https://jsbarretto.com/blog/Recent content in Blogs on Joshua BarrettoHugo -- gohugo.ioen-GBSun, 15 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://jsbarretto.com/blog/software-is-joy/Sun, 15 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://jsbarretto.com/blog/software-is-joy/I am a huge fan of Richard Feyman’s famous quote: “What I cannot create, I do not understand” I think it’s brilliant, and it remains true across many fields (if you’re willing to be a little creative with the definition of ‘create’). It is to this principle that I believe I owe everything I’m truly good at. Some will tell you to avoid reinventing the wheel, but they’re wrong: you should build your own wheel, because it’ll teach you more about how they work than reading a thousand books on them ever will.https://jsbarretto.com/blog/on-llms/Wed, 30 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://jsbarretto.com/blog/on-llms/This post is based on a Mastodon thread and, as a result, is somewhat more disorganised than usual. I think a lot of people that don’t really understand what they’re doing are obsessing over LLMs for the same reason that they might have obsessed over visual programming or Plain-English-programming a generation ago. In their mind, programming works like this: A clever person designs the system/app/website/game in their mind.https://jsbarretto.com/blog/optimism-and-utopianism-are-enemies/Thu, 13 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://jsbarretto.com/blog/optimism-and-utopianism-are-enemies/I want to get back into the habit of writing things, and I also tend to bite off more than I can chew, so here’s a post I’ve wanted to write for a while that I’m going to try to keep short. I’m fairly sure that if you were to ask someone in the street, they’d struggle to see optimism and utopianism as fundamentally different concepts. I think this hypothetical person is wrong: the two are opposites and I don’t believe it’s possible to be both at once.https://jsbarretto.com/blog/existential-threats/Mon, 10 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://jsbarretto.com/blog/existential-threats/We’ve all heard of the Fermi paradox. Simply put, it is the contradiction between the apparent ease of life emerging and the fact that we know of only one planet upon which it has occurred: Earth. In the words of Enrico Fermi, the physicist who gives his name to the paradox: “Where is everybody?”. For years, a reasonable answer to the paradox has been to assume that the formation of life is an exceedingly improbable event and occurs so rarely in the universe, despite its immense scale, that the chance of two civilisations chancing upon one-another is very small.https://jsbarretto.com/blog/masculinity-without-patriarchy/Tue, 17 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000https://jsbarretto.com/blog/masculinity-without-patriarchy/Alternative title: “Why The Shawshank Redemption is a feminist masterpiece despite containing no female characters” Content Warning: This article discusses physical violence, rape, and suicide. I am a man. This has always been a reality that I’ve felt comfortable with. What I’m less comfortable with is explaining to those that ask what it means to be one. This sits in sharp contrast to other aspects of my chosen identity: I have no such trouble explaining what it means to be an athiest, a socialist, or a feminist.https://jsbarretto.com/blog/parser-combinators-and-error-recovery/Thu, 13 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000https://jsbarretto.com/blog/parser-combinators-and-error-recovery/Hello! In this post I’m going to talk about chumsky, a parser combinator library that I wrote. It aims to be easy to use (even for beginners) yet also support elegantly recovering from syntax errors, generating high-quality error messages, producing partial syntax trees when encountering errors, and providing parser developers a lot of expressive control over parsing. I’m going to talk about why I wrote it and discuss the things I think it does well, what I think could be improved, and what problems are still left to solve.https://jsbarretto.com/blog/intro/Wed, 12 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000https://jsbarretto.com/blog/intro/This is the first post on my blog. After much reluctance, I’ve been convinced to start one. My hope is that this place becomes somewhere for me to record the more interesting things I come across. I don’t really like talking about myself, and I’ve no intention of starting now, so I’m probably going to use this space to host the following: Long-form release information for the open-source libraries I develop