Reading the list of Bellard's contributions, what strikes me is not the raw ability (although certainly there is that too!) but "damn, he knows how to pick 'em!"
He keeps picking stuff to work on that ends up being insanely useful to a massive number of people. That seems somehow even more remarkable than the technical ability.
Deciding what to work on might be the most important question in life.
My guess would be the hueristic is "I want to do simple thing, why is it so hard?" (Modern computing has an overabundance of "DX tarpits".)
Which is funny because, everyone has that experience, right? But then approximately nobody proceeds to do something about it. (Including most people who have the skills to make a difference!)
Like, that's surprisingly mundane, and surprisingly actionable.
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If we distil it into a philosophy, it would be something like...
As an extension to your last point, here in the US people love complaining about politics (on both sides) but very few people (including me!) take the time to come up with solutions and go to town halls, or write to senators apart from the automated message that makes you feel like you did a thing, or even run for office.
Of course, all of those are hard! And I think that speaks to the modern tarpits. No one set out to make a tarpit, it just happened and it's hard to make it perfect.
A big hidden in plain site facet of this, is few are willing to put forth the work within the existing system.
That is, going to town halls, writing senators, and running for office are all standard parts of the system people are complaining about. And they are offering the complaints, largely, as stand in complaints for whole hosts of problems that they actually think are there.
So, agreed, few are willing to ignore their general nebulous complaints and get into the system to work with it. They dream that there will be some magic shift of everything away from their complaints.
My only twist is I think this is ok, as long as people stay grounded in the rest of their life. It is perfectly fine to dream. Is mostly fine to complain. No need to dirty the water where people are getting things done, though.
I don’t know, it wasn’t until the pandemic and a layoff that I had time to actually sit and think.
There’s a reason that most of the voters (and protesters in my area) are retired, and it isn’t apathy. I don’t have time to educate myself on these topics in any real depth.
And I need to educate myself because the push information is all bullshit. Digging into policing in Seattle, the official and public conversation was all culture war while the actual problems looked like simple incompetence from a system analysis perspective.
I don’t have the bandwidth to deal with this kind of fumbling on every topic, and I’m realizing that my parents didn’t live in a low-trust society like I do.
We don't disagree? But this is part of the problem of many complaints. The cost of entry into any system is non-zero. That people with more resources are involved is not at all a surprise.
Which is why I have my "twist" there that this is not necessarily bad. I'm fine letting people dream. I'm fine with people having general complaints. I have to be fine with people being wrong, as it happens whether I'm fine with it or not.
What is getting dodgy is how many people accidentally find themselves hijacked in the delay that is inherent in understanding systems to think that they can win with a culture war.
"Willing to put forth the work" is where we differ. The collapse of the fourth estate alone meant the end of the broadly informed citizen.
I've been professionally trained to monitor my own thought process and review my notes for signs of bias, and I've spent decades absorbing new domains well enough to build testable models. When I look at understanding political issues the people I rely on to help me "put forth the work" are gone, man. The effort I need to put in on one subject well enough to make decisions now is immense.
I'd wager I probably violently agree with that. The collapse of the fourth estate from people that were willing to hold government accountable to people that are chasing ratings and payouts has been an unmitigated disaster.
> how many people ... hijacked in the delay that is inherent in understanding systems ...
That sounds a lot like the anarchy that I put a lot of unpaid time into. Decision power does not come from elections, it comes from being credible in meetings and ad-hoc conversations. It comes from thrashing out issues in dialogue.
Anarchy is boring. Anarchy is living with people. Anarchy is shaped like a kibbutz, not a revolution.
Responsibility contains the understanding of second-order effects. If you give an idiot the floor, and ask about second-order effects, they cry that you aren't respecting them.
Idiots believe that, if adults do not instantly pivot to follow their lead, it is because of a dearth of democracy.
Bitch, we are an anarchy. We have no hierarchy. Democracy is when you have rulers that you can recall, which is a special case of having rulers. You just invented a political class.
I see this as a balance between effort and impact. I don't know anything about politics - maybe this is how it should work - but I do know corporate IT bureaucracy. In many cases, the activation energy required to move the needle on rather trivial things just isn't worth the effor; so you look for workarounds, forgotten corners of the infra, or other rogue ways to actually do stuff. When an IT department says to me - great idea, formalize these 20 pages of requirements, death by powerpoint style, and put it in our suggestion box - I just pass on that. I suspect politics is even worse than the run of the mill corporate IT, and many people feel the same in regards to politics.
The actual calculus is that you spent 30 minutes on something that should have taken 30 seconds, but then you're done with it. The "proper" solution is to spend months or years fixing the workflow for complete strangers for free, even though you personally will never get that time back. Yeah, it moves the world forward, but it's not always the best choice on a personal level.
Also keep in mind that most of such charitable work goes nowhere. There is a fair number of projects shaped like ffmpeg or QEMU that have never achieved the critical mass. I've written a number of small utilities that simply went unnoticed because they were never featured on HN or anywhere else. Writing FOSS is pretty similar to starting your own band. It helps if you're a good singer, but it's not enough.
Ah, agreed, this is how it is with almost all personal projects even outside of software. Am experiencing this in music too, almost none of them go anywhere. Got to do them because you enjoy them
I think you're underestimating the skill required to do it that well. Add 1 wrong feature and suddenly your simple project working around a DX tarpits is a new tarpit.
To be fair, almost zero people praise the dx for ffmpeg. but the utility and value is so massively high, that it overcomes the famously complex dx of ffmpeg. I'm not even insulting ffmpeg, if it does a million things, then there are going to be a million knobs.
I think of git as the same. The git cli is not intuitive at all (unless that lightbulb goes off) but the utility is so good, that people just kind of suck it up and use it.
I think for what it is ffmpeg has about the best interface it possibly can. At least I find myself failing to imagine a better one. Complaining about it would be similar to complaining about jq IMO.
Whereas the git cli is very clearly suboptimal. Unrelated tradeoffs aside, spend a while using an alternative DVCS such as mercurial if you doubt this.
yeah jq was a good analogy. I tried so many times to like jq, but found the cli and syntax too complicated to use. But I only finally saw and appreciated how powerful it was when my agent started using it.
Same with ffmpeg. I recently built an entire video out of 3 other source videos, just talking to claude, and it did everything (including audio adjustments, EVERYTHING) with ffmpeg. It was unbelievably cool.
This is my approach which I use for SMBs (my actual clients). Never failed in decades. I am on my own since year 2000 and few times before that.
1) Always start with building single vertically scalable monolith running on dedicated server which can serve reasonable amount of transactions / date volume with acceptable performance.
2) Only start adding to infra when vertical scaling stops working (well you get some warning sign before it actually starting to hurt business) and then do it strictly on on need basis. Only rewrite / rearchitect if you see approaching google scale and can not shard simply by XXX-Canada, XXX-US etc. This will of course fail on some specialized scenarios but we are talking plain vanilla business backends for SMB.
That's still make the hard part present. Things are not good on so many considerations. So selecting and being able to focus for just as much time as it will be required are the hard part.
Thus starting with learning wow meditation seems an important first step.
For all the rest, it's already going to be more issues on how to prioritize getting the ressources mapped where seems to fit to reach the goals.
Maybe, but you could also look at it from another angle.
Taking something that’s traditionally been hard and making it dramatically easier, better, and faster unlocks pent-up downstream use-cases.
I’m sure it’s some degree of both selection and execution, but so many industries have been unlocked simply because somebody showed up and figured out how to make a previously difficult thing easy.
I don't even think such a scale works for the kind of brilliant solutions Bellard (not Bertrand) creates.
I don't think 100 1x programmers can create these solutions. So much gets lost having to communicate and coordinate people. And they would just accumulate cruft (and DX tarpits like other mention).
One way I like to think of it is that Fabrice creates prototypes interesting enough that other people choose to spend their entire careers maintaining them.
Often this is the conundrum in research as well. What should one spend their life working on? Especially if you want to make an impact. Choosing the right problem is often harder than coming up with a relevant solution.
> Deciding what to work on might be the most important question in life.
The flip side of this, is if you have the ability, you can just pick the hardest problem in your field, go solve it... rinse and repeat.
Everyone can find out what the hardest problems in their field are, it's not a secret, just a question of if you have the ability/gumption/willingness to go spend years of your life attacking a problem like that
Finding the hardest solvable problems in your field is far harder.
Prove P = NP
(or not).
Is definitely one of the hardest problems in computer science, but you could waste your entire life on that problem and make no progress. Innumerable great contributions to the field have nothing to do with that problem. Booting Linux in JavaScript wasn't even on most people's maps.
This is the more striking thing. An meme I often repeat is that ideas are cheap, execution is key - there's a trope of "I have a great idea for an app, I just need a developer to do all the work", exacerbated with AI doing all the work.
But this guy is the opposite idea of that. In hindsight, sure, a library doing video is obvious. But the other ones? That's something else.
Bad ideas are cheap. Good ideas need to account for the surrounding context as well as the target audience which I suspect you might be lumping in with execution. Good execution is also nontrivial.
I think the trope exists because so many people with poor or mediocre ideas perceive them as good. It's analogous to the observation that most people view the languages they commonly use as the most powerful and those that could offer them new capabilities as strange.
> Deciding what to work on might be the most important question in life.
Work on being a positive influence in the world. Help your neighbour when they are in need and fight for the rights of those less fortunate than yourself.
You are. Decide for yourself what it means to be a positive influence in the world and do that. This isn’t that hard, it’s not a gotcha. If you are capable of empathy, you are capable of understanding what it means to be good for others, learn from mistakes, and do better.
Also, I provided examples:
> Help your neighbour when they are in need and fight for the rights of those less fortunate than yourself.
He keeps picking stuff to work on that ends up being insanely useful to a massive number of people. That seems somehow even more remarkable than the technical ability.
Deciding what to work on might be the most important question in life.