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by boltzmann64 145 days ago
Non-native speaker here. Is the phrasing of the blog title awkward or am I the only one? Seems like they are using "10x" as a verb and my brain kept parsing "10x" as a adjective to developer, reading "10x developer" which is a already established industry lingo.
3 comments
csande17 145 days ago
Native speaker here: yeah, it's awkward.

It's possible to use a multiplier like "10x" or "5x" as a verb like that, but the object has to be the thing being increased, like "productivity" or "sales". And it's usually best to put a word like "the" or "your" in there to avoid confusing it with the case where you're using 10x as an adjective (like in "10x developer" or "10x growth"). So there are a lot of articles and books and stuff with titles like "how to 10x your wealth" and that's fine, but "AI can 10x developers" both sounds kind of wrong and implies that the AI is hiring more developers onto your team.

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netsharc 145 days ago
No, even "How to 10x your wealth" is grammatical abuse. "How to double" or "quadruple" is acceptable. "To 10x" is dumb techbro way of saying "to multiply by 10".

I hate hate hate this trend of grammatical fuckery of using "some-number x" as verbs.

It's another dumb shit techbros say, like pinging people...

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bmacho 145 days ago
It definitely misleads the reader for the reasons you mentioned.

These types of sentences are called garden-path sentences. You can read some typical examples here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence#Examples

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ramblerman 145 days ago
for what it's worth, it didn't seem odd to me. I guess the missing article and phrase indicate it's a verb.

"So AI can ... developers" is begging for a verb, there is no room for an adjective there.

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