Posts by rproffitt

Thus just in: AI-Powered Visual Web Crawler.

Seems like those old school web crawlers may be in for a fight!

You may think I have a dim view about cryptocurrencies. You'd be right. Here's a couple recent writings about this:

FTX operated behind a veneer of legitimacy Mr. Bankman-Fried created ..

• https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2022-219

In 2022, the crypto market experienced over $3.8 billion in losses through various attacks. This was a record-breaking year for crypto hackers. A second monumental contributing factor to the collapse of crypto has been the bankruptcy of numerous crypto companies, causing public investors to lose trust in the market.Feb 15, 2023

• https://www.bressler.com/publication-1310

Somewhere in this discussion it was written "businesses worldwide accept these play money" so I checked out where I shop a lot and found Amazon, Trader Joes, my local restaurants and in fact no where I checked would take bitcoin or any digital coin as payment.

However in my circles there are a few that sell mining rigs. They won't take this coin as payment either. The biggest mining system is delivered in a shipping container. I haven't heard much from them over the past year as the miner market crashed.

Tell more. Long ago I used Tesseract to extract text from images but it did require good image quality. Today the online image to text systems appear to do better. So the answer is yes.

OK, how about a Ponzi scheme?

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin work the same way as Ponzi schemes, according to critics like Roubini and Quinn, with new investors paying out early investors because no actual cash flows are being produced.

• https://fortune.com/2023/01/09/crypto-bubble-ponzi-scheme-fraud-history-shocking-financial-historian-says/

Have to agree that cryptocurrencies have shown themselves to be scams. In my circles, no one owns or uses them.

I want to reiterate that web3isgoinggreat com is a fine place to see recent exploits, scams and more.

Given your postings so far, I see you do little but ask questions that I would google or try on ChatGPT. Do you need to chat about how to google?

Google and other search engines suffer from GIGO (garbage in garbage out). Until a few years ago folk mostly put up mid to great content on the web but SEO meant that many thought that spamming the web with garbage was a way to get rank or hits. So much garbage on the web so the old way of indexing the web is fairly borken.

GPT is not search. Have you thought about that?

Q. how I can use ChatGPT 3 or 4 for free, unlimited with unrestricted use ?
A. For now you need to host it yourself. Example at https://github.com/tatsu-lab/stanford_alpaca

There's others but I can't guess what your application is from what you've told so far except you want to have an AI for free. There are others out there but let's start with something that can run on good sized PCs.

As to coding, I think I'd rather use Tabnine.

Truth be told I've never found any with "unlimited & unmetered bandwidths." Maybe one or the other but not both. If they did, my bet is it would be very expensive.

First let me write I wouldn't do this. Often folk want to quiet the fan and the notebook will run hotter. That's not good for its lifespan. Others want to make it run cooler but that's usually someone that doesn't like the usual notebook temperatures. The makers let the temps go up on purpose and the fan kicks in when needed.

All that aside, how about this from Reddit?

Update: Looks like Notebook Fan Control (NbFC) would work if I have time to configure it.

• https://www.reddit.com/r/Asustuf/comments/m5sq1k/xpost_tuf_a15_thermals_and_fan_control/

For Jim, my view is that the answer is fuzzy since "it depends" on what the host system is. My last example was the CPU that took in Java bytecode.

For Dani, long ago I wrote a lot of code that would simulate an electronic design. We were looking at what variance the design had so the code used the Monte Carlo method. Two runs could give you two different answers. To achieve the same result each time you could seed the random number generator with the same seed but that wasn't the goal of said simulation. But as you noted: "same input." As time passed we changed from our own RNG to some API which changed the results slightly.

The code posted has extraneous blank lines and you didn't write where in the 200+ lines you felt the issue was.

Here, you get to work at the issue so you learn how to fix your code. For now you should be setting breakpoints so you can examine variables as your code runs. Are you aware of this feature?

Let me tip my hand here about my old work with FPGAs. We built our replacement processor with such and one model (Xilinx) let us replace the microcode at boot time. So it would be able to directly execute bytecode from say, Java.

Mind you this is rather old news so here's an example: https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/embedded-revolution/article/21764771/java-core-permits-direct-java-bytecode-execution

So Jim, are we living in a computer simulation?

This can be a rabbit hole since today's CPUs can have microcode updates to execute the bytecode directly.

This could be called translation or did the CPU learn the new language?

Very few have Visual Basic 6 from 1998 installed and working. So let's go about this another way.

Post the passage of code that is problematic and tell what it is doing as well as what it should do. I wrote far too much in VB6 but we moved on about a decade ago.

Lost my longer reply as I'm on a new keyboard but on most machines today, assembler code is again expanded to microcode so it's like byte code. As you recall, long ago I was on a team to design and (edited) replace a soon to be discontinued 8 bit processor. We opted to use a microcode system to speed up the design process. No code ever ran without a little microcode interpreter work. This is how most CPUs work today.

But hey, this is like a rabbit hole, isn't it?

Some languages are "both." Python, for example, can be executed as either a compiled program or as an interpreted language in interactive mode.

I use all what folk and you have mentioned except Siri. I revealed why I had to forget about Apple and their products before but that's not important right now (nod to Leslie Nelson.)

It seems odd to read that Siri don't actually work. I've seen it do fine but as with any of these tools, none or 100% of what folk expect.

As to the 2021 data cutoff for GPT 3.5, that's not a big deal because it's not a search engine as defined by Google. It's something else entirely and quite useful. At some point I'll have a short explanation of what GPT 3.5 and 4.0 is but the one thing it is not is a search engine.

Dave Bowman said "I'm already there." - Space Odyssey: 2010

Search for "How to use ChatGPT with Siri" and you can try it out. It might not be GPT 4 yet which is sort of a big deal.

Write more detail. Right now with AI/ML and the new tools you can leap forward on that app you always wanted to write but didn't have the time.

Also, odd choice for those tags. The last Android app I worked on didn't use javascript, php or python.

For now, don't use AI such as ChatGPT to create articles, blogs and such. Google claims that it seeks differentiation (debatable) since it would not work if Google presented a list of links that all were rehashed AI output. Somewhere out there is Google's stance on AI/ML or in Dani's words "spun content." If you want to work SEO, don't copy/paste AI/ML output.

But I would use AI/ML to do my own research on topics like SEO. Someone calls out ChatGPT as dated information but we now can get an updated GPT 4.0 with more recent datasets.

There's a book titled Evolve Or Die. A chapter title from the book is "Our Civilization Is a Pyramid Scheme." As it is, Google is a pyramid scheme and as some point those at the bottom will have to evolve. AI looks to be a real threat to Google's pyramids.

Taking that to the next level, those that slave doing SEO to build Google's pyramids are well, slaves.

Some think the AI detectors will be the answer but so far I'm seeing way too many false positives. Example: The US Constitution is flagged as AI generated content. Google is working hard on AI content detection but as it stands today, it's terrible.

Google also is trying to counter OpenAI's GPT with Google Bard. However Bard shows how far behind GPT Google is today. In February 2023 the market reacted to a very poor demonstation of Bard. Microsoft and OpenAI soared while …

As to the fake frames, that's already here. It's also inside our cameras. We are quickly moving away from where the "picture" is only what the pixels in the sensor reported. Apple, Samsung and others now run the image through various algorithms (which do include AI/ML) so the old statement "a picture never lies" is laid waste. The pictures you find on many smartphones are no longer the raw data they used to be.

As to fake videos, that's been shown for years and as the compute/AI/ML hardware improved it's now an everyday occurrence you may see fake videos. From my friend David: "My boss got deep-fake scammed yesterday. He received a video call from his boss (redacted). It was (redacted)'s face, speaking in (redacted)'s voice saying: "I'm on site in (redacted) and need the server credentials. Please text them to me here. I gotta go. Thanks." Aaron happened to know that (redacted) wouldn't have the slightest idea what to do with server credentials, so it didn't work. But it sure could have."

You already mentioned DLSS and such so I take it you don't need to discuss Tensor cores in GPUs and the relationship to AI/ML.

Take some time to research the AI/ML as we know it today. The usual one (won't write its name because it could result in a deletion) runs on hardware such as multiple GPUs with 48 or more Gigabytes of RAM.

So no, very few will have that hardware to host the AI on.

I don't see anything wrong yet. You need to add what data source you need.
Tutorial at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/data-tools/create-and-configure-datasets-in-visual-studio?view=vs-2022

Example prior example that mentions doevents() for C++ https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6203689/visual-studio-c-how-to-get-the-form-not-freezing-while-calling-a-time-consumin

The issue is one I've seen over and over on MFC and other apps. There are many priors so look at a few more to see if you can find one you feel applies. For my app I had to add a doevents() call to let Windows process the update.

Since there are newer versions that are available for free (Community versions) you should move up to what can be supported.

No reason to learn VB6 today as, well, do we need to list all the reasons why?

PS. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Studio#:~:text=The%20most%20basic%20edition%20of,-source%20and%20individual%20developers". to find that free version.

Sorry but no. We removed VB6 and such years ago. There's no longer a way for me to load up the IDE.

Since this old system is now decades out of date, why are you creating something new with this?

Good timing. Here's a note from someone in my circle:

My boss uses a ChatGPT-alternative to generate complex database
queries. He points it at the database server, gives it credentials, and
then asks it in plain language to come up with a complex SQL query. It
figures out the database (even with weirdly-named fields) and instantly
generates complex queries with multiple joins and orders.

It didn't take anyone's job, it's the new way of how we work today. Unless you thought this should have be done by a human.

Try https://www.daniweb.com/programming/software-development/threads/164321/setwindowtext-doesn-t-seem-to-work and then for other prior discussions google "setwindowtext doesn't update". The complaint looks to be a recurring one with many prior discussions and solutions.

My view is more sales is better than few sales. I have a much longer story about the Olive Oil company my mother was HR at long ago.

They wanted an ecommerce site, I proposed going with godaddy so they would be up in running in a week or two. Another consultant said "Oh no, you need a full custom site."

4 years later their site had never come up. Over 100 thousand invested (much more but they didn't want to say.) Finally the owner had enough, called another consultant that said "godaddy" and the site was up and running about 2 weeks later. Today they are also on Amazon with their own site just a few percent of total sales.

In the USA, that would be Amazon.

The people I know went with it and put their products up on Amazon.

I'd like to know what frameworks your company uses. Also, bonus points if you tell why.

Given there is no Web 3.0, then any answer will be like Schrödinger's cat. Both dead and alive, right and wrong.

In the meantime, the scams and grifts continue by those claiming their sites are Web 3.0.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3 agrees there is no Web 3.0. As such why did anyone consider the topic question to have any validity?

However, what Web 3.0 is being marketed as, continues to be a venue or idea that shows more promise for scams and thefts than any real step forward for the web.

For dwellfox, there is no Web 3.0 so there is no future for SEO as of today.

Dani, if you wish me to give a daily post about Web 3.0 scams, exploits and thefts, I can do that. Is that required here?

1. While I only have worked PHP in passing, you already hit the #1 accelerator known (caching.)
2. The most common time consuming area I found which you usually see used by new coders is "Select *". There are long discussions about this but the source is easy to find why folk still do this. It's in almost every SQL 101 class and textbook.
3. You may have already done this but to keep all the ideas in this list, consider a PHP Accelerator. Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PHP_accelerators
4. Remove extra code. Sometimes we put in code to debug PHP but forget to remove it later.
5. See if foreach is faster than a for loop.
6. And if you can use a profiler, do that to find out where the code is spending the most time.

Much of the above applies to other languages so here's one of my favorite speedups I used over the decades. When do a repeating calculation, consider a lookup table for the answers. Be aware this is from my work in embedded computing where we don't have a FPU most of the time so looking up a SIN(x) value rather than computing it can be many times faster.

Web3 is Going Just Great
...and is definitely not an enormous grift that's pouring lighter fluid on our already smoldering planet.

• Molly White

Today's story is "$8.9 million stolen from SafeMoon" which was due to "a code upgrade introduced a bug. The attacker was able to take advantage of the bug to artificially inflate the price of the SafeMoon token, then sell it to steal the erroneous "profit"."

Web3 stories like this are almost daily so for me, Web3 is mostly about the grift.

Be sure to look up some web site such as "Web 3.0 is Going Great" to find the cesspool of scams and ripoffs.

No one I know that is legit is buying into this.

Dell wrote "NOTE: 5K x 3K displays require systems equipped with DUAL Thunderbolt 2.0 (DisplayPort 1.2 capable) ports to operate the 5K x 3K display at optimal resolution." And there's more out there about this.

Sorry Dani, these are settings I know to try but make no claim I know why these problems exist at all. My background in digital video recorders did have me work with protected video links (that's HDMI for most) and we found so many implementations that were supposed to be backwards compatible (they lied.) So you know to try the setting and see if it clears it up.

However, once in a while a client won't accept that this is a possible cure. Your only choice is to send them back to the makers.

Over in the Apple forums, found this: "I set the LG monitor from dp1.4 to dp1.2. all problem solved."
This is in some menu in the LG.

Always a nod to distrowatch to see what the current favs are. On my desk I keep bootable USBs with Ubuntu, Puppy and TAILS.

I don't run Linux often but have worked with it since Slackware 0.11 (don't drop that box of 3.5 inch floppies!)

Tell me a little more. I find that so many electronics develop issues after a few years.

Just yesterday Mary had me looking at her rig (laptop with 27 inch display) which the monitor was off. Turns out the power pack was unplugged. A little rearrangement and cord management cleared that up. While I was there the speakers were buzzing. Moved the USB connection to the nifty new USB 3.0 hub and that cleared up.

Recently a cranky display at the office was tracked down to the display cable (HDMI.) The user was adamant it wasn't the cable because the cable worked on other displays. Changed cables, all better.

Finally I'm reading the LG 5K has to be on recent Apple computers, I can't write the entire list but 2017 this, 2019 that, along with current versions of Apple's OS.

Given the number of times I find a cable issue, new display cables are always brought along on the service call.

In my circles, it's been very positive. It's been great to see advances in this field. For years I didn't think I'd see this any time soon and then boom!

You'll likely to find those that embrace and those that complain that it's not always correct. Heck, people aren't always correct either.

Time to debug (examine variables) as I wrote in your discussion at https://www.daniweb.com/programming/threads/539964/currently-doing-car-rental-service-as-a-project

It's time to debug. In the function calculate_cost, add code to print what variables are used to find where the trouble is.

I can't tell what dev system you use but on some you set a break on the line in question so you can see what the variables are. But not everyone has a dev system so you print.

I won't debug that but it looks like you are acting on an item before it exists. Example would be line 56. Does submit_button exist when this line is executed?

Where are these lines 17 and 56?

In the first code given line 6 and 9 might be referring to non-existent button. See if the button exists and is the name which you used.

As I've done a bit of Android programming I must refer you to the online documentation. Look up the following elements: Activities, Fragments, Views, Layouts, Intents, Services, Broadcast Receivers and Content Providers.

There might be more but this was a list from the docs.

As per https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/visual-basic/misc/bc30574 you may have to check all the data types on line 40. Or try it with option strict off.