David Gleich

  • Replaced a 2nd gen nest with an ecobee… I forgot how awesome the nest was! I’m sad to bid it fairwell. Got this before the Google acquisition.

  • Has anyone made a cut of home alone 2 without trump?

  • Great article by Anna Seigal! www.siam.org/publicati…

  • A silly party trick for lectures.

    Here’s a quote from a SIAM News article about Peter Lax…

    Colleagues remember Peter’s unique style during mathematical discussions. “He was famous for napping while listening to a lecture,” Strauss noted. “But at the end, he would nevertheless often come up with an incisive comment or question.” This apparent contradiction sometimes epitomized Peter’s deep understanding of a topic before the lecture began.

    People used to say the same thing about Gene Golub and I observed it myself. Having been in academia a while now, it isn’t ‘deep understanding’ necessarily. It’s that you’ve seen it before (which correlates with deep understanding). So much academic research is simpleminded and derivative and formulaic and doesn’t address the deep problems. So much of it just doesn’t work. So much is repeated. So much can be inferred from past work by the same people. The limitations are often already there and have been pointed out before.

  • Can we put @gruber@mastodon.social in charge of IT please? “It’s the job of IT to serve the needs of the organization, not the organization’s job to limit itself to what makes IT easiest.” True words. Strangely hard to find. People with vision to make it happen get promoted out of IT, I fear.

  • I spent 4 hours on the phone with Apple and Verizon trying to fix an Apple Watch for a child. What is wrong with these companies??? It still isn’t fixed.

  • This is incredible. See www.nature.com/articles/… and the associated data osf.io/naut4/fil… It’s a full viral workup for each student in 4 classrooms for 6 weeks. 87 viral infections among 64 students.

  • Cooked way too much food for Thanksgiving… exactly as planned :)

  • See Gruber’s take. Here’s the issue, LLMs are going to be big. A MacPro & Extreme Chip and 1.5 TB of memory at $20k would be a killer deal compared with the upcoming generation of $100k GPUs. Much easier to push power/memory in big box. Apple missing the boat here again.

  • I was using the gpt-5-nano model to extract a network of connections from the Epstein documents release. It works, but I got so depressed and upset at the contents of the connections I stopped. Can share prompts/codes if people care.

  • I can’t be the only one who gets confused when people “like” a text message. Does that mean you agree? Does that mean yes? Then combined with the “thumbs up” emoji, it gets even more confusing.

  • Posted without comment. www.economist.com/united-st… (gift article for first 5 clicks!)

  • Installing Minecraft for a child account on a pc is a torture device Microsoft should be proud of.

  • Programming without coding.

    LLMs are going to bring back the historical distinction between coding, which is the mechanical translation of ideas into the machine, compared with programming, which is establishing the algorithmic, logic, and data flows. I’ve been “programming” a tool without writing a single line of code but rather just expressing the ideas so I can feed it into an LLM to get a mechanically generated tool. This is awesome. Caught a major bug in the process already and spent zero-time doing the coding step. We now have english as the ultimate high-level language.

  • CVS bills insurance $471 for a Covid shot for the kids.

  • Two fun articles in Science! Integrated low-temperature PVC and polyolefin upgrading: ideas for recycling PVC plastic (albeit with lots of challenges remaining) 10.1126/science.adr7403: a new communication network in the brain based on nanotubes in addition to the normal synapses.

  • I want to rip my eyes out when I see “apple stupidity” (there is no intelligence) summarize things with passive voice.

  • A picture is worth 1000 words! fediscience.org/@ZLabe/11…

  • Imagine a world where you don’t have to call up the Internet company every year to say… give me the lower rate again please?

  • Anyone else not enjoying iOS 26?

  • I just cannot believe the microelectronics soldering skill on these iphone storage replacement videos… www.youtube.com/watch

  • I love it when Claude vibecodes away doing the hard stuff…

        for i, pos in enumerate(positions):
        # Skip some positions for efficiency if too many
        if len(positions) > 50000 and i % (len(positions) // 50000) != 0:
            continue

  • First year none of the family texted about the new iPhones. I think Apple has a problem.

  • huh …

    arstechnica.com/space/202…

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