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Comment by venturecruelty | Hacker News Reader

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It stands for "Chicago transit authority". I don't know about you, but search engines have become useless since last year, I'm talking downright unusable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CTA

The Chicago Transit Authority has existed for only about 70 years despite transit in Chicago being around for 125+ years.

Legislation the governor signed last week all but guarantees that it won’t see its hundredth birthday except possibly as a sticker on the side of the busses and trains. Within 5 years the agency will only have the duty to plan routes within the city limits, and maybe do some of the driver hiring.

I googled it and it was defined as a marketing term, so I figured that can’t be the right one in a comment about freedom of speech.

To be exact, it takes more time than 0.3s to type it, even for a fast typer.

I don't know why people can't not exaggerate things? Doing it is certainly making their message less reliable, not more

It's nice for writing to be sufficiently self-contained for the reader to get the basic meaning without research. How does it affect your sense of perspicacity when a sentence forces you to consult a dictionary just to keep up?

I'm still not sure why this is the author's problem. If a piece of writing is too challenging, you are welcome to disengage from it, and not demand more from the author.

You are absolutely right that communication need not be effective.

A search engine can tell you what some people mean by the acronym. It can't tell you what this particular author meant. It's like asking an LLM where you left your car keys, or asking Google what your spouse wants for dinner.

I don't see why that's the author's responsibility to manage this for you.

Because... that's how communication works? Managing the understanding that readers will take away from what you've written is a pretty central definition of the author's job.

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