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Joshua Barretto

@jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy

22 followers 7 following 491 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 ⁂ social.coop/@jsbarretto, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact

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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

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

(also thanks to @jamwaffles's `embedded_graphics` for the font rendering capability)

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.

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

I ended up resolving this by realising that (a) signalling based on index was more sensible, (b) cleanup can just be done after the futex yield (just re-lock the waiting set and remove ourselves from all of the things we were waiting on) and (3) doesn't actually matter at all since spurious […]

Original post on social.coop

Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026

I've noticed that when you start asking LLMs about parser combinators in Rust they start spitting out API designs that look extremely similar to my library, chumsky. A fair critique is "you licensed it under MIT" and, sure, but this is only making me not want to license things under MIT any longer.

Reposted by Joshua Barretto

Bodil @bodil.lol · 12/10/2026

A gentle reminder that unsourced news stories are usually bullshit, even when they play to your biases about the Nazis all being Russian bots.

Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 11/10/2026

The first sort of seems trivial: simply store the virtual address along with the thread ID in the wait queue (although, there is potential for a race condition if the process' address space mapping changes before the wakeup occurs). The rest seem like they're potentially quite difficult to handle.

Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 11/10/2026

I've got my futex implementation up and running quite nicely but now I'd like to generalise it to multi-wait behaviour (i.e: block on any of N addresses). Simple enough, although I think there are a few things I'm not yet sure about: 1. How best to signal to a thread which specific address […]

Original post on social.coop

Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 11/10/2026

Am I followed by anybody with a strong familiarity with OS kernel internals that I might be able to ask a few questions of involving futexes, epoll, scheduling, and that sort of thing?

Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 09/10/2026

Not that heapless is bad, just that this really should be a thing that core makes easy because it's already doing 99% of the work.

Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 09/10/2026

The 'easiest' way to do formatted printing into a buffer (i.e: without writing directly to I/O hardware) on no_std (without alloc) is to bring in a library like `heapless`, which feels quite unfortunate.

Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 09/10/2026

It does make me sad that &mut &mut [u8] doesn't implement core::fmt::Write.

Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 08/10/2026

I think it should be possible to not require anything but these two mechanisms? Which is awesome if so. That makes the square footage of my scheduler maybe a few dozen lines at most.

Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 08/10/2026

Hehe, microkernel IPC entirely via shared memory and futexes now works. And it's fast as hell.

Reposted by Joshua Barretto

bryan newbold @bnewbold.net · 07/10/2026

ah damn, RIP Margaret Hamilton. she took safety-critical software engineering seriously, and got people to the moon and back. news.mit.edu/2026/margare...

old photos of a woman (Margaret Hamilton) standing next to a tall stack of books (printouts of Apollo space mission software source code)

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Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 02/10/2026

Programming is just googling stuff like "elf magic field" and then being surprised at the results

Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 20/09/2026

It's a bit mad that, until 2019, objdump was missing a feature as apparently niche as... disassembling a specific symbol. You were expected to disassemble the entire bloody thing and pump it through awk or whatever, apparently

Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 17/09/2026

@donpdonp Thanks, I'm hoping to go into more depth about some parts soon.

Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 16/09/2026

SUVs really are the McMansions of the car world. Why do they all look so garishly horrible? It's like the manufacturers are having a competition to see how much like the 😑 emoji they can make their cars look. Come on, making your headlights 30% narrower isn't going to suddenly make your chelsea […]

Original post on social.coop

Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 15/09/2026

@jonny Somebody forgot to check errno!

Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 15/09/2026

I found some time to write about some of the things @veloren does differently as compared to other games in the voxel genre, which is something I've been meaning to do for a while. blog.jsbarretto.com/post/veloren

blog.jsbarretto.com

Some things Veloren does differently

Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 15/09/2026

This stuff is net harmful, at every level, all the way from the mundane (online misinfo, spam, killing the FOSS ecosystem) to the *really bad* (booster rocket for the far right, encouraging teens to kill themselves, destruction of the intellectual commons), all the way to the truly calamitous […]

Original post on social.coop

Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 15/09/2026

I'm in a weird position where I entirely believe that the Anthropic AI doom stuff is purely a cynical attempt to save a dying oligopoly, but also I sort of don't want to say it because I do think that actual ASI (LLMs won't get us there, of course) would be a near-immediate extinction event and […]

Original post on social.coop

Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 12/09/2026

@jonny Dear god, STEM major humanities minor courses desperately need to come back

Reposted by Joshua Barretto

raganwald.com @raganwald.functional.cafe.ap.brid.gy · 08/09/2026

Tony Hoare, as usually quoted: “There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. “The first method is far more difficult.” The […]

functional.cafe

Original post on functional.cafe

Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 07/09/2026

Oh no, my CI failed

Screenshot of some text next to a red cross icon. Text reads "Check that there are no more than 10,000 lines of code".

Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 24/08/2026

@b0rk Not a cryptographer, but I feel like I've got a good conceptual grasp of crypto so maybe not quite the intended audience. For me, keys/passwords have colour: blue for public, red for green. Giving a password feels like extending an arm into an alligator cage. A public key feels like […]

Original post on social.coop

Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 24/08/2026

I can't help but visit it and feel that everybody is being disingenuous. I think it's probably got a far smaller bot population than most of the rest of the web, but in a way it doesn't matter: you're not viewing the thoughts of actual human beings anyway, just a façade that's been constructed […]

Original post on social.coop

Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 24/08/2026

I saw a post on there that was like "Cory Doctorow is bad" and the justification pretty much boiled down to "I don't like how he's imprecise with his terminology in order to appeal to people" and, uh, idk. If you're not willing to entertain that Cory might be on your side I don't think there's […]

Original post on social.coop

Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 24/08/2026

I like fedi. It is not perfect, and it has its own strains of mad cow disease, but it's also comfortable, like a pair of shoes one has owned for a decade

Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 24/08/2026

Sometimes I visit BlueSky and... it's not that folk on there are bad in any profound way, but I always leave the place with a sort of unquantifiable misanthropy. Something about the place just makes me want to escape to the wilds. I don't know whether it's the omnipresent Americanism or the fact […]

Original post on social.coop

Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 21/08/2026

A thing I am noticing when taking the dog for walks is that the areas with the highest plant diversity are remaining the most green despite the lack of rain. Difficult to say which way round the causation goes (perhaps being near, say, a source of water encourages greater plant diversity?), but […]

Original post on social.coop

Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 21/08/2026

I think I have a new favourite quote. > On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able […]

Original post on social.coop

Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 14/08/2026

Angry-posting is a really good way to get popular on here, huh?

Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 14/08/2026

I want to remind you: these bastards have spent $1.5 trillion of society's money on this technology. That it's produced *something* should not be surprising. That's 'solve aging', 'cure cancer', 'eliminate all poverty', 'shift climate change into reverse', or 'send a probe to another solar […]

Original post on social.coop

Reposted by Joshua Barretto

spooky Deirdre Connolly¹ ² at a distance @durumcrustulum.com · 06/08/2026

"LLM-generated patches did not resolve the vulnerability, added a new vulnerability, or both, an average 53.9% of the time." 👁️👄👁️ 1password.com/blog/why-ai-...

LLM-generated patches did not resolve the vulnerability, added a new vulnerability, or both, an average 53.9% of the time. You can read further details about our findings, observations, and conclusions in the research paper we’ve published alongside this post.

Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 13/08/2026

I love Rust, and I love the tools it gives you to craft truly beautiful APIs, but it can't half be used for evil purposes when wielded by somebody seemingly intent on making using an API as difficult as possible for no reason

Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 13/08/2026

Please, do not create your own clamping API parameterised by your own magic clamping enums. Just tell me what the damn bounds are. Stop trying to pretend that you're not just doing that internally too.

Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 13/08/2026

Like, come on, you don't need to newtype 'line' and 'column' for a TUI library. I want my code to not require 500% extra characters to appease the compiler.

Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 13/08/2026

I wish all those that build numeric newtypes into their Rust API a very fuck you. Stop making me do stupid cast and `.into()` backflips, I do not care

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

Best photo I got through them.

A black-background photo of a thin glowing cresent, curved toward the top-right oof the image.

A man in a soviet-era nuclear operator outfit. Caption reads "Not great, not terrible.".

Reposted by Joshua Barretto

Oliver Geer @ogeer.org · 12/08/2026

I forgot to buy eclipse glasses, but saw the eclipse anyway via shadows on the wall. So lucky! #eclipse #solareclipse #eclipse2026

Golden crescents scatter over a rectangular section of a dark brown wall, giving it a feathery texture. It's the eclipse naturally projected through a window.

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.

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

@matt That's entirely fair, well said. As you say though, this is still an order of magnitude or two below the norm for modern app installs though, and probably still half an order of magnitude greater than it might otherwise be if developed in an environment where size was a greater pressure.

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

RE: infosec.exchange/@masek/11705435970… Reminder that you can build a workable version of almost any useful program that uses less than a few hundred KB of working memory, if you know what you're doing. I'm looking forward to those skills finally being relevant again.

infosec.exchange

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

Reposted by Joshua Barretto

jonny (nonvenomous) @jonny.neuromatch.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/07/2026

[Microdosing LLMs, self inflicted vibe coding, slopgazing. Long-ish] I had never top to bottom vibe coded something before - like full on "do not look at the code, just keep rolling the dice" - and I was sort of confused about how people in forums would say they were "working for months" on […]

neuromatch.social

Original post on neuromatch.social

Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 22/07/2026

Interpolating rich latent spaces that have already been marked and reasoning in highly noisy and path-dependent environments are wholly different tasks and we should be careful not to imagine that proficiency in the former necessarily demonstrates proficiency in the latter, even though this is […]

Original post on social.coop

Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 22/07/2026

Their reasoning is bounded by the linguistic latent space that we have laid down before them (as are we all, to some degree). But our unique ability is that we can operate outside that latent space too. It's often seen as curious and a little bemusing that machines can generate mathematical […]

Original post on social.coop

Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 22/07/2026

Problem is, for all of human history, symbol manipulation has been seen as *very difficult* because it's something that is less immediately intuitive to our brains. So whenever we see someone - or something - perform manipulation of a latent space like language our tendency is to presume that […]

Original post on social.coop