Archive for the ‘Software Development’ Category
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/17
Een paar quotes van Laurens Verhagen’s column [Wayback/Archive] ChatGPT is een soort waarzegger, die net iets vaker de waarheid vertelt | de Volkskrant:
‘Mensen vrezen dat computers te slim worden en de wereld zullen overnemen, maar het echte probleem is dat ze te dom zijn en de wereld al hebben overgenomen.’ Deze vaak aangehaalde uitspraak van computerwetenschapper Pedro Domingos is al zo’n tien jaar oud, maar heeft nog niets aan actualiteit ingeboet.
…
ChatGPT in de basis is: een slimme woordvoorspeller.
…
Nog erger is misschien wel dat er bij Harper’s Bazaar blijkbaar niemand meer is die nog een boek leest. Ze zijn daar te druk met lijstjes maken aan de hand van chatbots, maar vooral met zichzelf in rap tempo overbodig te maken.
Dat laatste geldt natuurlijk voor iedereen die zwaar leunt op generative AI zonder veel moeite te steken in te verifiëren dat wat de woord- en beeldvoorspellers produceren klopt. Die moeite wordt steeds groter juist door de vervuiling van trainingsdata doordat AI trainingsmodellen niet kunnen onderscheiden of hun bron nu door mensen of door AI wordt gemaakt.
De trainingspool van menselijke data (feit of fictie – waaronder uiteraard satire, dat kunnen de modellen ook niet onderscheiden) – al dan niet uit materiaal dat zonder toestemming is opgenomen – is overigens inmiddels doodgebloed:
“Het had waar kunnen zijn” had van ChatGPT kunnen komen. Als die term faschineert, lees dan vooral [Wayback/Archive] Van Aarsvink tot Zeebreker – O.C. Hooymeijer.
Links uit de quotes van de column:
--jeroen
Posted in AI and ML; Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, ChatGPT, Development, Generative AI, GPT-3, LLM, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/15
I have a lot of old Power Point slide decks that I want to reuse in current presentations. By now however, I learned prepare all my presentation stuff in either Markdown or reStructuredText: far easier to publish and put under version control.
After searching, I could only find one tool that is still maintained doing a decent job doing a PowerPoint to Markdown conversion: [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – ssine/pptx2md: a pptx to markdown converter. The tools which works great, in big part of PowerPoint content being highly structured with styles like title, subtitle and various heading levels and content types.
The thing it does not document is the prerequisites, which are these:
- a
venv (which, despite having used Python quite often, but not proficient in it, still makes me nervous: one forgotten step and you pip everything in your global environment).This links helps me every time [Wayback/Archive] Install packages in a virtual environment using pip and venv – Python Packaging User Guide. From it, I created this little table:
Steps for setting up and using a Python virtual environment
| Step |
*n*x/MacOS |
Windows |
Comment |
| 1. |
python3 -m venv .venv |
py -m venv .venv |
Only needed once |
| 2. |
source .venv/bin/activate |
.venv\Scripts\activate |
Switch to virtual environment |
| 3. |
which python |
where python |
Check if python is used from the virtual environment (should result in
.venv/bin/python on *n*x/MacOS or
.venv\Scripts\python on Windows) |
| 4. |
which pip |
where pip |
Check if pip is used from the virtual environment (should result in
.venv/bin/pip on *n*x/MacOS or
.venv\Scripts\pip on Windows) |
| 5. |
./.venv/bin/pptx2md</precode
|
.venv\bin\pptx2md |
Force a module which didn’t add itself to the path when installed via pip |
| 6. |
deactivate |
deactivate |
Leave the virtual environment |
- missed during
pip install pptx2md (in order I discovered them):
Future enhancements
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Posted in Development, Lightweight markup language, MarkDown, Office, Power Point, Power User, Python, Scripting, Software Development, venv | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/14
For my link archive: below a series of articles my Raymond Chen on “The AArch64 processor (aka arm64)” in the order of appearance from a few years back and still very relevant today.
It is part of a few more series on processors that (were) supported by Windows. A good reference to find which version supported which processor architecture is the tables in List of Microsoft Windows versions – Wikipedia.
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Posted in AArch64/arm64, ARM, Assembly Language, Development, History, MIPS R4000, PowerPC, Software Development, The Old New Thing, Windows Development, x64, x86 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/11
Weekend, so catching up on CES 2025 news.
If you are at CES, be sure to go visit the VideoLAN booth in Eureka Park to witness what I think is likely the most important CES 2025 AI news:
[Wayback/Archive] VideoLAN on X: “VLC automatic subtitles generation and translation based on local and open source AI models running on your machine working offline, and supporting numerous languages! Demo can be found on our #CES2025 booth in Eureka Park.”
In my opinion, though a remarkable statistic, their 6-billion downloads gimmick is just a teaser for the way more important news what this AI LLM is:
- free / open-source
- off-line
- subtitles plus translations
- 100 languages
Whisper already ran circles around the YouTube automatic subtitle generator, and their automatic translations are far below par (see video below), so having new contender is great!
VideoLAN tremendously raises the bar for all commercial vendors, and at the same time makes:
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Posted in AI and ML; Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Development, LLM, Media, Software Development, Video | Tagged: CES2025 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/09
Besides the Delphi Praxis servers (the [Wayback/Archive] German one has existed for what seems eternity, the [Wayback/Archive] English one took over the Google Plus Delphi group – see Google is sunsetting Google+ by August 2019; DelphiPraxis might start English forums and have RSS – and de-facto the dead Embarcadero forums as the old newsgroup servers went dead, and the new ones weren’t known for their high up-time [Wayback/Archive] community.embarcadero.com’s forums – General Help – Delphi-PRAXiS [en]), nowadays – with the shortened attention span of many people – Discord has a few Delphi servers as well:
They are chat based, and suffer from messages and threads disappearing, just like the Delphi newsgroups and forums suffered from, and archiving content can be difficult or impossible (not just because of the Wayback Machine being down).
Queries:
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Posted in Chat, Delphi, Development, Discord, SocialMedia, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/08
Directly after a new Windows installation, I want to have my cloned git repository of batch files in the PATH persistently so that it gets searched after rebooting or opening a new console window.
At that moment, there is not much of a 1024 PATH character limitation, but be aware about that limit if you try this yourself.
This is my add-current-directory-to-path-at-end.persistent-and-limit-to-1024-characters.bat:
:: https://serverfault.com/questions/664180/can-i-permanently-add-to-path-in-windows-using-batch
:: https://superuser.com/questions/812754/how-to-recover-from-path-being-truncated-to-1024-characters-by-setx
:: global environment
setx PATH "%PATH%;%CD%"
:: local process
:: https://superuser.com/questions/975605/add-current-directory-to-path
set PATH=%PATH%;%CD%
I execute it from within the cloned git directory.
Oh: you need to double-quote the SETX parameters, otherwise you get an error message: “ERROR: Invalid syntax. Default option is not allowed more than '2' time(s).“.
More links than the above ones from the batch file, especially on the 1024 character limitation:
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Posted in Batch-Files, Development, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/08
(All below statements were run elevated as Administrator)
I had arp -d fail with any parameter combination on one of my systems always throwing the error The ARP entry deletion failed: The parameter is incorrect..
Luckily I found out that this did clear the ARP cache correctly:
netsh interface ip delete arpcache
I found that via [Wayback/Archive] “The ARP entry deletion failed: The parameter is incorrect.” – Recherche Google:
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Posted in Batch-Files, Development, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows 7, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 