Comment by chaboud

2 days ago

I have heard so many of my co-workers use "load-bearing" over the last couple of months. It's truly comical. Maybe this is a way that we can make "fetch" happen.

7 comments

chaboud

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jghn  2 days ago

Why is that funny. I've had that as part of my professional lexicon for over 20 years

  • chaboud  1 day ago

    I've renovated houses (and I have a bad habit of buying 100 year old hacked up chaos-boxes - my current house was moved from one hill in San Francisco to another 80 years ago, so it's a puzzle box), so yes, I've been using "load-bearing" as a shorthand for decades, reduced to be less jargon-y by adopting "structurally essential" for increasingly international team composition, where English is a second or third language.

    However, I've been hearing "load-bearing" at least two orders of magnitude more often over the last few months, particularly after uncorking Claude Code for the team.

    I don't think it's a dead give-away of AI usage, and I don't think AI usage is a problem. I just think we can introduce phrases into common use by having them be used by common tools. So let's train the models on obscure/archaic terms and see what happens. Heck, we can just prompt it...

  • backwardsponcho  2 days ago

    The thing is that some people start to adopt certain "mannerisms" from their LLM of choice. It's not funny in and by itself, but it tends to be unnecessarily pompous words/expressions as well. Relevant: https://www.vice.com/en/article/youre-not-imagining-it-peopl...

    • jghn  2 days ago

      I've seen this too and I get it. However, we should not assume that certain phrases are AI tells. And that was my point. There are all kinds of things I see described here as "AI slop" that are things I just do, and have done, for decades.

      1 reply →

inglor_cz  2 days ago

I made the decision to always talk to AI in English, in order to reduce the otherwise inevitable seep-in of AI terminology into my actual speaking and writing patterns. Czech and English are far apart enough that formulations like "load-bearing" don't cross the barrier easily.