Readit News"It's not X -- it's Y." or "This isn't just X -- It's actually Y."
Usually with an emdash there as well for the separation. As I said it's very plausibly becoming more common among people not using LLM-assisted writing too, just from seeing the stylistic approach used more often and having it spread naturally, but I do have been seeing it spread with dramatic speed over the last couple years. I even catch myself using other phrasing more often from reading it more. I think it's just part of how language spreads, honestly.
The "it's not ... it's" phrasing though definitely stands out as a bit odd when repeated.
On another note though:
"This isn't paranoia—it's pattern recognition honed by lived experience."
I can't stop seeing the LLM verbiage everywhere I look. I feel like once you recognize the repeated syntax that got RLHF'd into all of these models you never stop seeing it. Maybe everyone is learning those patterns from reading AI-generated language now too.
And then d-day comes and it's over. The impetus is gone. And every single time, I try to hang on to it. I give myself new projects and fake deadlines. I force myself to get up early and stay up late, but the moment that magic is gone, those things become... work. And like I said, there are things I would rather do than work.
I think a lot of Elon's success stems from his mastery of this "lock in" phenomenon. He is (or at least was) able to induce it in himself to drive himself harder than normal people do. He is able to induce the same state in his workforce as by setting bold and inspiring goals and setting absurd deadlines.
This is not a secret, btw. Nobody goes to SpaceX without understanding that they're signing up to work double the hours for way less than double the pay. For many, this sounds like a nightmare. If you're a young single guy looking to lock the fuck in, to take on huge responsibilities and grow in the company of some of the smartest, hardest working people on earth, it sounds positively amazing.
tl;dr: It's a feature, not a bug.
Interestingly (or maybe not?), the things that rise to this level have a much higher activation threshold the older I get.
The older kids get, the less this works— older kids have real commitments, things like school that have consequences to the parents if they are missed. They have sports and other activities to attend that are on a schedule and may have cost money to enroll in. They need to get enough sleep to be functional. They are increasingly exposed to situations that are more complicated to untangle if/when they go sour.
And older kids are smart enough to walk away from a "validation" discussion if they detect that the end goal is just to get them to do the thing— they will simply issue ultimatums: "I don't want to talk about my feelings on this, I've told you straight up I'm just not doing it, end of story."
So it's not that parents are "focusing only on control", it's that particularly as kids get older parents need to strike a balance between good faith listening and validating, while still ultimately retaining the last word and being able to be an authority when it matters. I think some gentle parenting acolytes miss this reality and believe that the toddler scenarios cleanly extrapolate up through teen years, and that everything can be managed through a pure consensus model— and believing that is how you end up capitulating to your kid over and over again, ultimately letting them run wild.
This is pretty much the key in my experience.
To add a finer point: good faith listening is validating. Validating doesn't mean telling them it's ok, or giving in, doing what they want, etc.
It's the difference between "yes I understand you're feeling A, B, C, but we're doing it anyway because X" and "I don't care, stop it, be quiet and do it".
It's not replacing dumpster-diving, nor would I consider myself to be part of dumpster-diving subculture. I don't talk about it to my friends. It's just cheap food.
For instance, the cost for a pair of redundant symmetric gigabit fiber is in the thousands a month and may require tens of thousands of construction costs. These quickly add up, and the upfront costs can quickly reach six figures.