[Cybiote]

The trick is that even a tiny difference in ability can lead to a large difference in results as the number of decision steps involved in a task increase. The expert wastes less time in search space. This is a combination of good mental models honed from experience and attention to detail.

Something unusual about Bellard is the breadth of his knowledge. There are probably a fair few who can write a fast deterministic low level code optimized neural network library. A decent number who can write an autodiff library but few who can do both. Once that's done, I daresay that's the hard part.

Given such a library, implementing an LSTM or transformer model and combining it with Adaptive Modeling/incremental learning of data statistics using a neural network to feed an Arithmetic Coder is something that is within the reach of many more.

In summary, a 10x developer is not 10x smarter or 10x more skilled, they just waste less time investigating unproductive paths and are maybe 1% less likely to take wrong turns. This ends up making a huge difference for large complex tasks.

[pansa2]

> Something unusual about Bellard is the breadth of his knowledge.

One thing I’ve noticed is that he chooses to apply himself to many different subfields of development, but always using the same technologies e.g. all his work seems to be in either C or JavaScript.

I’ve only worked in a couple of subfields but have seriously used at least 7 different languages, plus countless libraries. Compared to Bellard I’ve probably spent (wasted?) a large amount of time trying to choose, and then learn, the “best” tool for each job.

[ZephyrBlu]

To be fair, Bellard has the luxury of doing that because he's generally writing things from near scratch and he's not beholden to other people or outside requirements.