Joshua Barretto
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jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy
Joshua Barretto
@jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy
14 followers 5 following 300 posts
Mostly libre software and system safety. Also gardening, DIY, dog photos. Founded @veloren and other projects. Really, really dislikes fascists, born at 364 ppm.

🌉 bridged from ⁂ https://social.coop/@jsbarretto, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact
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jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy
A family member has an apple surplus due to a tree in the garden that produces an ungodly amount of fruit every year, too much to eat before it rots.

Normally the excess would be composted and only the best kept, but this year I'm having a go at making scrumpy […]

[Original post on social.coop]
A photograph of 3 containers on top of a glass-topped oven. The first contains apple scraps: cores, skin that has gone bad, etc. The second is a transparent glass cylinder and contains a hazy golden liquid (fresh apple juice). The third container is a bowl that contains oxidised apple pulp, after squeezing, terracotta in colour.
December 15, 2025 at 1:31 PM
jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy
I've been accused of using AI to write on occasion too; my mother was a school teacher and was adamant that we were raised with a 'proper' command of the English language. Every page of this book is etched into some corner of my brain, and we'd be tested on it […]

[Original post on social.coop]
A picture of a book cover, 'The Usborne Guide To Better English (Grammar, Spelling, Punctuation)'. The picture is of several English work books open on a table, with a collection of small thumb-sized characters wearing overalls carrying various items of stationary around.
December 15, 2025 at 11:36 AM
jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy
Wine brewing attempt update:

Fermentation (~1 month) finished. The sloe berry wine was fermented using wild yeast (i.e: did not sterilise after pressing the fruit), and the red grape wine (courtesy of a neighbour that decided to turn his back garden into a […]

[Original post on social.coop]
A photograph of an opened container of sloe berry juice on a kitchen worktop. On top of the juice is a layer of off-white pellicle, produced by the yeast during fermentation. The juice is a deep pink colour. A photograph of 4 transparent glass bottles lined up in a storage cupboard. The first two contain a pinky-red liquid, the second two a dark crimson.
December 7, 2025 at 7:06 PM
jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy
Hmm
A screenshot from a file browser, containing two single-entry columns from a file listing: 'size' and 'modified'. The former says '12 items', the latter says '45 years ago'.
November 27, 2025 at 2:08 PM
jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy
I finally found the energy to dive back into Ariadne's wildly complicated diagnostic generation logic. Here's a new configuration option, `minimise_crossings`, which does what it says on the tin.

Before and after.
A screenshot of the output of what looks like a compiler. The output contains a variety of spans/arrows pointing at different parts of some source code (with no particular intent, because this is a stress-test example). The arrows frequently criss-cross as they weave through the diagnostic. A screenshot of the same compiler output, but the arrows have been disentangled considerably. There are still some crossings out of necessity, but superficially it seems like only those that are essential remain. The diagnostic is easier to read as a result.
November 20, 2025 at 11:06 PM
jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy
From last night: directional lanterns.

The most difficult part about this one was the closed-form ray/cone intersection maths for the diffuse effect - no SDF raymarching here! Cones specifically are a pain because they have so many intersection combos.

On top […]

[Original post on social.coop]
November 7, 2025 at 9:31 AM
jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy
Messing around with some material & particle shaders for @veloren.

If you're working on a game and your shader code doesn't hot-reload, you're missing out: it's like trying to paint a picture with your eyes closed.
November 3, 2025 at 9:17 PM
jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy
Thinking that I might start adding something like this to more of the software I write.
Text that reads: # Provenance This software is proudly and fondly written, maintained, used - and most crucially - understood by real human beings. While we can't personally attest to the provenance of every line of code ever contributed, the vast majority of the codebase has certainly been developed without the aid of large language models and other stochastic 'intelligence'. While the GPLv3 may not guarantee warranty 'of any kind', you can at least use this software in the comforting knowledge that its veracity and coherence is vouched for by sentient intelligence with skin in the game and a reputation to uphold. # Contribution guidelines We expect contributors to adhere to the ethos of the project. Source code is not an artifact, an intermediate representation, nor a bothersome annoyance whose creation is to be offloaded to metal and transistors. Source code is a source of truth - the only source of truth that constitutes this software project - and it deserves to be understood and curated by the accountable and reasoned mind of a human being. Please refrain from contributing changes that you have not personally understood and instigated the authorship of. We do not expect perfection, but we do expect you to personally understand your own motivations and decisions.
November 1, 2025 at 11:41 PM
jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy
Look at that sealant line! Buddiful. Bleddy buddiful.

And it only took a year of disastrous fuck-ups and ruined jumpers to get here.
A photograph of the corner of a kitchen cabinet, at a shallow angle. The cabinet is bordered by aquamarine wall tiles. Between the tiles and the cabinet is a line of silicon sealant. It is a little wobbly, but mostly fine.
November 1, 2025 at 5:25 PM
jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy
Boo!
A photograph of a watermelon with a scary face carved in it. The face is not very well carved. It sits in a window planter on the outside of a window of a house. The eyes and mouth glow, because a candle is lit inside it.
October 31, 2025 at 6:51 PM
jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy
A few weeks ago I hit a really fun personal milestone: my text editor is now sufficiently complete that I can start using it as my daily driver.

Now that I'm using it full-time, I'm finding so many opportunities to make tiny productivity improvements here and […]

[Original post on social.coop]
A screenshot of a terminal-driven text editor. The screen is split horizontally into 3 panes, each containing a view into a different example Rust text file, each with syntax highlighting. A scrollbar is visible on the right-hand side of each pane. Each pane has a smooth border, created using unicode box-drawing characters.
October 29, 2025 at 9:26 PM
jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy
The combinator pattern is extremely cool case study #5371:

Here's an entirely automatically generated railroad syntax diagram for the JSON parser example that comes with my parser combinator library Chumsky (https://github.com/zesterer/chumsky/).

This works for […]

[Original post on social.coop]
An image of a railroad syntax diagram. It contains a single self-recursive definition, a JSON value. The diagram consists of a series of branching lines which fan out into many different paths, some which loop back on themselves, and then finally coalesce into a single end path on the right of the image. Several of the paths contain labels such as character that appear in the JSON grammar.
October 27, 2025 at 9:01 PM
jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy
I hear they call this 'splooting'.
A photo of a chocolate brown spaniel lying at the threshold of a carpeted room. He has large brown eyes. He is lying with his back legs spread apart, flattened against the ground. He peers up at the camera with a solemn look.
September 11, 2025 at 2:31 PM
jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy
Some have ripened. Not quite the same volume as two years ago with the cherry tomatoes, but the consistency of moneymakers isn't bad.
A photograph of 3 bowls on a worktop, each containing about 15 medium-sized red tomtatoes.
August 29, 2025 at 11:31 PM
jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy
I missed a lot of steps between then and now: but the kitchen is finally usable (ignoring tiling, the kickboard, and a long tail of other things). This has exhausted me for the last few months, but I'm very happy with how it's turned out, especially as this is my first major DIY project.
A photo of a kitchen in a terraced house. It is about 6x4 metres in size. The flooring is limestone tiles in a repeating pattern. The cabinets are a pale green, with black cast iron handles. The cooker sits in the centre of the room, insert into the chimney. The chimney has been painted brick terracotta. The rest of the walls are a warm beige colour. In the foreground is a small wooden table with chairs.
August 29, 2025 at 1:13 PM
jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy
Tomatoes. They should have been red a month ago, but better late than never. #gardening
A photograph of a mess of tomato leaves and shoots. Among it all are several groups of tomatoes. Most are green, but some are red.
August 19, 2025 at 10:19 PM
jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy
Irksome thing: I bought some tiles today. After purchase I looked closer at the pattern. I noticed red/blue highlighting around the shape. I think this is LCD sub-pixel hinting (i.e: a thing vector rendering software does to compensate for the specific colour […]

[Original post on social.coop]
A close-up of a tile. The tile is white, with a black crest in the middle. When looking carefully, a coloured rim is visible around the crest, blue for left-facing edges and red for right-facing edges.
August 9, 2025 at 5:50 PM
jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy
Musk, UK's OSA
New article, with the headline: "UK Online Safety Act risks ‘seriously infringing’ free speech, says X" "Elon Musk’s social media platform says lawmakers made a ‘conscientious decision’ to increase censorship" Below is an image of a middle-aged bald man, from the infamous Clickhole article "Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point"
August 1, 2025 at 4:12 PM
jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy
Union Pacific No 119 in @veloren, because why not. You can drive it around too. #trains #gamedev #foss
A screenshot of a mountain pass in a blocky voxel game. In the foreground is a rail line and a model of a Union Pacific 119 (a steam locomotive with a black boiler, golden cab, and wheels in a 4-4-0 configuration) on the tracks, heading downhill.
July 25, 2025 at 1:26 PM
jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy
This looks so much better than I ever imagined it could.
A side / low angle photo of the piece of wood. Light reflects off it, and the grain is clearly visible.
June 27, 2025 at 7:48 PM
jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy
Danish oil is black magic, I swear. I found this wood abandoned by the side of the road a few months ago and decided to turn it into a window sill.

Before and after (each piece was one half of the same table top).
A photograph of two wide planks of wood, balanced on a garden chair in a garden. The plank on the left is grey, dirty, and has many scratches and discolourations on it. The one on the right has been sanded, oiled, and waxed. It appears to almost glow a vibrant cherry-red colour. The wood blocks that compose it are clearly visible.
June 27, 2025 at 7:46 PM
jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy
@hannah Christ. It reminds me of this recent YouGov poll from the UK that showed that the general public has pretty much a perfectly inaccurate sense of what LLMs are and aren't actually good for. Pretty terrifying.
A picture of polling results showing 'things Britons think AI chatbots are good at' from highest to lowest. The highest are things like 'doing general sums', 'answering general knowledge enquiries', 'checking a piece of writing for spelling'. The lowest are things like 'serving as a virtual romantic partner', 'serving as a mental health therapist', and 'providing relationship advice'.
June 21, 2025 at 5:51 PM
jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy
@w7voa
An image from the Simpsons. A small crowd of 5 characters stand around two monkeys on the deck of a ship. The crowd is cheering and holding money, clearly making bets. The monkeys are both holding knives and appear to be in the process of fighting.
June 5, 2025 at 6:34 PM
jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy
Making pixel fonts is quite fun.
A screenshot of a font demo page. It reads: Basic v12 A concise pixel font for programming. Followed by some character demonstrations, and finally "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". The font is composed of 8x6 characters. It is stylised, but not overly so, and is perhaps reminiscent of a typewriter font.
May 22, 2025 at 8:03 PM
jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy
Tiles finally laid. Far from perfect (I didn't feel like re-cutting every tile to add space for grout), but it's a big milestone. #diy
A photograph of a small kitchen being built. The floor is empty, besides a small table and a pile of DIY tools. On the floor are a series of limestone tiles laid in a grand opus pattern. They are mortared to the floor.
May 19, 2025 at 11:05 PM