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> Fabrice Bellard I googled him just now knowing nothing about him. Holy cow. How can this person even be real? Are we sure he's not a superintelligent alien?

> Fabrice Bellard I googled him just now knowing nothing about him. Holy cow. How can this person even be real? Are we sure he's not a superintelligent alien? >In 2005, he designed a system that could act as an Analog or DVB-T Digital TV transmitter by directly generating a VHF signal from a standard PC and VGA card. WTF! How?? > On 31 December 2009 he claimed the world record for calculations of pi, having calculated it to nearly 2.7 trillion places in 90 days. Slashdot wrote: "While the improvement may seem small, it is an outstanding achievement because only a single desktop PC, costing less than US$3,000, was used—instead of a multi-million dollar supercomputer as in the previous records." This guy is more like 1000x than 10x.

scruple 7y ago
I was working in embedded, on an LTE base station and remote radio head, mind you, on a set of teams that comprised about 30-40 engineers in total, when Fabrice released details about his software LTE/NR base station [0]. It was absolutely mind blowing to me. It is still absolutely mind blowing to me. The level of specialized knowledge that we had in-house to accomplish this work... We're talking about dozens of people who held advanced degrees, had decades of experience in the industry individually, let alone what we had combined, all of our knowledge of the standards, the various pieces of project/product management behind the work, all of these very talented software and hardware engineers... It's just truly something else to behold when you realize this one person exists who can do the highly specialized work of so many. IMHO, he stands alone where he exists in terms of his productivity and his immense knowledge. I hold a small smattering of engineers in high regard but he is leaps and bounds ahead of that pack. [0]: https://bellard.org/lte/ https://bellard.org/lte/

scruple 7y ago

I was working in embedded, on an LTE base station and remote radio head, mind you, on a set of teams that comprised about 30-40 engineers in total, when Fabrice released details about his software LTE/NR base station [0]. It was absolutely mind blowing to me. It is still absolutely mind blowing to me. The level of specialized knowledge that we had in-house to accomplish this work... We're talking about dozens of people who held advanced degrees, had decades of experience in the industry individually, let alone what we had combined, all of our knowledge of the standards, the various pieces of project/product management behind the work, all of these very talented software and hardware engineers... It's just truly something else to behold when you realize this one person exists who can do the highly specialized work of so many. IMHO, he stands alone where he exists in terms of his productivity and his immense knowledge. I hold a small smattering of engineers in high regard but he is leaps and bounds ahead of that pack. [0]: https://bellard.org/lte/ https://bellard.org/lte/