Latest Meta DaniWeb Posts

what was missing was a programming hub of news / forum / interviews

I have always been a strong proponent of having editorial (news, tutorials, interviews, etc.) complement the user-generated forum discussions. In the past, well over 50% of our gross revenue from advertising went straight into paying for staff writers. IMHO we used to have a lot of tech news content being published regularly, but as traffic declined, so did revenue, and so did the budget for staff writers. The nail in the coffin was when I was no longer able to afford Davey (happygeek), because his gig at Forbes turned into a fulltime promotion and there was just no way I was able to compete with what they were paying him. I feel like a lot of members left when happygeek left. For sure, our Google rankings tanked a lot due to no longer having regular news stories and editorial daily.

However, I'm still keeping up with some staff writers. For example, Johannes just published an interview last week, and Usman just published a tutorial a couple of days ago. Of course, we don't have the level of clout that we used to in order to attract interviewees like Steve Wozniak anymore, but we're trying.

Dani , yes I also believe that you are responsible for the decline of DaniWeb .... BUUUT that was many years ago. We all foreseen the decline of "forums" back in early 2010's , there were many alternatives of what to do , and I strongly believe that you choose the wrong one. I will not repeat what you did or what you could be done differently , I have told that many times , forums as we knew were dead - we all seen that , what was missing was a programming hub of news / forum / interviews .

But here we are ... and forums could have a revive in certain areas. Not in SEO advertisement topics , but invest your time that when someone asks a serious question gets an answer. I have got the answer "because this is what is being told" several times over the last months when I ask for something that Gemini or ChatGPT would give me the default answer and not more reasoning (example my C++ threads). Even if you don't know C++ , learn or ask someone that knows to look at the issue and respond with a concrete answer. Programming is not always true or false , it is what you want to do , how do you want to do it , what are the other factors / people involved , and what resources are you willing to spend to it ... that is something that AI …

Also, in non-computing over the years I have heard comments like "if only I hadn't stopped for coffee I would have missed that accident, or several other variations. The thing is you never know what would have happened if you had made different decisions. Certainly making a different decision may have resulted in things being better. Or they might have been worse, or exactly the same. There's no need to beat yourself up wondering what if.

It's hard for me to imagine that all of the pleasure I've gotten out of Daniweb, the challenges, the insights, the friendships since I joined in 2010, are all dependent on the largesse of just one very talented person. I, for one, appreciate all you have done, particularly considering your current health issues. If you feel unappreciated then perhaps this post will make you feel a little less so.

This is definitely not a targeted attack at anyone. Please take it just as me having a bad day and venting.

I'm kinda tired of people constantly telling me that I'm the reason that DaniWeb traffic has tanked over the years. And if only I had done this differently. Or done that differently. Or listened to members more about this. Or listened to members more about that.

I have always done what I thought was in the best interests of DaniWeb long term. There have been many times over the past twenty years that I've looked back, and hindsight is always 20/20, and thought that maybe if I hadn't done this than that wouldn't have happened, or I did this wrong, or I screwed up here, or I screwed up there, or I did that right after all.

But the thing is, at the end of the day, I'm the only one willing to put my money where my mouth is.

In the current landscape of tech and programming forums, Dream.in.Code went out of business. DevShed went out of business. Cre8asite Forums went out of business. Bytes.com is hanging on by a loose thread.

Yes, we aren't nearly as popular as we were in the 2010s. Heck, we aren't even profitable anymore. But I'm paying for all server costs out of pocket. I'm working on the site every day (that I am able to, given recent health challenges). I've made, on average, 700-1000 code check-ins annually for the past ten …

I did some sample testing, and parsed a thread topic for the dataset. Reducing the footprint from 220kb to 26.5kb. All in 0.43 seconds. It doesn't use any API. Just the patterns I saw in the code. It took another 6 seconds to embed too Chat with RTX.

Then, not deducting for the deleted threads, this could be a lot smaller, and quicker than expected to parse the pages of DaniWeb in full.

Estimated time: 3 days 3 hours 17 minutes. Expecting a maximum size of 18.144 GB, we can estimate a maximum time of 37.63 days to import at 33.90it/sec. A larger sample would give us better numbers here, instead of worst case.

Chat With RTX uses around 9-16 GB of VRAM depending on the query. You have shared memory (your free RAM) that replaces it if you run out of VRAM.

Food for thought...

It indeed seems to be working. The interface is all done in the browser, on your localhost, 127.0.0.1:43905/?__theme=dark, and I stripped it down to just the message box. Just have to gather more data, and it seems good. Took ~50 minutes to get installed. The dataset can be a simple text file with a space between each topic thread.

I have yet to try it or find it's limitations. Trying to free up some space. Those were the minimum requirements, plus 16GB of RAM and ~100GB free space. I also don't know how large a dataset for DaniWeb would be. Will know more later.

Pardon my cluelessness here. A $300 video card can efficiently perform complex AI tasks against DaniWeb’s entire database in real time?

Missed the link to the Python API.

An RTX 30 or 40 series card with 8GB of VRAM. ~$299. There is no support with Wine a user has reported. There was a link to a python api. That was just an example and a thought, but not limited there.

There's creative solutions.

Having only users with an RTX card can use the feature, and processing their own requests. Require a LLM download from DaniWeb.
Remoting and communication routing to other machines that do have Windows. :)

That looks interesting. It’s not relevant to us because we would need an expensive GTX video card, Windows computer, and there’s no API … but it looks intriguing :)

The question was inspired from seeing news and videos on Chat with RTX.

Currently, when you ask a question on DaniWeb, as you type in the title and message, we perform a search against all of our existing content to see if a similar question has already been asked.

However, I do admit that I don't have any experience with ChatGPT nor do I know how to train an AI model. From my understanding, the API costs money, although it does look very reasonably priced, especially for something that would make a dent in our traffic or revenue (currently we don't come anywhere close to paying monthly hosting costs).

I'm curious on people's thoughts of using DaniWeb's content to train an A.I. model, with all the questions that are marked as Solved. It can be an optional feature, like "Ask DaniWeb AI".

When a user asks a question, the DaniWeb AI will auto answer your question if it's been known to be solved already.

It can also be a reference guide to telling you to maybe take a look at a particular thread(s), if it say matches a threashold of 90%+ content.

With over 541k threads and 2.29 million posts, we could make DaniWeb a place to get all your answers.

I can confirm that's not happening. I can confirm they're just signing up and then leaving, and can also confirm they're not bots. There can't be that many people creating sleeper accounts for future spam attacks, so I'm ruling that out too. Plus, it's always been this way.

Spammers? Perhaps auto-deleted?

As you can see here, we get lots of new members signing up every day, but nearly no one posts. This has been true for decades and decades now. Anyone care to hypothesize why all these people sign up if not to contribute? #Lurker

Happy new year 2024!

Enjoy them in good health :)

Two new knees.

Merry Christmas to all.

Happy New Year web tech friends! Hopefully 2024 will be web-tastic!

OK, all updated! Let me know if you spot any issues or things that don't seem to be working the way they're supposed to.

Thank you!

P.S. This is not just a thank you but also a test of the new system in the development environment.

We are in the process of upgrading both the version of Codeigniter PHP framework we are using, as well as the version of PHP we're on. We are just putting some final touches and anticipate going live in the next few days. I'll update this thread when we do. If you spot any bugs or things look wonky, please be sure to let me know.

No clue where that came from. Nothing on DaniWeb is even orange.

Opera updated today and now the graphic is this:

File under "New bugs for old.. New bugs for old."

I am so saddened to hear this that I'm at a loss for words. You're in my thoughts and prayers.

There are targeted treatments (similar to chemo) that help for a few years

This is devastating news. We can only hope that with the rapid progression of modern medicine, more effective treatments will be forthcoming while existing treatments keep the worst at bay. Look at how quickly effective covid-19 vaccines were developed with MRNA technology that was only recently developed. I know that this can only be minimally comforting at best. As always I will keep you in my thoughts and hope for the best.

We may have had our disagreements in the past, but this is one thing I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. With all my heart I wish you the strength to endure what must be endured.
And, who knows, modern medicine is improving exponentially. There’s always hope.
James

It's been two months so I figured I'd update this thread for the last time. TLDR: I'm not going to get better.

I was diagnosed with a form of leukemia that modern medicine currently has no effective treatments for keeping in remission, nor are there any known treatments that the leukemia doesn't learn how to adapt to by mutating even further, and therefore coming back with a vengeance. Bone marrow transplants don't work. Chemo doesn't work. There are targeted treatments (similar to chemo) that help for a few years, but then it always comes back worse.

Essentially it's known as a chronic leukemia, and of all the chronic leukemias, I have a particularly aggressive constellation of mutations and comorbidities. Since it always comes back even stronger, with the time in remission shorter and shorter each time, the recommended treatment is to watch and wait for a few years until it almost kills you, then slam it back with a hammer. Then wait again another few years until it almost kills you, and then slam it back with a different hammer. Until you run out of different hammers.

Ultimately, the number of faulty white blood cells grows exponentially to the point of where it crowds out all of the functioning cells in your bone marrow and blood, and either there's no room left for functioning red blood cells and you die of anemia, or there's no room left for functioning white blood cells and you die of a paper cut.

I’ve …