By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 03/08/2026Our "sentence completion" trick doesn't emerge from a rough, automatically generated mental table of the statistical likelihood that word A will follow word B. We also *understand why* those combinations appear in each other's speech and writing. 17/ 1571
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 03/08/2026"Understanding" and "statistical extrapolation" *can* often lead to the same place, but when they *don't*, "understanding" provides a way forward, while "extrapolation" founders. 18/ 1798
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 03/08/2026Both work fine, but only one fails gracefully. The two tricks only *appear* the same, but they are fundamentally different. 19/ 2491