Lex Fridman

I think that's super fascinating.

You wrote that there's stretch and budget, but they see the extreme importance of FFmpeg as a Rosetta stone so that multimedia can be played a thousand years from now.

I mean, that's a beautiful way to see FFmpeg VLC as a tool for preserving visual knowledge.

I mean, they have a deep, deep appreciation of the content itself, of the video itself.

And like, especially when you're thinking lossless,

They're terrified of losing something essential about the thing, and in so doing, they're deeply understanding the thing that is to be preserved, which you sometimes might not be thinking about when you're obsessing about the actual technology of the encoding and so on.

Yeah, it feels like capturing the 20th century and the 21st century is essential because it feels like a transition point.

Well, we went from scarcity of data to slop, oceans of slop.

And that transition point is good to archive.

And then there's like, realistically speaking, there's a needle in a haystack where there's a lot of value in archiving all that footage and then over time finding the gems that we don't know are there.

Hey, there was something in that corner that we just didn't know.

Do you think VLC and FFmpeg will be here 100 years from now?

What's the future of, where is FFmpeg going?

Where is VLC going?

Like in the next, if you think about like five years, 10 years, 20 years.

Yeah, so will VLC and FFmpeg expand to whatever multimedia?

So multimedia might become, sorry for the pothead expansion of topic, but if you look at something like Neuralink with brain-computer interfaces, it's very possible that we start to consume what multimedia means is whatever...

codec, whatever data that our brain wants to consume through the brain computer interfaces.

That's one.

And virtual reality, of course.