Moving into a luxury apartment complex comes with expectations of tranquility and harmony, but for Redditor u/ComedianTraining7414, this idyllic vision was shattered when her upstairs neighbors, a family with three energetic children, started disrupting her peace with constant noise. Despite repeated attempts to maintain civility when confronting them, the woman’s sleepless nights took a toll on her. Seeking solace, she began reporting the “menacing” behavior to the apartment management, unaware that this would eventually lead to a $4,000 fine. Now, after learning that it’s too much for her neighbors to pay, she turned to Reddit’s ‘Am I the Asshole?’ community, asking its members to help her make sense of the ordeal. Image credits: Liza Summer (not the actual photo) Image...
Some people don’t have the ability to create mental images, a condition called aphantasia, but can still experience visual imagery in their dreams. (Shutterstock)When asked to close their eyes and imagine a sunset, most people can bring to mind an image of the sun setting on the horizon. Some people may experience more vivid details, such as vibrant colours, while others may produce a mental image that is blurry or lacks detail. But recent research has found that some people don’t experience mental imagery at all. This lack of mental imagery is called aphantasia. People with aphantasia are often surprised when they learn others see mental images in their minds. Many people with aphantasia have said they assumed others were...
shutterstock The artificial intelligence (AI) pioneer Geoffrey Hinton recently resigned from Google, warning of the dangers of the technology “becoming more intelligent than us”. His fear is that AI will one day succeed in “manipulating people to do what it wants”. There are reasons we should be concerned about AI. But we frequently treat or talk about AIs as if they are human. Stopping this, and realising what they actually are, could help us maintain a fruitful relationship with the technology. In a recent essay, the US psychologist Gary Marcus advised us to stop treating AI models like people. By AI models, he means large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Bard, which are now being used by millions of...
There’s a moment late in Emma Straub’s novel This Time Tomorrow that I hesitate to even allude to, because reading it, and realizing what she’s been doing, is one of those experiences that suddenly casts the world into slightly sharper focus. The book offers a revelation about a defining emotion of modern life, and it surprised even Straub herself. “What’s so funny about being a novelist is how stupid one is, really,” she told me last month over Zoom. She knew that the novel was about grief and about pre-grief, the strange purgatory of knowing that someone you love is going to die, when life feels indefinitely suspended. What she didn’t know was what the completed work would ultimately expose:...
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing me that Ben Affleck hadn’t been working since 2021. Yet, Affleck’s fifth directorial effort Air, which has a brand-recognition (and by that, I mean EGOT winner Violas Davis) synopsis that can lure in some of Boston’s biggest factions, quietly swooped into theaters and created decent buzz. And as of the week of its release, I find out that Affleck is the lead role in Robert Rodriguez’s Hypnotic, an inspired offspring of Christopher Nolan’s fifth-dimensional mysteries where spatial laws are flexible and black suits and gunpower are a universal mandate. “Is this what you do when you say you’re going to work all day?” Jennifer Lopez asks Affleck as he’s working at...
