Posts by Reverend Jim

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.

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.

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.

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."

I'm not following.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Has anyone had a look at Perplexity?

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.

An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first orders a beer, the second orders half a beer, the third orders a quarter of a beer and so on. After the 7th order the bartender pours 2 beers and says, "you fellas out to know your limits."

Why do computer programmers confuse Halloween with Christmas?

Because Oct 31 = Dec 25

I'd tell you a UDP joke but you might not get it.

With me? No. She and her husband were much older. But she obviously did with my parents because I recall them mentioning that she had had problems for years after.

A friend of the family (friend of my parents) was one of the people who got dosed in the MKULTRA program.

From CodeProject:

Shortly the site will be switched into read-only mode. Our hope with this change is to allow another party to maintain the site as an archive of great code, articles and technical advice. We are working hard to make that happen and while in no way guaranteed, things look very promising so far. However for the foreseeable future, and possibly permanently, new postings will be disabled, for articles, for forums, for QuickAnswers and the other portions of the site.

My hope is that it remains online, even if only in read-only mode. There is a lot of good stuff there.

I'm sad to see codeproject go. I was a daily visitor there.

Welcome to Daniweb. Please take a few moments to read the Daniweb Posting Rules and Suggestions For Posting Questions.

hwnd is the window handle returned when you created the window with CreateWindow or CreateWindow Ex. Or you can get the handle from an existing window via the title with

hWnd = FindWindow(NULL, "Window Title");

Your statement does not set a form location. It just creates a point structure. To set a form position in C++ you can do

SetWindowPos(hwnd, NULL, x, y, 0, 0, SWP_NOSIZE | SWP_NOZORDER);

Doing just dandy, thanks. Welcome to Daniweb.

What do you mean by incomplete? Does it compile? Does it give you output? How does it differ from what you expect?

If you went to the doctor because of a pain you would at least tell him things like where it is, how intense it is, how long it lasts, etc.

We will offer help but we won't write your code for you. Please revies the community rules/guidelines which state, Do provide evidence of having done some work yourself

That may be. It's also true that there is no evidence to back up its claims. As James Randi used to say, no amount of belief establishes a fact.

Astrology is BS. The only reasons to consult an astrologist are:

1. You want bad advice
2. You have too much money and you want to throw some away

If #2, consider donating to an animal shelter instead.

What help are you looking for? Do you need help picking a design tool? A framework? What is your current skill set?

I have never had any success dealing with a chatbot so the first thing I type is "speak to an agent".

Never mind the robots. They've been promising me flying cars since 1950. Where is my flying car?

Forty-two.

Pinky swear?

Jimmy Carr once did a short gag on something similar:

Here's how to tell if your house is haunted. It isn't. Ghosts aren't real.

You can't. Psychic readings are nonsense.

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