Years ago, when I worked at Stripe (which had a somewhat unique and inventive lexicon) it was a common term. “Is this jank load-bearing?” someone might ask.
replyI added a specific rule to disallow saying “load bearing”. So Claude is now saying “load handling”
replyBe sure to avoid asking it to ignore the elephant
replyBut have we found the seams yet though?
replyIf the seams bear too much load, they rip. Whereas pants, they fall down.
replyI'll be honest with you: this is why we need to take a belt-and-suspenders approach.
That's not just an observation, it's an insight. Words are doing the real work.
replyThis just makes me angry!
replyI really wonder if they can fix it. Fable 5.1 claims to speak humanese, but we'll see.
I tend to think this wierd limited vocabulary/style they use is an unwanted side effect of all the the RL training, perhaps also of being trained on their own synthetic content over multiple training cycles.
Yea I don't get "load bearing" that much but "seams"... So sick of it.
replyKids In The Hall had a sketch about overuse of a word or phrase [1]. This is the world that Claude is building for us.
replyIt doesn't have to ruin it for you, but people are going to assume comments with it are AI generated.
replyI can you can always use an em-dash instead of the hyphen for extra LLM cred: "load—bearing" :)
replyWe need a Samwise "Bear the load!" meme
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Wait, why would it ruin it?
replyBecause it says it more often than kids say "six seven".
replyIt’s a frequently used metaphor in LLM responses.
replyOften for trivial things that LLM is proud that it has noticed but bear no load whatsoever.
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