LaGuardia. Nnedi Okorafor; Tana Ford; James Devlin. 2019. LaGuardia (2019) by Nnedi Okorafor. Image from nnedi.com
Winner of the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Graphic Novel, and the 2020 Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album - Reprint.
Aliens exist (first landed in Nigeria); human-alien in the world. Main character: Future, a Nigerian-American doctor. Future sneaks in LetMeLive, an alien, into America to escape a genocide (largely imperceptible to humans) on LetMeLive’s kind....
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs Capitalism is meant to eliminate bullshit jobs, yet layoffs tend to fall on people making, moving, fixing and maintaining things, but not on the salaried paper pushers that effectively work 15 hours a week.
From a political standpoint, a happy productive population with free time on their hands is mortal to the ruling class. Moreover, work is considered a moral value in itself....
The paper is written in a period when NLP practitioners are producing bigger (# of parameters; size of training data) language models (LMs), and pushing the top scores on benchmarks.
Environmental Risks Large LMs consume a lot of resources, e.g. training a single BERT base model on GPUs was estimated to use as much energy as a trans-American flight.
Marginalized communities are doubly punished. They are least likely to benefit from LMs, e....
Criticism/Defense Of Billionaire Philanthropy Taxes will probably not go to the same causes, e.g. reforming the bail system, grassroot efforts for migrants, etc.
Admittedly, these are things that the government should be doing, but it seems that the government doesn’t do enough. Furthermore, some of these issues so politicized, e.g. immigrants, that government support can be fickle.
Foundations are more effective than governments as they do their due diligence, e....
Quiz It’s hard to give pessimistic answers when the book’s title says “Things Are Better Than You Think”…
In all low-income countries across the world today, how many girls finish primary school?
🔲 A: 20 percent
❌ B: 40 percent
✅ C: 60 percent
There has been lots of efforts to get girls to finish primary school, e.g. providing sanitary towels. Surely, they must be at \( \ge 40% \) completion rates....