Recent content on iRi
The effect of AI on PRs has gotten a lot of press. Slop PRs, untested
PRs, just the profusion of PRs. Slop bugs, slop security reports, all
sorts of slop problems. Definitely a problem. 
 But I would also propose that something else happening in the
open source space that is hurting the open source community: Everyone
thinks they can start their own project now. The stream of…
One of the recurring hobbies of the programming community is to
self-righteously self-flagellate about how we don’t do Real
Engineering TM like those other engineering disciplines do, with their
blueprints, and licensing processes for Real Engineers, and planning, and
site testing, and all their wonderful formal processes that we so
callously ignore. If only we could do…
As with many programmers, as my career has progressed I’ve come to
appreciate the utility of “compile time checking”. I don’t ever want
to go back to a language where it is hard to verify constraints are
checked at compile time. 
 Followers of this blog may know that I do a lot of programming in Go,
and find it hard to square that attitude with the use…
Two strands are making me ponder the “value” of code in our new AI
era. One is the increasing cheapness of producing a line of code,
trending toward zero. As a professional who produces lines of code,
among other things, this trend is something I need to be thinking
about for many obvious reasons. The other is the question of how to
 moderate a Reddit…
Every field of human activity has its unique characteristics, and
programming is no exception. 
 One of the unique aspects of software is how it spans such a large
number of orders of magnitude. A software engineer may be slicing and
dicing nanoseconds, or they may be trying to accelerate a computation
that will run across thousands of cores for a month… and they…
This is a lengthy post explaining my reasoning for certain decisions
we’re making in the Go subreddit. It is posted primarily to share with
other moderators of all sorts of content as we all struggle through
the implications of AI. If anyone else gets any benefit from this,
that’s a bonus. For anyone else uninterested in that, you know where
the back button is.…
As it stands today, consciousness is a black box of mystery. We don’t
know how to define it, we don’t know how to measure it, we don’t have
any terminology for it, we comprehensively lack any framework for
dealing with it. We operate on “we know it when we see it” standards,
and if you go down the P-zombie line of
thinking , you may be
reduced…
In my previous post, Layered Design in
Go , I discussed a
procedure that can be used in any Go module to order the packages in
an order of what depends on what, starting with the modules on the
bottom that have no internal dependencies, then the modules that only
depend on those, and then so on. 
 Conceptually it’s a useful way to think about Go modules, and…
This post will describe how I design my programs in Go. I needed this
for work, and while I searched for a link, nothing quite fits my
coding practices out there. The word “Layered” can pull up some fairly
close descriptions, but I want to lay out what I do. 
 Deriving Some Requirements 
 Go has a rule that I believe is underappreciated in its utility and
whose…
As many others observe as well, one of the major reasons to write is
to firm up ideas in one’s own head. Serializing an idea out into
English words is still no guarantee one understands it deeply, but it
is great progress over a very fuzzy idea that has never been fleshed out at
all. 
 I’ve known for a long time I wanted to sit down and write this
out. But I had…