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Comment by genxy

6 hours ago

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.

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.

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.