make Everything Legible to AI 09:40 — Regenerating the YC User Manual 11:19 — Software Is Ephemeral, Context Is Valuable 12:18 — Where Humans Still Matter

Labor Day robots-at-work series: solar panel installation robots are now doing the heavy lifting. 🤖 In large solar farms, the hard part isn’t just making panels. It’s getting thousands of them installed fast, safely, and accurately in brutal outdoor conditions. This robot handles PV modules with millimeter-level placement precision and can install 80 panels per hour. The real test is the terrain. Desert sites, soft sand, slopes, wind, heat, and long outdoor shifts are where most automation breaks down. This system has already been tested in harsh desert and Gobi-style environments, including long continuous work sessions. That’s what makes it interesting. Solar is scaling fast. But installation is still physical, repetitive, and punishing work. If robots can keep panels moving across these sites with stable accuracy, clean energy deployment gets faster without putting as many workers in the harshest parts of the job. This is the kind of robot work I actually want to see on Labor Day. Less show, more jobsite.

Good news for Windows 11 gamers: Microsoft is quietly working on a major internal plan called “K2” to slash bloat, boost performance, and make the OS seriously competitive with SteamOS. >SteamOS is now the official benchmark, Microsoft wants Windows 11 to deliver identical (or better) gaming performance on the exact same hardware >Dramatically lower idle RAM usage and a much lighter overall OS footprint >Heavy cuts to AI clutter and pre-installed junk >Completely rebuilt Start menu, reportedly up to 60% faster >A ton of other under-the-hood tweaks (faster File Explorer, snappier UI, fewer background processes, etc.) The changes are probably due to make Windows look better on Project Helix and future handheld/Xbox PC hardware. It finally feels like Microsoft is listening people, can’t believe it

Yesterday I drove my @tesla 900 miles on FSD from Miami to Nashville and I realized it’s genuinely the better option. I fly that route 2 to 3 times a month. Flights are never under $400. Most times $600. Sometimes $800. Add Uber to and from both airports, or parking garage fees. Then factor in the delays, the cancellations, the security theater, the chaos, the guy next to you who hasn’t met deodorant yet. On the other hand: I pack healthy snacks, press one button, and the car just goes. I took calls. Replied to emails. FaceTimed my family. Ate without pulling over. Did everything I normally do on a travel day, except none of the stuff that makes travel days miserable. My biggest concern going in was range and charging. Here’s what actually happened: My bladder needed one extra stop the car didn’t even suggest. Most charging stops were under five minutes. Total cost for the whole trip was less than just the uber to the airport. And this was the base model Y. Now I’m thinking I should get something comfier and just make this the default.

LLPhant: A PHP Generative AI Framework Inspired by LangChain laravel-news.com/llphant-a-p… posted by @paulredmond

Si la production d’électricité nucléaire est décarbonée, elle s’accompagne de risques importants. Jean-Marc Jancovici rappelle que toute production d’énergie s’accompagne d’inconvénients et de risques, à l’image des barrages hydroélectriques au cours du XXe siècle. ➡️ radiofrance.fr/franceinter/p…