iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 18/10/2026

It runs on hardware too! Unfortunately the mouse is not functioning but I think that's because I buggered the BIOS a few years ago.

The same picture as above, but on the screen of a Thinkpad x250 sat on a desk

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 18/10/2026

It's so fun to see this working. Each of these windows has been independently registered with the GUI shell process by different processes. Each of the processes are properly isolated from one-another and are merely sharing a memory-mapped framebuffer with the […] [Original post on social.coop]

A screenshot of part of a QEMU window. Visible is a light grey checkerboard pattern with two simple GUI windows (titled 'This is a window!') and a simple cursor.

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 12/08/2026

I am amazed at how well an old pair of welding goggles and 3 layers of parcel tape worked, frankly. Amazing view of things.

A photograph of a hand holding a pair of blue welding goggles. On the front of each lens is a roughly-cut circle of parcel tape.

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 07/08/2026

Fixed my (and now my son's) toy train due to a long-missing battery cover. #FreeCADFriday

A photograph of a toy train, designed for a wooden train set. It is red, yellow, black, and blue. The top half of the train's boiler and funnel are 3D printed in white PLA.

A screenshot of the aforementioned part in FreeCAD, turned in such a way that the underside is visible. The underside exhibits various striations and indents to account for intersecting parts on the original train

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 16/06/2026

A quantization/dithering and outline shader for Veloren. Quite happy with it.

A screenshot of Veloren, a voxel game. The resolution is low, and objects in the scene have pixelated black outlines. Colours are dithered, with a retro pattern covering the screen.

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 08/04/2026

It was a bit of a pain in the arse to get working cleanly, but I do not regret doing the work to add support for nested syntax highlighting to my text editor. Markdown code blocks look so pretty now.

A screenshot of a terminal text editor. The editor is viewing a portion of the markdown README from https://github.com/zesterer/tao. The viewing portion contains several code blocks. Each code block has a slightly darker background colour compared to the text of the document, with full syntax highlighting within. The rest of the markdown documented is also highlighted: headings appear as a beige, bullet points in a light blue, etc.

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 28/03/2026

The first batch of this year's seedlings are approaching escape velocity now the seasons are changing. From the left: tomato, salad mix, a mixture of red and white onion, and celery. #gardening

A photograph of a variety of seedlings in small plastic pots sitting on a makeshift wooden table in a greenhouse. The first group are tall with broad leaves. The second are bright green, with jagged leaves. The third are tall and spindly, almost like thick grass. The last are short and delicate, with small leaves that look like parsley.

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 11/03/2026

I wrote a big 'ole blog post about the process of developing the text editor I now daily-drive, complete with technical details about the implementation and some fun solutions I found along the way. Perhaps some of you folks will enjoy it. blog.jsbarretto.com/post/text-editor

A screenshot of a terminal text editor, being used to edit a blog post. The screen is split into 3 panes: the blog post, a terminal window, and a pane containing Rust code.

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 26/02/2026

Choosing violence today

$Code: #[unsafe(no_mangle)] unsafe extern "C" fn pthread_mutex_lock(mutex: *mut c_void) -> c_int { // Dear God NO! 0 }$

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 19/01/2026

Alfred Nobel donating his entire life's fortune to the pursuit of peace on his deathbed

A large cartoon tortoise looks at the camera. Caption reads "one often meets his destiny on the road he takes to avoid it ~ master oogway"

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 07/01/2026

[ai stuff, *again*] Idk, this sucks. I refuse to say 'thanks' or 'please' to anybody's computer. It is a machine. No hate toward Steve, but I do not like how cleanly this fits into the slippery slope that is the normalisation of technological supremacy over […] [Original post on social.coop]

https://steveklabnik.com/writing/getting-started-with-claude-for-software-development/

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 03/01/2026

On the back of that marginal success, I'm going for round 2. Longer fermentation, a larger batch, and fewer mistakes. Last time I did 2.5 litres, now I'm aiming for 8.

A photograph of a 10 litre plastic container. It is full up to about 80% with apple juice, browned due to oxidation. It sits on a wooden table.

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 31/12/2025

It went to plan! I cut off fermentation a little short of where I wanted to be in time for New Year so it's a bit weaker than I'd hoped. At a guess, I think it's around the 3-4% range. It tastes really quite nice, shockingly so. The smell is beautiful, really […] [Original post on social.coop]

A hand holding a glass containing a small amount of pale yellow liquid up to the light. In the background is the corner of a room, one wall of which is covered in maps.

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 15/12/2025

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.

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 15/12/2025

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.

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 07/12/2025

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.

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 20/11/2025

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.

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 07/11/2025

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]

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 03/11/2025

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.

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 01/11/2025

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.

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 01/11/2025

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.

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 29/10/2025

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.

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 27/10/2025

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 (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.

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 30/08/2025

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.

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 29/08/2025

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.

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 19/08/2025

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.

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 09/08/2025

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.

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 25/07/2025

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.

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 27/06/2025

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.

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 27/06/2025

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.

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 21/06/2025

@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'.

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 20/05/2025

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.

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 09/05/2025

My first attempt at angle-grinding. Not amazing, but at least my digits and my eyeballs are still intact, so I'm counting that as a success. If anybody asks, it's '*rustic*', not '*done by a button*'.

A photo of two pieces of limestone tile on a plywood palette. They are separated by a new cut. It is vaguely straight, but not quite. Most surfaces visible are covered in dust.

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 06/05/2025

Print Preview. Now to draw the rest of the fucking owl. It does not help that this room is very obviously a parallelogram.

A set of limestone tiles laid out on a floor, over a levelling board material. They are arranged in an opus pattern. The room is relatively small (about 3x5 metres). The tiles are yet to be affixed to the floor.

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 23/04/2025

I made this today and I'm proud of it.

A meme, in the "guess we're making circles now" template. A machine with a conveyor belt spits out Continuous Integration status symbols: first green, then many reds. A worker, beside the machine, says "I guess we merging CI failures now".

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 21/04/2025

I am experimenting with alternative generators

Random babble:

Sam Altman speaks if america eats

eagle kills carrots then me speaks or cabbage walks if Sam Altman kills salami if democracy eats democracy and.
eats carrots then salami eats cats when carrots eats or america speaks then me eats quickly or onion kills chips then onion eats joyfully then me eats america or goblin kills weather and also Sam Altman eats salami when chips eats quickly or goblin speaks if america speaks and Sam Altman eats and kangaroos eats chips when weather speaks or computer eats chips and salami eats onion because eagle kills goblin and also chips kills dogs and also weather eats if your computer speaks then goblin speaks quickly then america runs when kangaroos eats cats and weather eats Sam Altman and also cabbage kills cats and also computer kills democracy then cabbage kills carrots when me kills computer and computer walks then america speaks or eagle speaks when my friend's dogs runs slowly and also me eats chips then

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 17/02/2025

I know 'efficiency' is a dead cat, but it still floors me that so many people believe you can make a system more efficient by taking resources away from it.

An image macro, using the 'makes sense to me' spongebob template.

Creature: "investment gives you economies of scale & increased efficiency"
Patrick: "yup"
Creature: "you want to make the state 'more efficient'"
Patrick: "sounds right"
Creature: "austerity means reducing investment"
Patrick: "makes sense to me"
Creature: "so, we should invest in state services"
Patrick: "no, brutal austerity please"

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