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It’s been a few years since large language models became widely available, so I’m curious about what the situation looks like for you when it comes to LabVIEW projects. Are you seeing a decline in interest? Are clients moving toward other programming languages? And a question for those of you who have had the opportunity to develop software using AI agents: after seeing what they are capable of, do you still feel motivated to develop software in LabVIEW? I have to admit that, from my perspective, AI agents have made incredible progress over the past two years. They can now create, test, and even deploy genuinely high-quality code. In my opinion, the LabVIEW market will start shrinking month by month, until eventually what remains will mostly be legacy systems that still need to be maintained.

That's such a Linux thing. "Ask it the way I want or you 4 pages of me berating you about how to ask a question". Asking erudite questions is simply an efficiency. Don't care. Never did. Overrated. There are symposiums and meetups for that. The forums are just a way to organise it. I don't see any downsides here. Got anything else?

Being on-topic is easy for an LLM to achieve. Being useful is harder, and that definitely hasn't been achieved in this case. So it's just time-wasting slop. Probably. Same purpose(s) as all other spambots, just using new tools: Either they will edit their posts later to insert spam links, or they're just vandalizing for the sake of it. That would indeed be putting AI to much better use. This part has harmful side-effects. Software community forums everywhere are shrivelling up, and I bet that one big reason is because people now talk to bots more, and talk to each other less. Sure, this makes answers more readily accessible, but the costs are: The loss of motivation to learn how to ask questions well. The loss of opportunities to share our knowledge with others directly. The loss of human networking in general. These activities have intrinsic social value beyond just acquiring information.

AI bot's seem fairly obvious to me, ATM. They don't really understand comma's and lists. On a different note. I've thought Lavag would be a good place for it's own AI bot. It could link questions to previous resolved answers. Automatically identify cross-posts. Guard against spam bots etc. Lavag.org is a huge resource that could be targeted domain training. Known meat-sacks could upvote and downvote the AI bot's response to train it. Too many downvotes, it disappears from the responses so as to not pollute with stupid responses. I think lavag could utilise a simple AI as a first interaction support. The expertise of a years worth of LabVIEW (experienced intern). A users question is usually a much better search criteria than the site search where you need to know the keywords.

I'm a bit surprised that there is such a strong activity in recent days on this forum. On one side we should be happy but on the other, they all share similar traits: - They are all from new accounts created within the last ~24 hours or so with names that look quite made up - They all tend to be one hit or two hit wonders, which is still questionable - Their answer is kind of on topic but also at the same time rather generic in some ways - They all claim to use LabVIEW 2020 and working with LabVIEW since 2015 Are we witnessing a new wave of AI generated spam posts? What could be the purpose?

The abrupt close is a pretty rough finish for an online exam, a simple results page would save a lot of confusion. Without answer review, that score is mostly just a gate pass, not much of a learning tool.

Forum software probably has a stale embed whitelist, which is a bit ironic for an XKCD about dependencies. Plain links still do the job, meh.

Searchability is the bit Discord never quite nails, even with channels. A forum thread is way less exciting in the moment but still useful six months later.

Seems like the security check is flaky rather than the password rules. Weird that posting in the thread nudged it into working, but at least the account got through.

Windows 11 seems to expose every little bit of old UI behavior eventually. Link hover is one of those things that can look fine until someone actually tries to click through.

Nice to see the v2 version preserved here. Alt for horizontal feels a lot less awkward than retraining Shift muscle memory, and the middle-button pan bit is a handy extra.

Cross-posting itself is fine, but the missing link is what wastes everyone's time. One thread can easily end up with the actual fix while the other just goes quiet.

Ambiguous wording without any review turns it into more of a guess-the-test exercise. The missing completion screen is such an avoidable bit of friction too.

The no-review part makes the score feel pretty hollow, especially with questions that can be read two ways. A proper completion screen would have saved some needless inbox hunting too.

Getting only a pass or fail after an essay-heavy exam is pretty useless, especially when the retake lock sticks around that long. The score on the recert at least shows the fundamentals are clearly there.

CLAD is a separate certification exam, the free fundamentals quiz is more of a warm-up than the actual certificate.

Real-time is nice until you need to find that one answer from three weeks ago and it's buried under 400 messages of banter lol. Forums age better imo, Discord is where the traffic is these days though.

ngl undisclosed cross-posts are the worst, you sink time into an answer that's already sitting on the ni forum

I should also point out it is forum etiquette to state and link if a question is a cross-post on Ni.com. https://forums.ni.com/t5/Industrial-Communications/NI-9145-with-NI-9476-9375-in-TwinCAT/td-p/4485626

IIRC. There is a safe-mode that will set outputs to a safe value (presumably 0v for sourcing 24v) when active. However. I think the status LED of the controller should be blinking red to signify that. Apart from that. If a variable can be set but it's not being replicated in the slave device (the NI device is a slave, right?) then it points to a mismatch in the PDO mapping. I do not know how you would tell that from the XML files you supplied but you may know more about their construction than I.

This problem is not unique to mailing lists. Forums, StackOverflow, and official technical support channels still encounter them (although the modern channels do have more tools to deal with them).

Mailing lists were great for maintainers, horrendous for users. Waiting a week to see if your question was answered and trawling through the archives in case you missed a response. One's issue getting engulfed in spam of the same simple issues posted by different people over and over again. I'm glad the days of IRC, Mailing Lists and, hopefully, Discord, are way behind us. Even SQLite eventually dumped the mailing list and support has greatly improved because of it.

I never did the IRC thing, but started with mailing lists as the main support channel. I have quite fond memories of the Info-LabVIEW mailing list started by Tom Coradeschi and currently maintained by Scott Hannahs for posterity. Back when you had to actually connect a modem through your main telephone line in order to go onto the big, friendly (back then at least) internet, mailing lists were very handy as one could respond to the mails offline and then connect to the internet provider to send off all the mails in one batch.

Yeah, the real-time aspect of it does necessarily mean a tradeoff in other places. The LabVIEW Discord is quite well laid out though with sensible channels so we can keep discussion targeted. Personally I value the real-time aspect higher than the formal structure of a traditional forum so I (and many others these days) are gravitating to that kind of technology. It's definitely not perfect though!

IRC? Wow there is a blast from the past. Thank you for digging up some good old memories of many well spent nights spent at my university computer lab arguing with other randos on the internet about alien activity and other tin foil hat stuff 🤣 I did not realise that is where all the LabVIEW developers had gone...