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Do you actually see construction workers being replaced? We need more stuff built than we have people or time. We have spent a century improving process and tools and if we 10 years from now could build 3 times as much with the same people we would find a use for them all.
They sure are stretching to find a way to make this have something to do with being pro-America.
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Do you actually see construction workers being replaced? We need more stuff built than we have people or time. We have spent a century improving process and tools and if we 10 years from now could build 3 times as much with the same people we would find a use for them all.
Quality is irrelvant these days. If AI does it cheaper, you're done.
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Somebody needs to coin a new term for the scattershot zero-thought AI griping that is pervasive in online comments these days. Meatslop? Obviously it's going to be more productive for a manufacturer to do a years-long curing test on 100 likely candidates instead of 100 random mixes. They obviously already screen candidates through traditional methods, but if this AI technique improves accuracy, all the better.
The current strategy of the AI hype machine is to exhaust people's reserves of attention by presenting a never-ending stream of hard-to-verify "positive" claims. It's Gish Gallop done on the Internet scale with a never-ending parade of tech influencers, proxy "journalists" and low-value accounts. The whole strategy aims for saturation and demoralized acceptance. It's no surprise that people readjust their immediate r…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The current strategy of the AI hype machine is to exhaust people's reserves of attention by presenting a never-ending stream of hard-to-verify "positive" claims. It's Gish Gallop done on the Internet scale with a never-ending parade of tech influencers, proxy "journalists" and low-value accounts. The whole strategy aims for saturation and demoralized acceptance. It's no surprise that people readjust their immediate r…
Written like someone who hasn't used AI since the great paradigm shift of December 2025.
Hand-held devices for testing concrete properties would be more useful. Most concrete problems come from a bad mix - too much water, not enough cement, etc. Concrete testing usually involves cutting a core out of the poured slab and sending it to a lab. Something where you stick a probe in the mix and can reject it before pouring would help. Here are some on-site concrete testers.[1] They're heavy and a pain to use.…
I wanted to mention that Concrete is far more complex and regional than folks might imagine. The quality of gravel and sand, local impurities - these all contribute massively. It's probably best to think of it like a wine's terroir - except, unlike a bottle of wine, it's prohibitively expensive to ship both the components and the finalized mixture to different areas. If a region's limestone has a massive clay impurity then it may simply be unsuitable for large structures or require extensive filtering to the point of being uneconomical.
It's important to be aware of just how much the local geological mix can impact the viability of building with concrete because while theoretically we could use perfect concrete for every project - at that point most projects would simply be too expensive to consider undertaking. There is a very large field of engineering around establishing the realism required in settling for what you've got for the price you can afford in. It can absolutely mean that the materials required to build a high rise in Philly might be priced starkly differently from the same structure planned in Milan even with adjustments for the labor impact on pricing.
Awesome. People take concrete for granted. Even at small scales (e.g. your patio) with formulas provided on the cement bag, concrete can go wrong (crazing, scaling, cracks). There's a lot of unappreciated craft in the work, not only in the composition and mixing, which is what this research seems dedicated to, but also in the placing, leveling, curing, finishing.
^ This. Civil Engineering is hard, and concrete is a perfect example of how something as "simple" as concrete in reality requires significant interdisciplinary collaboration with domain experts in ChemE, MatSE, Physics, Applied Math, and CS. Some of the most robust HPC applications I saw back when I was an undergrad were done by Civil and Structural Engineers in the ONG space.