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Comment by antod | Hacker News Reader

That's one interpretation. When referring not to other actions but to a word describing a location it becomes more ambiguous.

eg "pacing the frontier" could also mean they are impatiently or anxiously walking up and down the border.

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This is a more normal English meaning in my opinion — you picture a sentry patrolling a border.

That’s what I thought the original blog post was going to be about, pacing back and forth along the frontier. It’s a much more straightforward parse.

I like to imagine it means pacing around the frontier like a leopard looking for prey.

Y'all don't know about NASCAR and it shows

There is a "pace car" in Formula One too, although the name is informal, the official term is "safety car"...

That's when one is supposed to employ their common sense for semantic disambiguation. Spoken languages are not programming languages. I for one found it easy to parse.

People claiming they don't understand or are confused by relatively simple English is a surprisingly common genre of comments on HN. I wonder what causes the people here to have these feelings towards English; my guess is indeed that many people here judge English as if it were a programming language.

That is certainly one possible explanation, but I think another likely explanation is that once your brain learn programming, especially logic, data structures & algorithms, you just start seeing the ambiguity in non-programmers' writing so much more clearly.

From my dabbling with policy writing and legalese, English kinda _is_ a programming language, but one with ambiguity as a first class principal. Sometimes you would like to say something that seems normal at first blush, but gives you the latitude you need to mean something different at the time it is actually being evaluated in a situation that matters. Weasel words, for instance, serve a purpose even if we eschew them. The idea is that it is deliberately NOT formally declaring the exact meaning of something, nor the fact that it is not doing this. How could you really do that in code without calling attention to the very thing you're trying to obscure?

This is because it is valley jargon and we are all saturated with it. You may not have heard it before, but it is structurally close to similar concepts, eg "frontier model", that you got there without noticing.

It was still shit tier comms for communicating with the whole planet, but yes, for the inner loop, it was succinct and clear.

Valley neuralese

'Pacing' in the intended meaning is not valley jargon, it's almost the opposite in that it comes from athletics/sports.

Valley jargon isn't a nerd vs jock thing these days, and hasn't been for a good while. It's more quasi-intellectual sophistry sprinkled with tech vocabulary.

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