Rachel Barker

A while back I wrote a couple of articles evaluating various image compression programs. My original methodology had some issues, so I took the time to dot all my 'i's and cross all my 't's. And now, at long last, the improved versions of those posts are up! www.rachelplusplus.me.uk/blog/2025/06...

I have decided, in light of recent events, to make my public key 4 Now I just have to figure out what my private key is...

I feel so happy and proud seeing my name in these updates ❤️ (if you're curious what I'm up to these days, this is a nice high level overview!)

"Unroll a loop, make shader 10x faster", where I accidentally speed up Blender's Kuwahara compositor node on Apple GPUs (and elsewhere). aras-p.info/blog/2026/10...

I missed the official day to post this, but: newsthump.com/2015/09/11/s...

Quoting myself from a day ago - "The problem is thinking that the product of a programmer is code. It isn't, really, the code is just the final stage. The actual valuable thing the programmer produces is the underlying mental model. Without that, the code is just tech debt"

Tyrannosaurus rex was warm-blooded, new study confirms www.popsci.com/science/tyra...

#NASARoman activated the Wide Field Instrument—a 300-megapixel infrared camera that will allow it to explore wide swaths of the cosmos quickly. This test image captures the very first photons of starlight to reach the instrument—taken as an initial performance assessment: https://go.nasa.gov/4rg4qEc

A 40-year-old kernel bug got discovered while on stage at DEF CON and the writeup is glorious

📝💝 but what a privilege it is to read your code kayserifserif.place/posts/2026/h...

please just read this slide and know it’s the “drawbacks” to “anything can spawn anywhere” feature lol

People talking about shit like dlss5 and here I am going "I made my real mode x86 assembly better so now my 1 layer tile renderer for 160x120 resolutions runs at 60fps on a 33MHz 386 n_n"

I love old-timey book covers (from today's Tasting History: www.youtube.com/watch?v=fK8I... )

Actually a recent Xkcd for that: bsky.app/profile/xkcd...

This is the single biggest physics discovery of my entire lifetime. Or something's wrong with one of the cables. One of the two

Twenty years on from Gardasil vaccine launch, Australia on track to eliminate cervical cancer

July in Servo… 🦾🐧 binaries for Linux aarch64 🪶📐 web fonts in inline SVG 🚄🎨 multithreaded 2D canvas 🩹🦮 incremental accessibility 📝🤖 selection rendering (DOM only, not yet interactive) servo.org/blog/2026/08...

also if the dipshit who keeps probing for common php vulns on my STATIC FILESERVER website would kindly knock it the fuck off that'd be lovely

looking at my webserver logs for the first time in a hot minute and like, i know common decency is a dead concept at this point, but putting "example.com" in your scraper bot's user-agent string is ridiculous

this wave of AI has legitimately killed a huge part of what I loved about seeing stuff online, what I loved about being an educator, and what I loved about sharing my own work I just don't feel like doing it anymore

To tell if a maze is solvable, just hang it by its corners If it tears into pieces, you’ve found a solution

Good Evening, “RISC-V” was a 12-year, 17-day sociological study conducted by University of California, Berkeley. We are now complete with our study. Thank you for your time.

Reverse engineering a binary with partial RTTI really gives a similar high to deduction games like type help, TR-49, roottrees,... "I know you have to exist, but *where are you*" at a base class' constructor/vtable/default-implementation functions. Such a high when you end up finding it!

i think my favorite xml crime was seeing <keyvaluepair><key>burp</key><value>fart</value></keyvaluepair>. like the platonic ideal of the overflowing tupperware cabinet in the "there has to be a better way!" commercial

I've been working on improving my website a bunch recently, and wrote up a second round of things I did. Featuring: HTTP caching, precompression tweaks, and a teaser of one of my current larger projects! www.rachelplusplus.me.uk/blog/2026/08...

subfurface scattering

Here comes the S̶u̶n̶ Moon 🌑 On 12 August, a total solar eclipse was visible across parts of Europe, while much of the continent experienced a partial eclipse. From space, MTG-I1 recorded the Moon’s shadow moving across Earth: www.esa.int/ESA_Multimed... 📹ESA/Eumetsat

Curious how we've been improving Rust at Hexcat? Starting with June, our monthly updates are now publicly available on our website: hexcat.nl/updates/ #rustlang

Went to water my plants after the eclipse, and look who I caught trying to eat my turnips!

new blog post: self-hosting in the era of LLMs and cheap compute in general, about the kind of crap traffic i see day to day, as well as a more modern nuisance: claude code blog.xkeeper.net/the-cutting-...

Oh hell yeah, some of the Youtube ethnomusicologists I follow made something I've been wondering if they'd do for a while: A rendition of the opening of the Odyssey which is as historically accurate as possible given our current knowledge of ancient Greek music www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY4I...

There will always be people who appreciate what YOU make, it just might take them a while to find you.

I did the thing I've been meaning to do for years, finally got the right push to do it: www.rachelplusplus.me.uk/blog/2026/07...

I finally sent off something that has been hanging over my head for literal months. Really, really glad to be done with it, and looking forward to having all of that mental space back

playing with video processing again here's some birds leaving trails in the sky, processed from youtu.be/daFe_ygulPY

Someone made the mistake of getting me a UV laser engraving machine. ... (It was me.)

I've been improving my image compression project on and off for the last six months or so. Today I got it to basically where I want it feature-wise, so I've put out an alpha release and written a quick little blog post about it: www.rachelplusplus.me.uk/blog/2026/06...