I had a dude in a conversation non-ironically use "load-bearing."
replyI 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.
replyWe weren't talking about "seeing a man about a horse barn" we were talking about software.
replyLet'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.
replyI 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.
replyI use load-bearing all the time, mostly in jokes about something
replyThis highly depends on the context of the conversation. Were you by any chance talking about walls?
replyyeah? it’s not that weird of a term
replyIt’s weird when someone starts using terminology that is heavily over-indexed by LLMs out of the blue.
replyHuh, I've heard this term all the time at work and used it myself since long before LLMs
replySame
replyThat's a scary thought, llm's training on llm output. People trained by default of ubiquity to think and read llm output produce their own llm-esque writing.
replySeems stifling. We'll need someway to reward human creativity and out-of-bounds thinking before our greatest corpus of human intellect is a bounded by whenever and whatever was trained on.
Writing and later the printing press have already considerably stifled human expressiveness. Language used to be noch more fragmented and diverse before mass media (or the Bible in every household). In my grandmother’s time you would have difficulty understanding people from three villages down the road.
replyI'm not sure enabling people three villages apart to communicate with each other counts as "stifling human expressiveness"
replyI’m not sure that having people read LLM output does that either.
replyI don't understand this mindset, why is it people on here think humans have some kind of magical ability machines don't or can't? Five years ago I would never have predicted this kind of human chauvinism here. It's some kind of weird romanticism almost.
replyMaybe because everything LLM-written is written in the same style with no creativity, diversity, or idiosyncrasies? If all humans suddenly started writing in a single, bland, corporate style, that would be a tragedy, LLMs or not.
replyBecause right now humans do have a magical ability machines don't. LLMs are a fuzzy reflection of what they've seen hundreds of times already, they don't have originality or intelligence (yet).
replyAs a much more immediate practical matter, LLMs trained on LLM output makes them worse overall, they degrade from doing that. So the more LLM-prodoced content fills the web, the less useful it is as a data source for future LLM training. In addition to just being increasingly boring and vapid.
So is it that humans are inherently creative, machines could never do what we do? Or is it that humans will only replicate our training data, and so we have to ensure that machines don't bound our training data? Or are you going meta and gently pointing out the absurdity? (I hope it's this one!)
replyHuman creativity is not only not being rewarded, but people are increasingly talking like consuming too few tokens is something that's actively used against them.
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