Posts by Reverend Jim

I'm reminded of a Harley-Davidson ad from years back. It had a picture of a decked out motorcycle with a hot tub, wet bar, and recliner. The caption read, "If you want all the comforts of home, stay there."

And this is my response. Welcome to Daniweb.

Note: in the previous post I meant to say gibberish instead of content.

Even human generated content <edit - gibberish> can be hard to detect, except of course for Jordan Peterson.

Remember what happened with Microsoft's chatbot, TAY? It was shut down after only 16 hours when trolls trained it to spout racist slurs and profanity. OpenAI and similar systems are trained on the cesspool that is the entire internet. Sturgeon's Law says 90% of everything is crap. That may well apply to the internet. I'm surprised it hasn't collapsed under the digital weight of the massive amounts of data uploaded daily just to Youtube.

OpenAI can detect the content thrown at it is nonsensical

So OpenAI doesn't crawl Facebook and Twitter? How about Fox News and related sites? And if it ignores Fox, etc, are we thern going to get Trump screaming about radical liberal bias? How does AI distinguish between conspiracy theory and reality?

Thanks for the extra info although I disagree with the spewing comment. Nepenthes and Iocaine do not spew garbage across the web. They feed garbage to bots that access the protected sites. AI that returns bogus results on the ppther hand ARE spewing garbage across the web. BTW Nepenthes makes it clear that implementation will result in being unindexed by google.

The creator of Nepenthes says that it is ineffective against OpenAI which I take to mean that OpenAI is ignoring robots.txt.

As an example, the person who developed Iocaine found that 94% of the traffic to his site was caused by bots. When you price and design a site for an expected human load, and then you get overwhelmed by bots, you can throw more money at it or you can take action against the bots. In my meagre understanding of all things web related, robots.txt is supposed to specify which pages of a website should be crawled or not crawled by bots. But it seems that the AI bots are ignoring this file. As such, any action taken against them by site owners is, in my mind, justified, including poisoning the data and sending them down rabbit holes.

The increasing energy demands caused by wider adoption of AI is only going to accelerate the already critical global warming crisis. I think that instead of building more powerful AI engines we should instead focus on developing lower energy versions. Alternately, we could arrange with Iceland to build the data centres where they can be run entirely on geothermal energy. I'm sure they wouldn't mind the added revenue, as long as it could be done while preserving their environment.

If you have a few minutes to kill you might want to read the wikipedia entry on Enshitification.

I don't know where the "click here null" came from. I didn't put it there, but I did delete it.

There is an excellent book by Alan Cooper called About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design. The most recent version is the fourth edition in 2014. While looking this up I found another book by him that I'll be reading shortly. The Inmates are Running the Asylum. Why High Tech Products Drive us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity.

Can you please post the contents of requirements.txt?

I don't know if this will make a difference, but when I install python I always put it in

c:\python

and install for all users. I find it much easier when trying to fix problems like this to have all the files in a top level folder rather than buried multiple levels down in appdata...whatever.

I frequent the PyCoder website. They have both free and paid content. The paid content includes tutorials. I recently got an email offering me a seven day free trial of the paid content. When I checked it out I saw that it was a "sign up and get the first week free - cancel any time" offer.

I am very careful with my credit card (never been scammed in 50 years) and I absolutely refuse to use it where I am billed automatically. I wrote back suggesting they change it to a free week, and at the end I would be asked to continue by entering my credit card info. The short version of the polite reply I got was "nuh uh". While I do trust this site, there are too many sites that would continue to bill after cancelling.

Good to have you.

Hello and welcome to Daniweb.

Seems like the same work for the moderators either way. Every morning when I get on I check all the new posts regardless. The only difference is that Dani would have to make changes to implement a holding area.

Hello and welcome to Daniweb.

Greetings and welcome to Daniweb

Hello and welcome to Daniweb

Welcome to Daniweb

It's a five minute walk from my house to the pub, but it's a forty-five minute walk from the pub back to my house.

The difference is staggering.

A salesman is going door to door in the country when he pulls into a farmer's yard and stops as a three-legged pig wanders across the yard in front of him. A moment later the farmer comes out to see what the visitor wants. The salesman says "I'd like to show you our products, but first I have to ask you about that three-legged pig."

The farmer says, "Let me tell you about that great pig. A month ago I was ploughing the north forty when my rear wheels got stuck in the mud. The tractor flipped over and pinned me underneath. I could have died there but that pig ran to the house squealing until my wife came out and saw what happened. That pig saved my life."

"Yeah", says the salesman, "but why does he have three legs?"

"Let me tell you about that great pig", he again starts. "Two weeks ago we all went to bed and my wife left the stove on. The wind blew the curtains over and they caught fire. The house would have burned down with us trapped upstairs except the pig smelled the smoke and squealed until we woke up, just in time to put the fire out. That pig saved all our lives."

The salesman repeats, "but why does he have three legs?"

The farmer replies, "Hey, a great pig like that you don't want to eat all at once."

I took the shell off my racing snail, thinking it would
make him run faster.

If anything, it made him more sluggish.

I walked into the lingerie department of Macy’s and told the sales lady,
“I would like a Southern Baptist bra for my wife, size - 34B.”

With a puzzled look, the sales lady asked, “What kind of bra?”

I repeated, “A Southern Baptist bra. My wife said to tell you that she
wanted a Southern Baptist bra and that you'd know what she wanted.”

“Oh, yes, now I understand,” said the sales lady. “We don’t get as many
requests for them as we used to. Most of our customers lately want the
Catholic bra, the Salvation Army bra, or the Presbyterian bra.”

Confused, and a little flustered, I asked, “So, what are the differences?”

The sales lady responded. “It’s really quite simple. The Catholic bra
supports the masses, the Salvation Army bra lifts the fallen, and the
Presbyterian bra keeps them staunch and upright.”

I pondered on that information for a minute and said, “Hmm. I know
I’ll regret asking, but what does the Southern Baptist bra do?”

“Ah,” she replied, “the Southern Baptist bra makes mountains out of
molehills.

AI models are trained with data from the internet, and increasingly more content is being generated by AI. Couple that with the ancient computing axiom of "garbage in/garbage out" and I have to wonder if we'll end up seeing poorer results from AI as the data pool is increasingly polluted with AI content.

Putting on our traditional Christmas Eve spread with family. Christmas dinner tomorrow. We long ago stopped exchanging presents as we all agreed that agonizing over gift buying just for the sake of giving a gift was pointless. We all know we love each other so just being together, eating, and playing games was sufficient. Most years we don't even put up a tree, although we do decorate to a point.

Back to the gifts - we one of is out shopping (throughout the year) and we see the perfect gift for someone we just buy it and give it then. Getting a gift when you weren't expecting one is awesome. Instead of saying "I had to buy you something so here it is", it says, "I was thinking of you so here is a gift because you are awesome."

Hello, and welcome to Daniweb.

It depends very heavily on:

1. What type af analysis you want to do.
2. Your level of expertise.

Neither of which you specified in your post. Unless you made the post as spam-seeding I suggest you flesh out your question.

I'm not following.

Welcome to Daniweb.

Spamming is getting the same post over and over.

Spamming is getting the same post over and over.

Spamming is getting the same post over and over.

Welcome to Daniweb

I program only desktop/shell apps for Windows and I use Visual Studio Code (free) and python (free) with wxpython (free) as the target GUI. Do you see a pattern here?

Can you give us the actual query in pseudo code with field names? I think we can figure it out by first eliminating the vb.NET syntax. I typically use a SQL management console to get the underlying query before I add in the gory code details.

I can see the point in no/low code solutions. In my 30+ years as a professional programmer I found that my primary job was not to write code. It was to provide solutions. If that could be done with no code, or off the shelf code then so much the better. If writing code was the best, or only solution then that was the route taken.

If it is a test case then I have to wonder for what? It's true that we've seen a great deal of pointless posts and I absolutely do not see the payback in making them. I don't recall how many garbage posts I've seen defining what SEO and back links are. Someone asks for help with (let's say) a router and someone else posts a response defining what a router is. It is frustrating having to wade through this crap. Someone posts an inane question asking for suggestions and shortly after a reply is made with a recommendation, suspiciously from a different user with the same IP address. This is typically treated as spam, and deleted. But it takes time.

Welcome to Daniweb.

Rev., is it your wish that there should be more questions here?

Definitely. I miss the days when there were more programming questions. These days it is all about SEO, AI, and backlinks. And a lot of the questions are the same old spam bait, as are a lot of the answers. Not to mention the useless definitions and AI generated nonsense.

Another tip - it's nice to know where you work but do not use Daniweb for self-promotion.

There are already a number of threads regarding AI. Enter AI into the search bar to find some. Member usmanmalik57 has written a number of articles/tutorials that you may find interesting.

Has anyone had a look at Perplexity?

I'd be happy to answer Python questions provided you give a little more detail. I'm far from an expert but I'll help if I can.

I'm going to offer an obvious, but probably not correct, suggestion. My laptop (ASUS) has a little slider that covers the webcam. It might not be as obvious on your laptop as it is on mine.

It is easier to fool people than to convince then they were fooled.

• Mark Twain

I don't work with PHP although I've done a fair bit of SQL and SQL selects return recordsets that you have to step through to get all of the returned records so I'm thinking you'll need to process the records in a loop. Your comment

/A record was returned, display results

implies that you are expecting only one record. Perhaps try the select in a SQL console to see if you are actually getting back what you expect. What database engine are you using?

Generally it is hard to offer SQL suggestions without seeing the code. Are you closing the connection manually, or are you using a context manager?

Greetings from the other side of the wall. Welcome to Daniweb.

There are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

I tried walking up a hill without a watch, but I had neither the time nor the inclination.