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Comment by genxy | Hacker News Reader

I had a dude in a conversation non-ironically use "load-bearing."

I could only follow up with, "that is a genuine insight."

Not a single person visibly flinched in pain.

Careful, you might have been talking to a Real Engineer. Perhaps even a structural variant that use this phrase pretty much daily.

We weren't talking about "seeing a man about a horse barn" we were talking about software.

I use load-bearing all the time, mostly in jokes about something

This highly depends on the context of the conversation. Were you by any chance talking about walls?

Let's double-click on that. It's important to keep top of mind that using disruptive words and patterns in conversation isn't always driven by LLMs — reasoning from first principles tells us that problematic usages like this existed beforehand. One of my load-bearing career learnings is that people used this shape of language as a shibboleth long before game-changing tools like ChatGPT started slopping so much of what people read. It's a performant way of categorizing people into a very specific tech culture in-group based on vibes.

I don't think it's performative or about vibes. Everyone subconsciously adopts phrases and in general ways of talking from people around them. May it be from friends, neighbors or coworkers.

Not incompatible with my satirical post (I wrote "performant," a notorious tech neologism, not performative). Whether subconsciously or not people 100000% use language to communicate and determine others' social tribe membership.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRVExJZKIT8

yeah? it’s not that weird of a term

It’s weird when someone starts using terminology that is heavily over-indexed by LLMs out of the blue.

Huh, I've heard this term all the time at work and used it myself since long before LLMs

Same

Then it's not weird because it's not out of the blue.

Is it weird? Pretty much everyone's writing and speech is influenced to some degree by what they've read and heard in conversation. For better or for worse, it's only getting harder to avoid exposure to LLM generated prose.

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