mogge

Terrible news from Manchester over night. Puts whinging about politics or how bad your code base is into perspective.

indeed

very sad

@agile_geek - Agreed,.. We're 25 miles away, so it's an odd feeling in that on one hand it feels as though it could be on another planet, but at the same time I was born there, I went to gigs at the specific venue and all across the city; when people ask me where home is I say Manchester... I can't begin to imagine the horror and heartbreak for those that have lost people.

The only solace I can take from it is that, corny as it sounds, the people of the UK (and especially those of the North) are notoriously resilient and this will not cower them. I just hope it doesn't become justification for a witch hunt against immigrants again.

I don’t want to downplay what’s happened at all, but if it helps anyone to calibrate their response, the fatalities from road traffic accidents in the UK averages about 5 per day.

I know... also very sad indeed.

Always astonishes me that between 2005 and 2015 94 people were killed by Jihadist terrorists in the USA compared with 301,797 shot dead, mainly by their own citizens, yet I don't see Trump banning guns anytime soon!

yes.... that is very weird indeed. on average a toddler is involved with a gun death about once a week.

@peterwestmacott - I do get__ what you are saying, and I agree that all early / unnecessary deaths are tragic, particularly for those left behind, but it doesn't really change the human response to acts of random violence being one of far greater fear and sadness. We do all know the risk of using motor vehicles, but no one really expects to get blown to bits at a pop concert.

I disagree. People don’t know the risks because they haven’t looked at the statistics. Few people expect to be involved in car crashes either. We should fear traffic more than we fear terrorism.

@maleghast yep. This article states exactly that https://qz.com/898207/the-psychology-of-why-americans-are-more-scared-of-terrorism-than-guns-though-guns-are-3210-times-likelier-to-kill-them/

@peterwestmacott the issue is that people fear on an emotional level (obvious I know) and it's not rational as that article explains.

and stairs. we should be very afraid of stairs

More people have accidents at home...that's why I hardly ever go home! 😜

@mccraigmccraig - Yeah, I know; it was becoming a parent that actually made me realise how terrifyingly dangerous stairs actually__ are.

@maleghast I hear you - the stairs in our house suddenly seemed soooo steep when my children started navigating them

@peterwestmacott - I do fear traffic more than I personally fear terrorism, but I am affected more profoundly in emotional terms by events like this, and I realise that's irrational, but I can't really do anything about it.

@peterwestmacott - I know (re stairs) and I suddenly realised that I needed to be much more careful too, where previously I had been quite blasé about them.

@peterwestmacott Having been in two very severe traffic accidents I'm definitely more worried about them but tbh I'm fairly fatalistic about it with regard to myself. I worry more about my kids obviously.

but isn't it also a news thing? if news papers etc. had a item each day how many people died in traffic (or stairs) each day I think some things would change quite rapidly.

(not sure how you solve the stairs problem though)

yes - and it’s frustrating to think that more coverage of terrorism may lead to more terrorism, whereas more coverage of traffic accidents might lead people to drive more carefully

@maleghast I’m not sure it is irrational - it makes some sort of sense to be more moved by deliberate violence than by accidental violence

I think you may have a point @thomas. That article also points out that because air travel in the USA went down after 9/11 and long distance car journeys increased the death rate due to RTA's increased by over a 1500 people in the 12 months after 9/11

@peterwestmacott it's more about the illusion of control...we are less fearful of things we think we can control

*nods*

so will people be more fearful of self-driving cars even though they will be objectively safer?

Interesting....probably, yes.

@agile_geek yes I have heard that before.

@peterwestmacott - Yeah, irrational is probably too strong, after all the emotional impact of a deliberate, violent act should be greater than the effects of an accident. I suppose that the emotional impact does bleed over into more irrational thinking / decision-making on my part and that's the irrationality that I was really referring to.

I think we've already seen people express that view about self driving cars

re selfdriving cars.... people objected to trains and cars at first as well....

I think that overtime that attitude will change and self driving cars will get adopted surprisingly quickly

Yeah, I don't get that - I like to drive, but I am looking forward to the safer future where we are all in self-driving vehicles. Having said that, I do have a nagging doubt about the "moral maths" that self-driving vehicles may have to solve with regard to protection of the passenger over protection of pedestrians etc.

also @maleghast (and sorry to be so disagreeable so early in the day) but “but I can’t really do anything about it.” - I disagree with that too. Just thinking about it may help, but also reading up on statistics and cognitive heuristics and biases.

@peterwestmacott - That's ok, that's actually a useful point, not disagreeable at all. Again, a failure of communication on my part, as I omitted "...right this minute". I am quite certain that I can alter my thinking and behaviour over time should I choose to. 🙂

…and I’d sooner trust a computer with millisecond response times backed by a programming team who’ve had months to deliberate about it than the average driver in the spur of the moment when it comes to “moral maths”

that said, if a self-driving taxi decides to decelerate fast enough to kill me to avoid scratching it’s paintwork I hope my heirs will sue

@peterwestmacott - I agree, but the issue that has been raised is that a self-driving vehicle might adjuicate that it should plough into the pedestrian as a lower-risk option for the passenger than putting the vehicle into a wall to avoid the pedestrian. Clearly not all human drivers would make the more selfless choice, some would. This thought experiment is not about reaction times, but about the decision trees that the autonomous vehicle would be navigating.

yes, and I’d rather not have to navigate those trees manually at 30 miles per hour

I don't know, my Dad (a Systems Analyst and Programmer) always told me a joke about an airline pilot announcing that the plane was about the take off on auto pilot and all the programmers on the plane stood up and got off!

let's just hope whoever is programming self-driving cars is using a robust methodology and tools and not just a great python hairball

oh it will be one of those new-fangled, undebuggable neural nets won’t it?

I suspect that self driving cars would break as hard as they can, and that will be better then most humans would do.

This is interesting about autonomous vehicles reducing congestion.... if you watch the video you can see the autonomous vehicle leaves much more space and tries to breaks as little and as gently as possible https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607841/a-single-autonomous-car-has-a-huge-impact-on-alleviating-traffic/

and isn't it also the case that with self driving cars the throughput of roads increases as cars can drive closer to each other?

what dyu call a thing which is like an ORM but isn't OO ?

Value-RM?

ha, though thinking about it, the datastore isn't really relational either so Value-?-M ? perhaps just a DM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_mapper_pattern

Yeah just datamapper I think

query-builder?

limited query-building is part of what it does, but it mostly looks after persistence, so DataMapper is closer i think

I'm having a memory-failure AND my Google-fu is failing me... Is there a simple way to list the files in a specific location within the "resources" path of your application?

Also, if my app is going to become a Jar in the end I need to re-think using the resources path if I want the app to be able to add new files, right? I mean I can't write new files to "resources"

right?

the only time i've ever done that @maleghast it was a pain - retrieving the resource-path as a url, if it was a file: url then easy, but if it was a jar then using the zipfile api to open up the jar and browse the contents

that was a long time ago though - i've just avoided ever doing that again 🙂

maybe there is an easier way these days

this - https://github.com/ronmamo/reflections

Hmmm... I think I may indeed re-work this quickly. It's "easy" to get a list of files from a disk location with io/file so I think that I may need to plan to have the files on disk outside the app / jar.

Thanks for the link, I am looking...

if you are wanting to add new files then you don't want resources anyway

Yeah, I thought so... Oh arse.

Not a big deal, but I need to re-work a chunk of stuff on that basis...

harumph

if it's more than a hobby project, save yourself a bunch more work in the future and put the files on S3 or similar

@mccraigmccraig - Yeah, I think that's the ticket... Amazonica for the interacting with AWS / S3 or is there a newer, cooler kid on the block?

@maleghast we're using amazonica - here's our amazonica-based S3 client, go ahead and use/abuse it - https://gist.github.com/952ad298d47f93416eac23d7cfd0884d

@mccraigmccraig - Cheers 🙂

it's fake-async (with a future), because the basic S3 java apis aren't properly async and i haven't gotten around to using the other api which is properly non-blocking

That's rather cool 🙂

Would you like me to send you anything I add to it to list files (objects, I know) at a give "location" (yeah, I know that folders are sort of a lie in S3)

?

yes plz - i think you can fork gists etc can't you ?

I think so, yeah

you'll need a couple of libs to make it work - cats and manifold - and this util fn - https://gist.github.com/65748e21995b37549ccc72fe6e1daca9

Thx 🙂

OK, I am going to n00b myself now... Why is that a ".cljc" rather than a ".clj" ?

Also, is "cats" as mentioned above this library -> http://funcool.github.io/cats/latest/

?

I am using Juxt/edge so I have manifold already

Hello everyone, I am reaching out to let you know about the next ClojureBridge event on 2nd and 3rd June in London. For those who doesn't know already, ClojureBridge is a initiative whose goal is to increase diversity in the technology community through workshops. The event is aimed mainly to women and all the minorities in Tech and teaches the Clojure programming language to everyone who attend. For finding out more and attend the workshop please visit our website at https://clojurebridgelondon.github.io/ Also, feel free to direct message me for any further question or share with anyone you know might be interested

I've looked up the .cljc thing @mccraigmccraig - I get it now 🙂

yes, that's the right cats @maleghast

Thanks 🙂 Will let you know how I get on, though I am about to "down tools" for the day, so it may not be until some time tomorrow...

Does anyone here watch Netflix?

I "sporadically" get this issue and the sporadic nature seems to be increasing in occurrence