J’ai l’impression d’entendre de plus en plus souvent dire que le climat est avant tout un problème d’innovation. Les émissions continuent d’augmenter, les objectifs se dérobent, mais on essaye de peupler notre imaginaire collectif de machines à capturer le carbone, d’intelligences artificielles capables d’optimiser la transition, voire de techniques de modification du climat. Cette confiance n’a rien d’absurde en elle-même, et il y a fort à parier que les technologies aideront. Mais elle devient politiquement suspecte lorsqu’elle sert avant tout à repousser des questions …

This post was initially written in French, La technologie nous sauvera-t-elle ? I feel as though I keep hearing, more and more often, that climate change is above all a problem of innovation. Emissions continue to rise, targets keep slipping out of reach, yet we fill our collective imagination with carbon-capture machines, artificial intelligences supposedly able to optimize the transition, and even technologies designed to alter the climate itself. There is nothing absurd about such confidence in itself, and technology will very likely help. … <a href=“https://freakonometrics.hypotheses …

I was reading Merchants of Doubt and came across this passage: “Seitz, like his mentor Eugene Wigner (a Hungarian refugee) was ardently anti-Communist. (Wigner in later years lent his support to Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, eventually feeling that … Continue reading → …

The five boroughs of New York City can be informally or formally carved up into many different pieces, depending on what it is that you’re doing. As part of an ongoing project, I recently made an R package, nycmaps, that lets you draw maps of som…

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《自然生活的数学原理》这本在线电子书是我18年做博后时启动的个人项目，包含了生活中对衣食住行的思考汇总，部分在博客里出现过，最近重写成完全体了。读前提醒，相比科研，生活规律性很差，主观成分很高。虽然有些事我们可以量化，但也许并不需要量化。有些事我们觉得有无限可能，但限制无处不在。我的个人经验很有可能是一种画地为牢，莫要沉浸其中。

本书最大的参考意义是提醒你关注生活并学会好好生活，这在人工智能时代很重要。如果你为了从里面找有实用价值的信息，那很遗憾，大语言模型是更好的选择。但如果只想图一乐，那倒可以来审视下这个理工思维指导下的作品，作者本人亦不认同但很难逃离这种思考方式。

这个时间放出来 …