Clojurians Log v2

That is really cool post, thanks!

Yes, agreed. I believe we're on the same page. 🙂

Is there any way to get rid of the stupid taskbar that pops up on the right of every message that one scrolls past? It is annoying because it is both visually distracting and often blocks the right hand side of previous messages.

can’t recommend https://symless.com/synergy enough

you don’t need to press any button, it just works 🙂

use web slack + ublock block element?

I am using prezto: https://github.com/sorin-ionescu/prezto

I stumbled on another great Clojure open source tool: https://github.com/penpot/penpot Appears to be a Figma style prototype/design tool. Hacker News had a decent thread on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26000257

Playing with this now, it's very slick!

The world is very strange My TV telling me to put the remote control closer to it so it can be updated...

Haha. I bought some christmas lights a few weeks ago (you know, christmas) and it has a cheap remote control that only works within 50 cm from the "base station". What the ...

50 cm! what's the point :)

just hit the switch... :)

not very remote at all

Maybe it's a covid-friendly gadget, so you don't have to touch the same button as someone else ;)

Nice “feature”! Though I also have a wireless keyboard that sits 30cm from my computer and I never move it...

My TV was yelling at for some other wifi things being close to it, and therefore the remote might not work. And after a recent update I have no sound unless I change the sound configuration..

smart devices indeed 😅

I've worked too long as a programmer to put software in control of my living environment

(that's tangential to this off topic theme though)

software controls my access to every cent of my money, titles to anything i own, my ability to get a loan, etc. I think its kind of a meme to say software people won't put software in control of things like that. We all totally do.

@dpsutton if a but fucks up my bank account balance or loan or whatever, there are existing (pre-software) means to fix it

if a software bug means my door won't unlock, or my thermostat refuses to turn off, that's different and physically dangerous

i've never worked in a bank. but i'd be interested to know if that's actually true.

yeah. but pacemakers control hearts. and we seem pretty ok with that, just stay away from microwaves

the contracts don't depend on software state, they rely on correct accounting

i guess im assuming they fundamentally rely on business rules written in cobol in some mainframe somewhere

there are accounting procedures for rolling back erroneous / illegal / etc. transactions in the monetary system

yeah. and i'm assuming some business rules in cobol has to approve whatever a human decides is a way to correct things

they fundamentally rely on the standards of accounting and business law, the software helps them arrive at the first answer faster

if there was an error, there are procedures that retroactively fix it

in HFT they even allow the software to roll back transactions against the stock market

oh i'd be interested to read about that

Business law or cobol, which is more likely to be bug free

There is that project that came up again recently where someone translated the french tax code into a formal language, and found somethings they point to as bugs

but i suspect the rules for rolling back transactions are encoded and enforced in software right?

no, it' slegal

@hiredman i have that open in a tab and was thinking exactly about that

software just helps you find the answer faster

the law / auditing rules decide what's correct

kinda in circles, but software implements all of that. you can't just "declare rollback". At the very least there's some forms app to type in the correction, business rules (implementing the regulations that allow it undoubtedly) to roll it back, broadcast to whatever clearing house type entities are involved, using some protocol they all understand, etc

if a monetary transaction was illegal (eg. it's discovered that money laundering was going on), it absolutely can be rolled back in the money system, whether your software is capable of representing it or not

and apart from the fed, you can't just say "there is $5 more in this account than you thought. by law. do it" right?

i assume there’s a generation of people who grew up with the blue screen of death and terminator movies that will irrationally and arbitrarily refuse to give up control to computers over the coming decades

I am more worried about the opaqueness of these systems

At least the tax code is published and you can look it over

The business rules and such for the other systems in your life you can't examine

@dpsutton compare to etherium, where literally the code dictates transactions. someone made a transaction that got reused in other code that "accidentally" gave them money in corner cases. in a real financial system this would be fraud and the court would order a refund and likely a penalty as well. in etherium they deleted the entire state of the system

our legal system, despite being mostly written down, is just as complex with probably even more undefined behavior than any software program. at least in the US , there are questions with no answers until it appears before a court somewhere with the proper standing

it’s not less complex, we’re just used to it

sure - but humans have the ability to look at and even rewrite those rules - it's public and accountable

sure, but that machinery is exposed and open to inspection

Godel (of incompleteness fame) > Gödel, in his usual manner, had read extensively in preparing for the hearing. In the course of his studies, Gödel decided that he had discovered a flaw in the U.S. Constitution -- a contradiction which would allow the U.S. to be turned into a dictatorship. (funny aside about law not having bugs)

its only exposed and open to inspection in a superficial way

nobody here is claiming law doesn't have bugs

not sure what that means

nobody here is claiming software doesn’t have bugs

the computer isn't the source of truth, you need an auditable accounting (computer systems can help implement that accounting)

there are no podcasts about the internal business rules citibank uses for whatever

> Business law or cobol, which is more likely to be bug free just about this comment. i didn't mean it argumentatively but just as a funny thing i had heard

like, the legal machinery could be more open (some states in the us are really dumb about claiming copyright on their laws for example), but it is already open the extent that this is an industry of color commentary on its proceedings

right, but even just having access to all the laws that might influence a legal decision does not necessarily help you predict the legal decision

anyway, the financial stuff got digitized very early, and the existing checks and remedies for accounting failures just took the computer error as a new source of things to fix

I'm more afraid of things that can't be rolled back or remedied

of course, I am not saying it is predictable

it will depend on the laws, the case law, the prosecutor, the judge and when the jury had lunch

and yeah, pacemakers exist, I wouldn't accept an experimental one that ran clojure - that kind of software dev is rightly conservative

many of which are opaque

my mind goes to pacemakers, airplane engines, lasers for eye surgery, bypass machines for heart surgeries, etc. software does some critical stuff

I am saying you can look at it, and see it working, see it doing stuff, judges for larger decisions often even write briefs that explain why they think their decision is correct

right, but those are things I can't do without software :D

haha yeah. i was pretty nervous watching the artificial pancreas talk at strange loop

none of which I get from say, if I installed some kind of home automation system

I can lock / unlock my door, and control home temperature, etc. at very little inconvenience, and the automation opens up new classes of problems

no idea why and what decisions it is making

most of the decisions may even be made outside of my house on a computer in the cloud 😬

at least in the US, i believe you can be held for weeks without a trial

and that it happens

I am not saying the legal system is good at what it does, or that it embodies the values we want it to

It opens also a new class of improvements . It is always a balance to find. Not the same for everybody

I am saying it is at least more observable to me than most software systems(websites, apps on my phone, etc) I interact with every day

I mean these things already happen, my boss lost heat in the dead of winter because of a bad thermostat push upgrade, there are landlords that illegally lock tenants out using "smart locks"

I think that the legal system(which is more than just the written laws) has many opaque aspects

sure

even just the text of the laws leaves out many important details

but the encoded business rules of the software that runs our lives are entirely opaque

it's certainly not entirely opaque

we rely on many very complex software systems daily, but I think since we work on software, it's easier to quantify what we do and don't know. we also rely on other complex non-software systems and I think it's difficult to quantify what we do and don't know. IANAL, but from what I've read about the legal system, the right answer to most questions is "it depends"

and there's many important questions you could ask where no definitive answer could be provided

it seems like we keep coming back to that point. I don't think the ability to be observed and inspected is the same thing as fully specified / determined

and even if it was, it isn't like companies publish models of their software that we can query to determine what it will do in a given circumstance

(and almost certainly don't have such models internally either)

What a combination... the evidence of incompetent engineering, and the presumption of evil coinciding with intelligence

My previous car has a lot of failure. I figure out that the battery had damaged due to a previous breakdown. The battery low trigger many different other failures, until breaking electric engined in the light....

throughout the legal system, authorities are given discretion which is neither explained or published anywhere: • police • prosecutors • judges

I mean its more than software related, it has something to do with the overall complexity and its impact on reliability and security

to me, having some access to the rules is only useful if it helps predict a system's future behavior, or explain a system's past behavior

for some systems, having access to the rules doesn't offer much in explaining or predicting a system

I would consider a system that is difficult to explain and predict more opaque than a system that is easy to explain or predict, regardless of how many of its rules are available

right - there's a strong correlation between software and brittle engineering, but poorly designed systems are the actual issue

it's just that the way mainstream software is written and deployed (move fast and break things) sometimes leaks into domains where you neither want to move fast nor break things

It is definitely possible to create more predictable reliable automated systems involving software. It has been done. It tends to cost an order of magnitude more per line of code than the way most software is written 🙂. (or more)

right, and the best examples are probably in hardware (or the kind of software that's tied tightly to hardware)

I just don't expect any IOT vendor to be offering that kind of code quality