Joshua Barretto
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jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy
Joshua Barretto
@jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy
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
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.
November 20, 2025 at 11:06 PM
I have been thinking about how we only know how to provide agents with goals stated in terms of their stimuli, and how an all-intelligent, all-powerful agent would end up reducing the cardinality of its goal to only that which is required to perturb its stimuli (i.e: self-masturbatory behaviour) […]
Original post on social.coop
social.coop
November 18, 2025 at 1:50 AM
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
I am sorry if you opened a PR on my repository and I didn't respond for 6 months, I became irrationally terrified of some trivial decision I'd have to make by accepting the PR and my brain decided to memory-hole it. Please ping me again.
November 2, 2025 at 2:09 PM
Thinking that I might start adding something like this to more of the software I write.
November 1, 2025 at 11:41 PM
Every time I want to write a technical blog post about something I think is neat I get bogged down in a sort of recursive death-spiral doing endless introductions to sub-topics.

Has anybody conquered this vicious demon? How do you decide what things the intended audience should/shouldn't be […]
Original post on social.coop
social.coop
November 1, 2025 at 5:59 PM
Reposted by Joshua Barretto
I just saw an ad for "AI Fax Automation" and this is exactly what I mean when I say that AI is not the future, it's the worst of the present perpetuated forever
November 1, 2025 at 11:15 AM
Look at that sealant line! Buddiful. Bleddy buddiful.

And it only took a year of disastrous fuck-ups and ruined jumpers to get here.
November 1, 2025 at 5:25 PM
It's really sad to see developers I once had a lot of respect for go down the LLM rabbit hole and basically just post random gibberish about what their chatbox has decided to do on social media instead of the actually interesting things they used to post about.
November 1, 2025 at 4:42 PM
Boo!
October 31, 2025 at 6:51 PM
Paracetamol. Pro: easy to acquire. Con: basically a placebo

Pregabalin. Pro: works. Con: but not very well

Amitriptyline. Pro: helps me sleep. Con: I wake up 13 hours later feeling like roadkill

Codine. Pro: makes me feel like I'm on a rollercoaster. Con: rollercoasters make me want to vomit […]
Original post on social.coop
social.coop
October 30, 2025 at 12:20 AM
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]
October 29, 2025 at 9:26 PM
Is there a particular reason that Linux's framebuffer console (fbcon) sucks so much? Colour, character, and keybinding support are all abysmal. For something that's so visible to so many people, it seems like a strange oversight.
October 28, 2025 at 9:52 PM
Woken up at 4am and the internet is full of bizarre baseball-related humour that I don't understand, help
October 28, 2025 at 4:02 AM
Reposted by Joshua Barretto
The Python Software Foundation shows more spine than every single tech giant in just one single decision.

> Diversity, equity, and inclusion are core to the PSF’s values

https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-funding-statement.html
The PSF has withdrawn $1.5 million proposal to US government grant program
In January 2025, the PSF submitted a proposal to the US government National Science Foundation under the Safety, Security, and Privacy of Open Source Ecosystems program to address structural vulnerabilities in Python and PyPI. It was the PSF’s first time applying for government funding, and navigating the intensive process was a steep learning curve for our small team to climb. Seth Larson, PSF Security Developer in Residence, serving as Principal Investigator (PI) with Loren Crary, PSF Deputy Executive Director, as co-PI, led the multi-round proposal writing process as well as the months-long vetting process. We invested our time and effort because we felt the PSF’s work is a strong fit for the program and that the benefit to the community if our proposal were accepted was considerable. We were honored when, after many months of work, our proposal was recommended for funding, particularly as only 36% of new NSF grant applicants are successful on their first attempt. We became concerned, however, when we were presented with the terms and conditions we would be required to agree to if we accepted the grant. These terms included affirming the statement that we “do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.” This restriction would apply not only to the security work directly funded by the grant, **but to any and all activity of the PSF as a whole**. Further, violation of this term gave the NSF the right to “claw back” previously approved and transferred funds. This would create a situation where money we’d already spent could be taken back, which would be an enormous, open-ended financial risk. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are core to the PSF’s values, as committed to in our mission statement: > _The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of**a diverse and international community** of Python programmers._ Given the value of the grant to the community and the PSF, we did our utmost to get clarity on the terms and to find a way to move forward in concert with our values. We consulted our NSF contacts and reviewed decisions made by other organizations in similar circumstances, particularly The Carpentries. In the end, however, the PSF simply can’t agree to a statement that we won’t operate any programs that “advance or promote” diversity, equity, and inclusion, as it would be a betrayal of our mission and our community. We’re disappointed to have been put in the position where we had to make this decision, because we believe our proposed project would offer invaluable advances to the Python and greater open source community, protecting millions of PyPI users from attempted supply-chain attacks. The proposed project would create new tools for automated proactive review of all packages uploaded to PyPI, rather than the current process of reactive-only review. These novel tools would rely on capability analysis, designed based on a dataset of known malware. Beyond just protecting PyPI users, the outputs of this work could be transferable for all open source software package registries, such as NPM and Crates.io, improving security across multiple open source ecosystems. In addition to the security benefits, the grant funds would have made a big difference to the PSF’s budget. The PSF is a relatively small organization, operating with an annual budget of around $5 million per year, with a staff of just 14. $1.5 million over two years would have been quite a lot of money for us, and easily the largest grant we’d ever received. Ultimately, however, the value of the work and the size of the grant were not more important than practicing our values and retaining the freedom to support every part of our community. The PSF Board voted unanimously to withdraw our application. Giving up the NSF grant opportunity—along with inflation, lower sponsorship, economic pressure in the tech sector, and global/local uncertainty and conflict—means the PSF needs financial support now more than ever. We are incredibly grateful for any help you can offer. If you're already a PSF member or regular donor, you have our deep appreciation, and we urge you to share your story about why you support the PSF. Your stories make all the difference in spreading awareness about the mission and work of the PSF. How to support the PSF: * Become a Member: When you sign up as a Supporting Member of the PSF, you become a part of the PSF. You’re eligible to vote in PSF elections, using your voice to guide our future direction, and you help us sustain what we do with your annual support. * Donate: Your donation makes it possible to continue our work supporting Python and its community, year after year. * Sponsor: If your company uses Python and isn’t yet a sponsor, send them our sponsorship page or reach out to sponsors@python.org today. The PSF is ever grateful for our sponsors, past and current, and we do everything we can to make their sponsorships beneficial and rewarding.
pyfound.blogspot.com
October 27, 2025 at 4:04 PM
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]
October 27, 2025 at 9:01 PM
Reposted by Joshua Barretto
I'm in a #github internal group for high-profile FOSS projects (due to @leaflet having a few kilo-stars), and the second most-wanted feature is "plz allow us to disable copilot reviews", with the most-wanted feature being "plz allow us to block issues/PRs […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
October 24, 2025 at 4:17 PM
Reposted by Joshua Barretto
Even as I create larger statement pieces for upcoming shows, my functional ware is still the most important aspect of my work because of the way it exists in people’s homes and everyday lives. Here are a few pieces that have come out of the kiln over the past few weeks. #pottery #ceramics
October 23, 2025 at 5:06 PM
I am considering it a personal victory that I simply did not notice the AWS outage until it had already happened.
October 22, 2025 at 4:08 PM
Reposted by Joshua Barretto
I've gotten lots of notes from people today about 2 potential space debris falls.

One looks like a Chinese rocket stage that fell on Australia (https://nitter.net/RaviHJagtiani/status/1979900950199386410 and https://satobs.org/seesat/Oct-2025/0078.html)

And one is a suspiciously high altitude […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
October 19, 2025 at 4:20 PM
Reposted by Joshua Barretto
Spicy take:

Normal people shouldn't self host.

From an energy use perspective, the users per watt are WAY higher in a data center.

People are already awful at running patches and doing security updates.

OMG are people awful at doing backups.

From an ewaste POV, consumer electronics just […]
Original post on infosec.exchange
infosec.exchange
October 12, 2025 at 4:47 AM
I got an ear infection that's inflamed some of the nerves in my head (or maybe just one nerve? I don't know, I'm not a doctor) and now I've had the worst migraine of my life for 3 days running.

Please tell me about something interesting you made or did recently, I'm bored of being sedentary and […]
Original post on social.coop
social.coop
October 6, 2025 at 8:39 PM
The UK grid is at 65% renewables/low-carbon. Awesome.
October 3, 2025 at 4:54 PM
Only just realising that the yanks don't know it as 'paracetamol'. What is this?!
September 22, 2025 at 10:37 PM
Reposted by Joshua Barretto
Hey look, a dead canary.
September 17, 2025 at 11:16 PM