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I keep asking and keep getting responses, and when my questions where unclear or something else was lacking, this was communicated to me in a neutral tone (people who can hear a tone in any written statement are peculiar) and I fixed that. Almost all of my questions have been answered, and I myself have been able to provide an answer too...once or twice. So for me SO is a valuable resource that should not go to waste by allowing fake answers. Just how exactly does that work? Did they hack Stack Exchange to gain mod privileges? And Stack Exchange can't be bothered to check?

I stopped asking or answering questions on SO years ago due to the moderation. Life is too short to bother with the aggravation.

Stack Overflow is and has always been valuable to me and I assume its moderators have a great hand in that. I agree that it can happen that a moderator is harsh sometimes even towards a newcomer to the site. I personally prefer strict moderation. It is wise to just adapt to its style. Delphi developers on SO can be glad to have contributors like David, Remy, Andreas, Rob, Ken, Mason, Uwe, etc on there as well as here.

The first few times I asked questions and then answered questions on SO I did so badly and was told so. So I learnt. I think a lot of people who are criticised on SO would just better off heeding the criticism. As a moderator (not an elected moderator) I can say that SO's policies in recent years to drive quantity of posts to the detriment of quality has been dispiriting. The vast majority of users of SO don't ask. They use posts that are already there. This relies on there being well posed questions with good and accurate answers. Invariably the people complaining are asking poorly posed questions that aren't going to be of use to future visitors. In my view these questions should simply be removed. With a minimum of fuss for mods. Not doing so is the tail wagging the dog. The site should be catering to the majority of its users who are largely voiceless. Instead it caters to a tiny minority who make a lot of noise. I definitely support this strike.

Since December Stack Overflow and other sites in the network have been spammed with AI generated answers which are usually incorrect while sounding plausible. To handle this problem moderators working with other users and Stack Overflow staff enacted the policy that bans all AI generated posts. Such posts are deleted and users can be suspended (usually for a week) for posting them. To get the better picture about the impact, we are talking about thousands of users and even more posts. See: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/temporary-policy-chatgpt-is-banned However, last week the company enacted another policy which still allows moderators to moderate AI generated content, but effectively does not allow them to to use any means necessary for detecting such posts. In other words they can remove posts mostly if user admits post is AI generated. Allowing AI posts on sites will effectively kill the sites and elected moderators have decided to take an action and go on strike, along with other users of Stack Overflow and other sites in the stack Exchange network. Strike is scheduled to start tomorrow on Monday, Jun, 5th. Unofficial announcement of strike on Stack Overflow (there will be another announcement on the main Meta tomorrow) https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/424979/what-has-happened-to-lead-moderators-to-consider-striking If you have Stack Overflow or other Stack Exchange account please support the strike and sign the strike letter at https://openletter.mousetail.nl/ Signing is made by automatic authentication with Stack Exchange network account through browser if you decide to sign. You will have to enter display name you want to be displayed on the letter as some people have different display names on different sites. Thanks!

Yes, but you don't get there by self appointing yourself, either.

From https://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/Alexandria/en/Extending_the_IDE_Using_the_Tools_API The 32-bit IDE is already large address space enabled.

I've never worked with (or even looked at) Indy's LDAP classes before. But just looking at them right now, it appears that they are meant just for parsing/producing LDAP messages, not for receiving/transmitting them over TCP/UDP. So, you would likely need to handle the actual transmission yourself via TIdTCPClient or TIdUDPClient. For example, via TCP, connect a TIdTCPClient to an LDAP server, using an SSLIOHandler to handle SSL/TLS if needed, and then use TIdLDAPV3Encoder to prepare an LDAP message and save it to a TIdTCPStream to transmit it, and then use TIdLDAPV3Decoder with TIdTCPStream to receive messages. I have no idea if that actually works, but worth a try.

That would have been, and still is, illegal

Evidence please. The last time I saw this happen, with one of your posts, the voting and comments were reasonable in my opinion. Instead of deleting the post, you should have improved it as suggested. That's the entire point. That's the design goal. As I said above, the primary use case of SO is to curate high quality questions and answers. The criticism that you experience on your questions is part of the curation mechanism. You just come across as salty that you didn't get an answer to your question. But as mentioned above, SO is not trying to answer your questions. You can just go elsewhere to find the service you need. There are a few reasons. One of them is that there aren't as many questions that haven't already been asked. Perhaps the main reason is the policy changes by corporate SE, some discussion of that here: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389811/moderation-strike-stack-overflow-inc-cannot-consistently-ignore-mistreat-an Mods (elected and community) are just fed up with being unable to curate. I also think it's important to look beyond the delphi tag in SO. Delphi is a mature tech, with not much innovation. If you want to look at how SO works, then you need to look at tags for a broad spectrum of technologies. What I find ironic about the corporate SE policy changes in the past 5 years is that the community largely ignores them. They have a community run site. The vast majority of moderation and curation is done by community mods. Then there are elected mods who are bound by slightly different terms of reference. And corporate do none of the actual work. So they can make whatever policies they want, but it has little effect because the community does what it wants. Corporate told mods to be more permissive of low quality posts. Community doesn't want to do that and so is in constant conflict with corporate. Stack Overflow is worse than it used to be, much worse, in my view. But it's not because mods don't allow low quality posts. It's because mods aren't empowered enough to deal with low quality.

After trying to get anything useful out of chatGPT and wasting a lot of time to fix all the errors in the answer(s) I got, I am all for banning it from SO. I'm not sure it will work though. The dilution of web search results with plausible but wrong content generated by AI has already started and we will see a lot more of it. Of course there was already a lot of garbage on the web to start with, but now it has become much easier (-> cheaper) to produce it.

AI is a big problem. Anyone who tries to limit it's use to intelligent purposes gets my support. I've signed.

In my opinion, the online help is better. I bought the book a few years ago when I was about to transition a system from ADO to FireDAC and I found the book to be completely useless. It covers the basics, but so does the help and the help is up to date. Advanced topics are barely covered at all.

I talked about it, not many peoples says that it is deep and it not cover a many topics, only few