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Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying
(www.thenerve.news)
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
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Technology
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I was talking about roof sheathing with the latest chat gpt.
It was confident the joists should go above the sheathing.
You might want a 2nd opinion, did you ask Grok?
I work in construction and so far I must admit that I have no idea what the hype is about.
But I have decades of experience, meaning I don't know shit about anything BUT I know how to quickly find usefull information in the codes or in pertinents books.
If I were younger I might have fallen into the trap. If so I would probably be in jail by now, because in my tests I've seen LLM be dangerously wrong.
LLMs seem to be pretty bad at home improvement sort of questions in my experience. I suspect they don’t have a team of carpenters they use to RL the models, like they do for software engineers, etc
Software is easier because you can basically 'inspect the house' and the 'home inspector' via software.
Harder to do that with a house. Also a lot of different rules based on locality.
Reminder it doesn't know anything.
It is just mimicking text it has been programmed for.
For it to be "good" at mimicking home improvement, it's source needed to be full of home improvement talk. The best carpenters, plumbers, whatever aren't on reddit, or wherever talking shop. They're working, or making OSHA jokes at the bar.
How do people work? Are there ones born knowing how to use a hacksaw?