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After a few years of this work, through her acquaintance with young staffers involved in the audit’s administration, the mother met her husband. She preferred not to go into detail about the husband. He was young and attractive and they fell in love, though the mother would admit now that she had b…

A woman peered intently at her. This turned out to be Laci. To meet people in real life after meeting them on social media was always going to be slightly disappointing. Earl the Girl, a witty and fierce commenter online, was entirely ordinary in person. What did Sam expect? Sam hated her own shall…

A lesser-known outcome of the study is that it was seized on by critics of psychoanalysis as evidence that most (human) therapists are similarly offering unthinking, mechanical responses that are mistaken for something meaningful — a complaint that lives on in the term psychobabble, coined to descr…

GPT-3’s most consistent limitation is “world-modeling errors.” Because it has no sensory access to the world and no programmed understanding of spatial relationships or the laws of physics, it sometimes makes mistakes no human would, like failing to correctly guess that a toaster is heavier than a …

“Like, I marry a wife, and they take her, and then give me back the legs of the wife,” Ali Ayyad joked, and we all laughed. “Did they offer you money for their use of the hotel?” I asked. Ayyad said, “You agree to rent to them, it’s like this: They say, we will give you a ring as payment. But in or…