There's a lot of stuff going around about datacenters, so I decided to do a quick tour yesterday of some of the datacenters in the Salt Lake Valley. Some are indeed quite large, but there are a bunch of smaller ones too - and they are not always where you think!

All of these are publicly known, and you can find them (and ones in your own area) at https://www.datacentermap.com/ .

Let's start with a datacenter that I go by all the time! It's across the street from my grocery store in downtown #SLC. It's listed as a colocation facility; datacenters are famously secretive about who their tenants are, but we can guess that it probably hosts servers belonging to nearby businesses, especially ones that want their storage, etc. nearby, but don't want to have to maintain a secure, cooled room. Given the number of banks that have headquarters nearby, I'd bet at least some of them are customers.

This is a fairly little guy, with apparently 16k square feet of floorspace and 1.6MW of power.

In honor of Meta's latest announcement, a thread on 175 years of 3D failure.

Let's first go all the way back to 1851 with the Brewster Stereoscope. No less a person than Queen Victoria was impressed, kicking off a fad that quickly sold over 250,000 units. Turns out it was not the future of photography.

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Our cats are in the paper: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/sep/05/the-cat-mayoral-race-meet-11-runners-and-riders-in-the-uss-most-furious-and-furriest-election

The duo: Clementine and Nix
Two-year-old siblings Clementine and Nix are running for mayor and vice-mayor respectively. Their owner Lily, 11, says the pair’s goals are lengthy: “Catnip will be planted along the bike path”, “If a cat is napping they must not be disturbed” and “No one is allowed to pet a cat without the cat’s permission” are just some of the rules the pair would like to implement, should they be elected.

Reminder that if you like a website you should probably click on the "contact" link and tell the author you like their website

🐰 Oh I bet they get lots of email every day saying their website is cool, I'd just annoy them
🦝 Nope. I have a donations button and I'm not exaggerating when I say it gets hit a hundred times more often than my email address. People will literally transfer ten dollars from their bank account before saying "Hey cool website btw."

🐀 Wouldn't it be weird though
🦝 My learned friend, why do you think there's a "Contact" page on the website in the first place, it's so that you can say "Hey cool website btw."

🐴 This site hasn't been updated in ages, I bet they're not even interested anymore
🦝 Or maybe they stopped updating it because they had ten thousand people reading it every day but it felt empty and unfulfilling like shouting into a hole because only two of them ever emailed to say "Hey cool website btw."

🐹 But what do I even say
🦝 You say "Hey cool website btw."

I have played a little bit with OpenAI's new iteration of #GPT, GPT-o1, which performs an initial reasoning step before running the LLM. It is certainly a more capable tool than previous iterations, though still struggling with the most advanced research mathematical tasks.

Here are some concrete experiments (with a prototype version of the model that I was granted access to). In https://chatgpt.com/share/2ecd7b73-3607-46b3-b855-b29003333b87 I repeated an experiment from https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/109948249160170335 in which I asked GPT to answer a vaguely worded mathematical query which could be solved by identifying a suitable theorem (Cramer's theorem) from the literature. Previously, GPT was able to mention some relevant concepts but the details were hallucinated nonsense. This time around, Cramer's theorem was identified and a perfectly satisfactory answer was given. (1/3)