439
Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying
(www.thenerve.news)
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
439 points (97.2% liked)
Technology
86879 readers
4650 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I was talking about roof sheathing with the latest chat gpt.
It was confident the joists should go above the sheathing.
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?
Mostly tradies are learning by hands-on apprenticeship with a master. All that discussion is not on the internet.