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Comment by euroderf | Hacker News Reader

> Natural language is so ambiguous.

As a former tech comms guy I will say:

Natural language can be bent into arbitrary precision. Write something, then enter a read-rewrite-reread loop as the devil's advocate (this is key) until it stops being ambiguous or having multiple conceivable interpretations.

Yes with English this process can be a pain in the butt, until you get the hang of it.

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The problem is that it's very hard to anticipate all possible edge cases. Programming languages force you to do a lot of that work up front, English doesn't. It's the difference between writing Javascript and writing Typescript, except orders of magnitude worse.

The problem is, what's ambiguous or precise is subjective. Your devil's advocate needs to reflect all of the possible readers, and that isn't possible.

There's a good reason we use jargon in professions, or more constrained and less ambiguous languages for maths/coding

Legalese? It can be both precise and ambiguous, depending on both its construction and the reader's aptitude and comprehension.

This process can be handled by a “turn server”

Was a pain to set up, but you can score the context completion and then if the score is under 98% or something, “ask” clarifying questions of the requesting agent or person or system

Kagi and Perplexity are drawing a blank on "turn server".

I guess we just call them turn servers but technically it’s a “Stateful Dialogue Manager”

You’re never going to make a nontrivial statement in English that you couldn’t find two people who wouldn’t perfectly agree on its meaning. Or probably even a trivial one. Sure, at some point you can say “no, you’re clearly misinterpreting what I’ve said” or “you’re inferring something that wasn’t implied”, but English doesn’t have a formal spec or a reference implementation, so that’s kind of meaningless.

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