Lex Fridman Podcast / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
26 published records
01 / observation
“The problem is I’m a game developer, and I want to play some videos- … and I don’t want to be forced to open source the entire game just to play those videos.”
02 / commitment
“I will start first by opening, probing it with the MP4 container demuxer to see, well, it should be that.”
03 / commitment
“We should emphasize in the 2000s it was really normal to download a program and it secretly installs some spyware. It was, it was buried in very faint text or in the license text box that nobody reads at the bottom- … “Oh, I will be installing this toolbar- … and changing all these things,” and it was very common to have to, you know, you install a program to do something at the time of any sort.”
04 / commitment
“We are going to do a dav1d 2, right? That I call Devid, because de is two in French.”
05 / belief
“Oh, not assembly by hand, no. I think that that’s a given. C potentially, but I see it very… It has a very big Esperanto vibe about it.”
06 / belief
“In the security community, they certainly did. That was one of the things I think that argument came out is there was a portion of the security community who’s like, “No, these guys write crap code.”
07 / belief
“I think the thing that made this particularly heinous was the name-dropping of Microsoft, the name-dropping that this is a visible product.”
08 / belief
“You need to check what’s happening. And in my view, in the future, like, all those remote cars will be teleobserved by an AI model, which is just going to say, “Well, everything is good.”
09 / uncertainty
“You know, those ones on hydraulic—I don’t know how you say that—all the hydraulic- Hydraulic arms.”
10 / belief
“One of the coolest communities in open source multimedia, mainly led by someone called Dave Rice, I’ll give him a shout-out, I think from City University of New York, is the archiving community.”
11 / belief
“To emphasize, yes, we’ve talked about how brilliant this stuff is, but high schoolers like Daniel Kang have written assembly in FFmpeg. I think there’s been contributions because of these lessons.”
12 / belief
“Yeah, a few of them are outside, and some other one that’s- And so it was impossible to license, right? And I think that several months ago, HP decided that they were going to remove support from HEVC in their Windows laptops because the, the cost was increasing of those patents.”
13 / belief
“We’ll talk about assembly later I’m sure, ’cause that’s its whole topic in itself, but it’s also celebrating people like Andreas Rheinhardt who do maintenance. It is, I believe unpaid, as a volunteer.”
14 / evaluation
“I need to look at your code. And this is important because people don’t understand that, and they come to the community and send them some patches, and they get rejected, and they don’t like that because, I mean, you’re just like, “Sorry, it’s not up to our standards.”
15 / belief
“We care about the quality of your code because this is what defines our community, which means that we have a lot of people who contribute who are from very different backgrounds and very introverts.”
16 / belief
“Kieran, you said that there’s an active archiving preservation community? I think that’s super fascinating.”
17 / evaluation
“Is that– That’s the, that’s the initial instinct for a lot of people when they show up to a code base, probably before LLMs, is like… probably because they don’t understand the, the, the wisdom of the way things have been done in the past.”
18 / preference
“Like, what… You know, there’s a bunch of people listening to this, they’re basically like, sorry, for myself included, you know, I programmed for many, many years in C/C++, going up the standards of C++, fell in love with C++, even meta programming and so on, and then transitioned more and more because of machine learning about 15 years ago to Python.”
19 / preference
“What he did on his laptop, and I was young, I was 21, was just like mind-blowing because he was basically debugging Windows inside a type of VM with ex- Like, wow.”
20 / preference
“I mean, there’s like so many, just to give people an idea, like I use FFmpeg a lot on everything.”
21 / evaluation
“Well, my main concern, I understand, and I think looking at the long history, it’s all for the good. But I do… I am concerned because there’s so few humans that are critical to the success of open source projects that I have seen it be a psychological toll on folks and, you know, sometimes leads to burnout.”
22 / evaluation
“It sucks that that’s part of reality, ’cause all the people that love VLC, all the people that love FFmpeg, like me, you know, I, I legitimately hundred- probably thousands of times in my life had a smile on my face because FFmpeg made me happy, period.”
23 / evaluation
“It’s inspiring for others I think that are pushing the open source movement forward, that it’s okay to do these kinds of huge sacrifices if you believe it’s right. And I think in that case it was right and it was the reason that VLC became as successful as it was, ’cause it’s an embodiment, it’s a symbol of like, you know, freedom and what the open source community can create.”
24 / preference
“I think thankfully at the time I found a sample by pure chance that had a lot of flat blocks. It was animation, so that really helped a lot because it wasn’t using particularly complex coding tools, et cetera, and you could kind of get somewhere and then, and then build up and build up until you figure, “Hey, here’s a few bits here.”
25 / evaluation
“I love this on so many fronts because, so FFmpeg and VLC are pushing companies and pushing the world to standardize.”
26 / recommendation
“Kieran is a longtime codec engineer, FFmpeg contributor, and the man behind the now infamous FFmpeg account on Twitter/X that I recommend everybody follow for the memes and for the unapologetic celebration of open source and great low-level software engineering.”