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Another one is "surface", like in "across all product surfaces". I've been in the field for 15 years and have never heard that particular usage before.
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That is absolutely a normal thing to say
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Mine is obsessed with "planes". Data plane, control plane, management plane. Everything is a plane :)
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Well, they are just a manifold, so it's fair for them to view every conceptual thing in geometry.
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Mine loves "slices". Everything is a slice.
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I hate when it starts talking about code in terms of planes. I have no idea what it means. I guess it's better than talking about heaps of spaghetti with noodles connecting to each other, but that would be much closer to what it actually writes.
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Landing the plane.
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See also, surface.
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I’ve heard (and used) the term “API surface” a lot…
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I do UI design/dev and say "surface up" a lot. Although I don't use the term, in this area people call different container depths as surfaces (base, card, overlay as surface).
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Attack surface is another one I use.
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Yes, I've always heard it used in this context. I really believe the other use is because someone misheard "service", and it stuck.
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In my brief and abortive foray into education, I discovered that they friggin' love to use "surface" as a verb. As in: This activity surfaces an understanding of the turboencabulation principle for learners. Or somesuch. It's been a while, happily.

Unless you're a submarine, "surface" is not a verb.

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Idk. I've always used that verb with clients, usually when I notice either malfeasance or hidden behavior. Like: "I was checking our code for where a half cent of sales tax might be accidentally rounded down, and it surfaced something weird going on at franchise #77 in New Jersey..."
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Sure it is.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/surface#dictionar...

> : to come into public view : show up

> letters that have recently surfaced

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I find this usage less objectionable than the education jargon. It suggests that we all have a latent understanding of the turboencabulation principle just waiting for the right activity to force air into its ballast tanks and make it pop above the waves.

That said, I don't love this non-education jargon usage for its passive-voiced-ness. The letters didn't "surface" of their own accord. Somebody found them, decided that they were noteworthy, and made the choice to bring them into the public view.

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Congratulation! You are a submarine!
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It's pretty common to read "attack surface" in security.
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Yeah, I imagine this is a big part of it.
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Recently read some LLM generated output that mentioned the “center of gravity” within a codebase.

Also have read the term “seam” dozens of times by now, when previously I saw it maybe once or twice over years. Very abstract term.

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That one probably comes from maths, where surfaces show up all the time in geometric interpretations of things. I've been involved in more mathsy parts of engineering and I've heard it a lot.
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About a decade ago I worked with a product manager who used that phrasing constantly, so it kind of stuck with me.
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Surface it to say, that's my favorite lobe-earing eggcorn, for all intensive purposes!
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"ledger" for me – used extremely rarely pre-LLM and Claude just loves it
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It's a pretty common word if you've worked in anything that vaguely resembles an accountancy system. Also, anything crypto related will often use that word (the distributed ledger, etc)
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That's the case for most of these LLM tropes or word choices. They are all common lexicon in their respective fields, but the LLM doesn't make that distinction and uses them everywhere making them standout.

No one would bat an eye about "ledger" appearing at a high frequency in content about accounting, but it starts to look odd if "ledger" is showing up in other contexts.

"Load bearing" is from engineering; "Substrate" is primarily from biology & biochem, etc.

I don't know if this is true, but part of me suspects the labs want to make the models appear smarter so they reinforce this word choice in the weights, assigning some words a higher intelligence weight or something. "I will show you a list of options" vs. "I will surface a ledger of your options" and it prefers the later to sound smart to the human reader.

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> No one would bat an eye about "ledger" appearing at a high frequency in content about accounting, but it starts to look odd if "ledger" is showing up in other contexts.

The reason why I chose that specific term to push on is that practically every SaaS has a ledger _somewhere_ in its stack to keep track of customer payments. I'll give you load bearing and substrate, but ledger IMO should be quite common. Certainly a career devoted to say compiler internals or some specific scientific product could avoid it, but I'd imagine a sizable majority of HN users have worked on some system that accepts online payments for services, necessitating some contact with something likely referred to as a ledger.

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It sounds like you're saying labs intentionally doing it, but it's far more likely the labs or post trainers are unintentionally doing it by upvoting answers that seem smarter than those with more common language.

Of course this presents another conundrum, people that are smart typically have a vastly larger lexicon then those that are not. Humans typically have a lot more social clues on when to use those words and when not to, but it doesn't always work. I loved reading science/biology books as a kid far beyond my ages reading level. Actually using those words around other kids got me called a nerd.

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The first week I encountered this "substrate" I asked it to justify the usage and IIRC it claimed the word is used in some infra/systems lexicons... I wonder...
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A coworker started spamming this word in ~April while working on system design/architecture.
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"reconciling" is the most annoying one, in my opinion.
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The one I've noticed a ton recently with Sonnet 5 is that it loves the phrase "different not in degree, but in kind." It drags that one out constantly now, at least once a day. Gemini and GPT don't at all.
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I actually found it somewhat useful conceptually, but yes, it definitely does overuse it lol
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