I track a number of online blogs and connect relevant ones to things I am working on. You can grab my blogroll OPML here, or just browse it below. If you have your own blog that I've missed, do let me know!
How Agents Show Up: What Muse and other agents reveal when they use WhenIsBins Tom Loosemore — WhenIsBins.com tells you when your bins are collected. I built it partly to show Public Digital‘s clients that LLMs change how you make services…
size.fyi Alastair Tse — Have you ever wondered how big the iPhone Duo is compared to the iPhone mini? I have. And so I used size.fyi to show me. I didn't build this, but it i…ANPackage Management RFCs Andrew Nesbitt — Which package management specs exist and where do they live?
Announcing the Centre for Cryptographic Trust Infrastructure (CCTI) Martin Kleppmann — Today I am happy to announce a very exciting new research project that I’ve been working towards for years! We are establishing the Centre for Crypt…
Modular Explicits in OCaml Patrick Ferris — Abstraction, in OCaml, often refers to hiding a particular type's implementation using a signature. For example: module S : sig type t val add : t -> …OCaml Roundup: September 2026 Patrick Ferris — Plenty of OCaml work in September, including a few releases of libraries I maintain: rtree got a new release. ppx_deriving_yamlx saw its first release…
Building and testing a config management orchestrator for Windows Jane Street — The following is part of a series of posts about 2026 summer intern projects—for more, see “What the interns have wrought, special jumbo 2026 edit…Kudanshita Tozai Line Alastair Tse — Encountered two mosaics in kudanshita on opposite platforms, took these photos 8 hours apart. When I flipped through the photos afterwards I realized …
Global 2017-2025 v1.1 embeddings now available in geotessera 0.11.0 TESSERA — GeoTessera 0.11 defaults to a complete global run of v1.1 embeddings, streamed straight from AWS. Open the dataset, point it at a region, and read.
Weeknotes: 5th October 2026 Michael Dales — Habitat maps My plan was to do a semi-global run this week, but to get there I ended up with a stack of small steps towards that which instead took up…
Notes from week 40 Mark Elvers — Fast Tessera inference that brings one Xeon node level with a GPU; reverse dependencies in day10; Windows, macOS and FreeBSD worker updates and a new …Scaling and benchmarking a critical message bus using a new indexing strategy Jane Street — The following is part of a series of posts about 2026 summer intern projects—for more, see “What the interns have wrought, special jumbo 2026 edit…Digital Take on Japanese Maps Alastair Tse — @chizutodesign creates some of the most incredible and creative maps in Japan. This one that he made creating a 3d digital version of train lines in t…MOWeeknotes for Part II Project Matt Occleshaw — I’m going to use this space to document what work I do each week on the OpenStreetMap eDSL, in large part to keep me accountable. RSS feed available…
JPDemocracy: Our American Experiment, The Massachusetts Opportunity John Palfrey — I returned to Boston this week for the annual meeting of Philanthropy Massachusetts. We discussed the importance of courage, leadership, and meeting t…
Building Wanderloop App Alastair Tse — About a year ago, I went from carrying two phones, iPhone and Pixel, to carrying just the Android Pixel. But there were several apps that I missed on …MOWeeknotes 2026-W40 Matt Occleshaw — 28 September 2026 – 4 October 2026 At the start of this week I still needed to decide whether I was doing the eBPF project or the geospatial DSL. My…
Weeknotes 2026-W40 Jon Sterling — Pre-term rush: IA Examiners’ Report, joint HoTT module, Sabbatical cover I have been rushing to get a bunch of things sorted out before Term starts.…ANThis Week in Package Management: 3 October 2026 Andrew Nesbitt — Releases, advisories, and articles from across the package management world
Docker has always used microVMs Dave Scott — Docker Desktop has always run containers inside a minimal, purpose-built VM. Here is why, and what it bought us.Month Notes for August 2026 Alastair Tse — A very late August Month Note this month. I had come back from a month-long trip on Aug 11, and then flurry of non-work work organizing meetups, catch…“APIs so good, AI Agents prefer them” Tom Loosemore — I’ve become a bit obsessed with trying to work out how those running services should respond to personal AI agents knocking on their front door …How recurring network maintenance exposed 6 bugs Jane Street — Jane Street does a lot of network maintenance over the weekends. In each maintenance, a cabinet may lose connectivity for 15 to 25 minutes. Our intern…
News update from Conservation Evidence Conservation Evidence — This blog post is an overview of recent and ongoing activities involving the Conservation Evidence team.My paper on Know Your Agent Tom Loosemore — I meant to publish this paper on Know Your Agent properly a few weeks ago. It’s written for leaders running services, but is hopefully useful fo…ANSoftware Heritage Identifiers Andrew Nesbitt — Notes from CodeCommons: SWHIDs, the SWH archive, and connecting both to package metadata.
FPL Reading: 1 October 2026 FP Launchpad — Anirudh: OxCaml - Stack Allocations and Locality. Kaustubh: Reflections from IndiaFOSS 2026. KC: Textbooks that run. Alina: Jigsawing an extended Syst…A resilient kernel log reporter Jane Street — The following is part of a series of posts about 2026 summer intern projects—for more, see “What the interns have wrought, special jumbo 2026 edit…A FUSE server for our in-house storage backend Jane Street — The following is part of a series of posts about 2026 summer intern projects—for more, see “What the interns have wrought, special jumbo 2026 edit…Wanderloop Location App Alastair Tse — Wanderloop is a completely vibe-coded Android app that I've been working on and using full time every day since September 2025. It's a location tracki…
Sabbatical Diary: Every End Had a Start Richard Mortier — Having set off with a song in my heart I finish with a rather different song playing. No matter. Variety is the spice of life after all. It was, in th…
ANWeeknotes: 2026 Weeks 38 & 39 Aneesh Naik — This past fortnight was one week of work and one week of holiday. Hinewai I mentioned in a previous weeknote that I’ve been working with PhD student…
What the interns have wrought, special jumbo 2026 edition Jane Street — It’s time again to review some of what Jane Street’s interns built over the summer, though this year we’re going to try to cover more projects a…Trading off compute for memory with activation checkpointing Jane Street — The following is part of a series of posts about 2026 summer intern projects—for more, see “What the interns have wrought, special jumbo 2026 edit…What the TDOE interns have wrought, 2026 edition Jane Street — The following is part of a series of posts about 2026 summer intern projects—for more, see “What the interns have wrought, special jumbo 2026 edit…Mitigating memorization in LLMs Jane Street — The following is part of a series of posts about 2026 summer intern projects – for more, see “What the interns have wrought, special jumbo 2026 ed…Can you use autoregressive diffusion to generate market data? Jane Street — The following is part of a series of posts about 2026 summer intern projects – for more, see “What the interns have wrought, special jumbo 2026 ed…Nothing OS Screenshot Gesture Alastair Tse — One neat trick on my Nothing Phone 3a is that on the Nothing OS, you can take a screenshot with a three finger swipe down. I've primarily switched to …Classifying Finnish forest and mire types with Tessera embeddings using tessera-eval TESSERA — The Python library tessera-eval, from the University of Cambridge Tessera team lets users train a model on Tessera embeddings easily and quickly. In t…Redesigning my CMS Alastair Tse — A week ago I posted about how I recreated a CMS system that sits on top of my Obsidian vault. I wasn't very happy with the UI of the CMS, so over the …Weeknotes: 28th September 2026 Michael Dales — Last two weeks Copenhagen I missed my weeknotes last week due to being away in Copenhagen for a few days. Other than adding to the prevailing narrativ…Does Meta’s Muse AI Agent try to pretend it’s human? Tom Loosemore — A bunch of large banks from around the world have published a list of principles for trusted agentic commerce. It’s short, sensible and reasonab…Notes from week 39 Mark Elvers — The icechunk to zarr conversion finished, although not when I said it had; benchmarking Tessera inference on Intel’s AMX silicon; and day10 spreadin…Geo Tokyo meetup website Alastair Tse — Shane Reustle and I have been organizing a meetup called Geo Tokyo. We've done 8 meetups do far, after every meetup we send the links and list of pres…JPCollective Action for the First Amendment John Palfrey — A free press and the First Amendment matter to our democracy in America. Collective action is essential to upholding the First Amendment. Democracy wi…
Control Resonant Alastair Tse — I was a big fan of the CONTROL game several years ago and was really excited to learn this year that they would release the sequel to the game, CONTRO…
Textbooks that run KC Sivaramakrishnan — This is a written version of my talk at IndiaFOSS 6.0 in Bengaluru on 26 September 2026. The slides are available as a PDF and a Keynote file. I want …ANThis Week in Package Management: 26 September 2026 Andrew Nesbitt — Releases, advisories, and articles from across the package management world
Sabbatical Diary: Week 48---51 Richard Mortier — Time at the bar ladies and gentlemen, time at the bar. And so my sabbatical comes to an end. I might try to pretend I’ve still got 4 more days left …ANPackage Manager Sandboxing Andrew Nesbitt — A survey of sandbox usage across package manager clients.
Weeknotes 2026-W39 Jon Sterling — IA Discrete Mathematics lecture prep This year I’m teaching both halves of IA Discrete Mathematics, taking over the first half from Marcelo Fiore du…Steam Machine SSD Upgrade Alastair Tse — This morning I was able to take apart my Steam Machine and swap out a 512 SSD for a 2TB SSD within 10 minutes! Only took 8 screws and it was done. Bra…
Rewriting Tailwind CSS in OCaml: Is It (Pixel-)Correct? Thomas Gazagnaire — I really like Tailwind CSS. Keeping styles next to the HTML makes it much easier to keep the two in sync. I can see which styles a component uses with…ANPackage Manager Threat Model, Revisited Andrew Nesbitt — Path traversal via a manifest field appeared in eight of ten package managers audited and thirty-three times in four months of everyone else's advisor…
ANUnfinished Work in Package Security Andrew Nesbitt — Some assembly required.
JPA New Day for Governing AI Development? John Palfrey — Trying out a new maxim: the more powerful a technology, the more concern people will have about deploying it, with Artificial Intelligence as the late…
Notes from week 38 Mark Elvers — Converting icechunk to zarr using Fargate workers; rebuilding the Tessera dispatcher around Zarr shards instead of 0.1 degree tiles, and day10 going l…
Weekly Updates - 2026-09-20 Andres Zuñiga-Gonzalez — Introduction “The first time was so nice I had to do it twice” Chloe Kelly after winning two women’s Euros in a row, and me after attending a se…Neverending Alastair Tse — Every thing I build leads to another two ideas that I want to pursue. Neverending.ANThis Week in Package Management: 19 September 2026 Andrew Nesbitt — Releases, advisories, and articles from across the package management world
Updates to Home Front Alastair Tse — Spent a few hours polishing a new screensaver feature on my home control panel using Claude Fable 5.1. The rooms are now lit up based on the position …Vibe coded this website's Obsidian based CMS Alastair Tse — Content on my website liquidx.net is backed out of my Obsidian Vault. I have a convoluted way that involved Obsidian Sync, a server I wrote a few year…ANGood Morning, Your Toaster Is Compromised Andrew Nesbitt — Rise & Grind goes live to the software supply chain.
Weeknotes 2026-W38 Jon Sterling — Ramping up on Project Pterodactyl with András Kovács András and I have been working intensely this week to get up to speed on core parts of Pteroda…ANShadowing the Standard Library Andrew Nesbitt — export PYTHONSAFEPATH=1
ANWeeknotes: 2026 Weeks 36 & 37 Aneesh Naik — I’m a little busy at the moment trying to wrap up various things before going on holiday next week, so a shorter note. What I was working on This pa…
FPL Reading: 15 September 2026 FP Launchpad — Alina: The OxCaml Type system. Dhruv: How I reverse engineered an ASIC. Anil: .plan-26-37: The humans aren't dead, the humans are ahead, Hitting a NER…Weeknotes: 14th September 2026 Michael Dales — Last week Liverpool Makefest 2026 Liverpool Makefest 2026 happened on Sunday and seemed to go well. This year rather than being an exhibitor I was on …Notes from week 37 Mark Elvers — day10 now runs side-by-side with OBuilder on the RISC-V opam-repo-ci workers, and the layer cache shows why it wins. Plus the Lwt bug that stopped Win…Notes from week 37 Mark Elvers — day10 now runs side-by-side with OBuilder on the RISC-V opam-repo-ci workers, and the layer cache shows why it wins. Plus the Lwt bug that stopped Win…FP Launchpad update: research, teaching, and community FP Launchpad — Six fellows have joined FP Launchpad. An update on our research, OCaml NPTEL course, environmental software projects, and upcoming events.A study of sequence weighting at scale Jane Street — TL;DR: We study the scaling laws of data weighting across in-house and open-weight LMs, finding non-monotonic behavior across scales. We vary the weig…JPHolding up more voices in this big week in the history of Artificial Intelligence John Palfrey — A big weekend for Artificial Intelligence -- in terms of a focus on how to govern it effectively, not just racing to develop it as quickly as possible…
A guide for AI Agents wanting to know when to put the bins out Tom Loosemore — I made something in anticipation of the imminent arrival of our new AI Agent overlords: a guide to how they can help to put out the right bins on the …ANThis Week in Package Management: 12 September 2026 Andrew Nesbitt — Releases, advisories, and articles from across the package management world
ANPackage Manager Trends Andrew Nesbitt — min-release-age, minimum-release-age, -Zmin-publish-age, cooldown.
Evaluating your downstream task with Tessera embeddings TESSERA — tessera-eval turns a ground-truth shapefile into an honest accuracy estimate for Tessera embeddings — cross-validation, learning curves, and spatial…Weeknotes 2026-W37 Jon Sterling — Celebrating Gordon Plotkin’s 80th birthday! I’ve had a great time visiting LFCS in Edinburgh for the Plotkin 80 celebration. Many great talks, but…ANWhat’s new in git-pkgs Andrew Nesbitt — Small Go modules for people who build package-manager tooling.
Summer notes Jon Ludlam — Getting back to writing notes! Here's a dump of what's been going on. First class docs The notion of making docs a 'first class' feature of OCaml seem…JPWhen Authoritarians Attack Science, Democracy Is the Real Target John Palfrey — Around the world, authoritarian movements are attacking science to weaken democracy: cutting research funding, smearing scientists, and spreading mis-…
Weeknotes: 7th September 2026 Michael Dales — Last week Local developments This week I attempted to make a more nuanced version of my habitat map than I have done to date, and I'm glad I did, as i…Notes from week 36 Mark Elvers — Correcting last week’s opam-repo-ci overlay, running day10 alongside OBuilder on every job, and fixing the Windows sparse-file error at its source. …Notes from week 36 Mark Elvers — Correcting last week’s opam-repo-ci overlay, running day10 alongside OBuilder on every job, and fixing the Windows sparse-file error at its source. …FP Launchpad to host FUN OCaml 2027 in Bangalore FP Launchpad — FP Launchpad is hosting FUN OCaml 2027, the first edition of FunOCaml, or any major OCaml conference, in India. The two-day event runs 25-26 January 2…ANThis Week in Package Management: 5 September 2026 Andrew Nesbitt — Releases, advisories, and articles from across the package management world
ANHow much should you trust your OSS data? Andrew Nesbitt — Every second, open source shapes our software, yet our view of this ecosystem is surprisingly opaque. How much can you really trust OSS data?
Evidence Champions: growing a movement for effective conservation Conservation Evidence — Discover how the growing Evidence Champion network is helping organisations embed evidence into conservation practice, learn what works, and make more…Merging pure shell histories Patrick Ferris — We define a pure shell history as an execution trace from a shell that only changes the shell's execution environment, that is, there are no external …
Dependency Resolution via Natural Join Ryan Gibb — Package managers generally use SAT solvers1 for dependency resolution, walking the solution space, backtracking on conflicts, to find a resolution. Th…The Package Calculus Ryan Gibb — Package managers are numerous and diverse, yet all fundamentally solve the same problem, while remaining ad hoc and non-interoperable. This fragmentat…Weeknotes 2026-W36 Jon Sterling — Welcome, András Kovács! I’m really pleased to welcome András Kovács to my group, where he will take the lead in developing Project Pterodactyl. …ANGit Submodules as a Package Manager Andrew Nesbitt — .gitmodules is a manifest and the gitlink is a lockfile entry.
FPL Reading: 1 September 2026 FP Launchpad — Anil: The 3rd Programming for the Planet 2026 videos are available, Celebrating a year of Tessera embeddings and releasing GeoTessera 0.10 and 2 more.
Weeknotes: 31st August 2026 Michael Dales — Last week Habitat mapping After a few weeks of incremental improvement, I finally hit a stage where "progress" lead to regression in the results of my…Notes from week 35 Mark Elvers — Finally, a benchmark that compares day10 with obuilder, making day10 die cleanly and porting opam-repo-ci. Plus Tessera MODIS results showing reduced …Notes from week 35 Mark Elvers — Finally, a benchmark that compares day10 with obuilder, making day10 die cleanly and porting opam-repo-ci. Plus Tessera MODIS results showing reduced …ANWeeknotes: 2026 Weeks 34 & 35 Aneesh Naik — What I was working on Species Distribution Modelling As in previous weeks recently (e.g. 29, 31, 33), my main project these last couple of weeks …
ANThis Week in Package Management: 29 August 2026 Andrew Nesbitt — Releases, advisories, and articles from across the package management world
ANNow Hiring: Senior Open Source Maintainer Andrew Nesbitt — A rare opportunity to make a real impact in a fast-paced, high-visibility role.
Sabbatical Diary: Week 47 Richard Mortier — And so, time passes and all things come to an end. In this case, the school summer holidays are almost over; childcare responsibilities for the last c…Weeknotes 2026-W35 Jon Sterling — I fell sick several days ago, unfortunately, so I have lost a lot of time. I’m feeling mostly better now and am getting back to things. It has been …ANBazel Module Versions Aren’t SemVer Andrew Nesbitt — According to strict SemVer, protobuf's latest Bazel release is from 2022.
ANHardening the Override Flag Andrew Nesbitt — export PIP_BREAK_SYSTEM_PACKAGES=1
Hard rebooting Richard Mortier — This is one of those bookmarks for future me, from https://infosec.exchange/@hal_pomeranz/115220370083388046, wherein it is stated that the following …Weeknotes: 24th August 2026 Michael Dales — Last week Tessera group meeting On Monday there was a small Tessera group show-and-tell in the lab for one of the funders, where I presented some of t…Notes from week 34 Mark Elvers — Testing day10 on the RISC-V path in OCaml-CI, diagnosing failed Windows containerd commits, and measuring the Tessera / Microsoft Planetary Computer d…Notes from week 34 Mark Elvers — Testing day10 on the RISC-V path in OCaml-CI, diagnosing failed Windows containerd commits, and measuring the Tessera / Microsoft Planetary Computer d…Weekly Updates - 2026-08-23 Andres Zuñiga-Gonzalez — Introduction This entry in the blog post is a special one as it’s my first summer school during my PhD. I attended the Earth Observation Summer Scho…ANThis Week in Package Management: 22 August 2026 Andrew Nesbitt — Releases, advisories, and articles from across the package management world
Sabbatical Diary: Week 46 Richard Mortier — Another one of those weeks that did not feel productive but actually several things did get done and I shouldn’t ignore them. Made some progress on …ANIssues in the Repo Andrew Nesbitt — refs/bugs, refs/notes, refs/heads/ticgit, or a directory full of YAML.
Weeknotes: 19th August 2026 Michael Dales — Last week Both tardy and sparse weeknotes. Sparse as I had my second shingles vaccine last week which took me out for a day, but better a day feeling …FP Launchpad sponsors the SegFault 2026 Hackathon FP Launchpad — FP Launchpad is proud to sponsor SegFault 2026, an online hackathon on compilers and programming languages running through 3 October 2026, with an in-…FP Launchpad is actively participating in IndiaFOSS 2026 FP Launchpad — Six talks and workshops from FP Launchpad members have been accepted at IndiaFOSS 2026 (25–27 September, NIMHANS Convention Centre, Bengaluru), acro…New: a talks page for FP Launchpad FP Launchpad — We’ve added a Talks page, cataloguing talks given by FP Launchpad members on their research and projects, both internal (at IIT Madras) and external…ANTwo-Factor Authentication Across Package Registries Andrew Nesbitt — Something you have, something you know, and someone else's OAuth.
AOYour CI should be disposable Akshay Oppiliappan — Your CI should have one job: scheduling. It should decide when to do the thing. Your builds itself, should be controlled by you. Use Docker, Nix, a Ma…
Notes from week 33 Mark Elvers — This week, six million Tessera S3 objects were renamed. ocaml-gdal was extended to handle vector formats. FreeBSD CI performance investigations and OC…Notes from week 33 Mark Elvers — This week, six million Tessera S3 objects were renamed. ocaml-gdal was extended to handle vector formats. FreeBSD CI performance investigations and OC…Some additional `sway` hotkeys Richard Mortier — I am still generally enjoying using Wayland with the sway window manager on NixOS. It turns out I really like tiling window managers, it seems to beha…Weekly Updates - 2026-08-16 Andres Zuñiga-Gonzalez — Introduction This is a follow-up on the LCZ classification (segmentation 😲) project. I’ll mostly talk about using OSM through Overture as a way t…ANWeeknotes: 2026 Weeks 32 & 33 Aneesh Naik — Much briefer note this week! Natural England meeting Last week we had a very fun mini-workshop in Cambridge, with three visitors from Natural England.…
Everyone hates patch queues (but should they?) Dave Scott — How important is upstreaming that patch? Less important than it used to be. Is it worth the hassle?FPL Reading: 15 August 2026 FP Launchpad — Harisankar: We are Problem Solvers. Anil: Improving local weather forecasts using Tessera embeddings, .plan-26-32: Finally a use for serverless and fo….plan-26-31: Sorting out Tessera and Evidence TAP infrastructureGetMOBILE article on benchmarking micro-NPUs now outUpdating to the OxCaml 5.2.0-minus39 opam packaging.plan-26-32: Finally a use for serverless and found the Forester for the treesImproving local weather forecasts using Tessera embeddings
Restarting `pulseaudio` when it flatlines Richard Mortier — Although it now generally seems to work, audio on Linux seems to have been a consistent mess for decades. The current preference appears to be to use …Sabbatical Diary: Weeks 39---45 Richard Mortier — OK, so even for me that was a long break from this. In my defence, I had to go through a lot of hassle to get a holiday with the children sorted out, …Are we getting better at knowing what actually works in conservation? Insights from fifty years of conservation evidence Conservation Evidence — A new analysis of more than 8,500 conservation studies shows that researchers are getting better at testing what works for biodiversity, but major gap…Notes from week 32 Mark Elvers — Git 2.55 broke opam repo add for all the 4.x base images, and ocaml.org was under scraper attack. On the Tessera side, the v1 dataset got converted to…Notes from week 32 Mark Elvers — Git 2.55 broke opam repo add for all the 4.x base images, and ocaml.org was under scraper attack. On the Tessera side, the v1 dataset got converted to…Weeknotes: 10th August 2026 Michael Dales — Last Week Tessera Habitat Mapping I'm continuing to push forward mostly on the habitat mapping work, with occasional side quests into tooling bits I n…What the Interns Built This Summer FP Launchpad — Our summer interns formalized school arithmetic in Lean, added biodiversity data to CoRE Stack, found and fixed a subtle bug in a verified CRDT, pushe…Tessera Postcards of Anywhere on Earth TESSERA — The Tessera Postcard generator renders any 10km x 6km patch of land on Earth straight from the model's embeddings, in a range of colour palettes. Pick…Month Notes for July 2026 Alastair Tse — One of the most visible things in this FIFA World Cup are the pink shoes. Why are nearly 90% of them pink? I initially thought it was all the same mod…Know Your Agent: Why you should act now, to avoid playing catch-up later Tom Loosemore — [Edit 5th Aug 2026: A friend kindly pointed out that modern LLMs are now getting very good at using your PC for you, exactly as you would have done. I…Weeknotes 2026-W32 Jon Sterling — A much-needed holiday in Wicken Fen My wife and I took the weekend to unplug at a lovely little cottage in Wicken Fen. Because we do not have a car an…Weeknotes: 3rd August 2026 Michael Dales — Last Week Words not come good today - I basically blew all my writing energy on another post that is not yet published (explained below), and so this …Notes from week 31 Mark Elvers — A big week, with a couple of long-running efforts finally wrapping up: the Source Cooperative mirror is essentially complete now that we have direct w…Notes from week 31 Mark Elvers — A big week, with a couple of long-running efforts finally wrapping up: the Source Cooperative mirror is essentially complete now that we have direct w…ANWeeknotes: 2026 Weeks 30 & 31 Aneesh Naik — Thus far, I’ve worked very hard to prevent this blog from devolving into Yet Another Cryptic Crossword Blog. Today, these efforts fail. What I was w…
FPL Reading: 1 August 2026 FP Launchpad — Alina: Putting Everything in Order. Anil: .plan-26-30: Bananas ripen, models open, and OxCaml releases, .plan-26-29: Perfect weather, imperfectly meas…Package Managers à la Carte Ryan Gibb — A Formal Model of Dependency ResolutionPackage Managers à la Carte: A Formal Model of Dependency Resolution Ryan Gibb — Aug. 2026Ryan Gibb.The 31st ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP). Package managers are legion. Every programming lang…
KYC, KYB and their wild new cousin, KYA Tom Loosemore — Earlier this year I blogged about the idea for a Creative Commons-style legal framework to help services respond to requests from AI Agents claiming t…io_uring is not available (ENOMEM) Mark Elvers — Thomas reported that ocaml-multicore/eio PRs randomly fail on ocurrent/ocaml-ci with a strange error in the documentation tests.Weeknotes: 27th July 2026 Michael Dales — Last Week Habitat mapping with Tessera Last week I spent most the week down in Cambridge, primarily for a group meeting that David Coomes' group were …Notes from week 30 Mark Elvers — The main threads: making day10 a native OCluster job type, porting opam-health-check to use day10, keeping the CI dashboards ahead of both a scraper f…Notes from week 30 Mark Elvers — The main threads: making day10 a native OCluster job type, porting opam-health-check to use day10, keeping the CI dashboards ahead of both a scraper f…Conservation Evidence at the European Congress of Conservation Biology Conservation Evidence — The Conservation Evidence team recently participated in the 8th European Congress of Conservation BiologyReusing Buffers in Multicore OCaml Thomas Gazagnaire — OCaml is a pragmatic functional language. You can do very advanced things with its type system (like an entire roguelike), and you can also hide the t…
Migrating from Mailchimp to Ghost using agentic help Nick Ludlam — An overview of the Mailchimp to Ghost skill I regularly use with OpenclawCascade: A Typed CSS Toolkit in OCaml Thomas Gazagnaire — As discussed in a previous post, I have been working for a while on running Tailwind CSS without a Node.js dependency. That meant porting its CSS gene…New Faces: Kyle Gao TESSERA — Kyle Gao joins Tessera as an academic visitor from Aalto University, working on 3D reconstruction, multi-modal remote sensing, and geoAI.Weeknotes: 20th July 2026 Michael Dales — Last week Weeknotes After six months of trying to write as-I-go-per-topic weeknotes, rather than one-a-week-all-topics weeknotes, I declare the experi…Notes from week 29 Mark Elvers — I was on holiday for most of week 29, so just a few high-priority issues to report on.Notes from week 29 Mark Elvers — I was on holiday for most of week 29, so just a few high-priority issues to report on.ANWeeknotes: 2026 Weeks 28 & 29 Aneesh Naik — What I was working on Species Distribution Modelling: GeoLifeClef As I mentioned in my previous weeknote, I’ve been working on species distribution …
Deckchair shuffling is for the unserious Tom Loosemore — The FT and Guardian report that the new PM will disband the Department of Science, Technology and Innovation (DSIT), splitting its functions between a…New Faces: Jingtao Li TESSERA — Jingtao Li joins the TESSERA team as a research associate, focused on anomaly detection and foundation model techniques for remote sensing imagery.FPL Reading: 15 July 2026 FP Launchpad — Pranav: LeanLang Summer School - Days 3-5, LeanLang Summer School - Day 2 and 1 more. Harisankar: LLM Proposes, Lean Disposes: A Week at the LeanLang …Notes from week 28 Mark Elvers — Headline activities have included resolving the scraping attacks, fixing obuilder bugs, and Tessera AMX optimisations.Notes from week 28 Mark Elvers — Headline activities have included resolving the scraping attacks, fixing obuilder bugs, and Tessera AMX optimisations.JPReimagining AI: Philanthropy’s Role in Global Collaboration John Palfrey — Verity Harding of the University of Cambridge pulled together an anthology of essays about Artificial Intelligence and Geopolitics as of early 2026. I…
Machine learning without labelling: finding every football pitch in London with osm-rasterizer Andres Zuñiga-Gonzalez — OpenStreetMap already contains millions of carefully drawn polygons — including, it turns out, thousands of football pitches, each tagged with its p…OCaml Roundup: June 2026 Patrick Ferris — Summary June saw a lot of progress on Merry. At the start of the month, I worked on meio, a tracing tool for Eio programs. This was to help debug a pa…OCaml Roundup: July 2026 Patrick Ferris — Summary July was a slower month as I was on holiday for parts of it which broke a lot of work up. By far the most exciting update was that we finally …OCaml Roundup: August 2026 Patrick Ferris — Much of August was spent thinking about POSIX shell semantics, and in particular extending notions from smoosh to include side effects (and maybe conc…New Faces: Silja Sormunen TESSERA — Silja Sormunen joins the TESSERA team as a research associate, bringing a background spanning psychology, medicine, physics and network science to the…Weeknotes 2026-W28 Jon Sterling — I wonder if I should be honest and just say that I am writing “monthnotes” now. This term it has been a real struggle to write anything coherent, …LLM eval suites are vital. And perilous. Tom Loosemore — If you’re making an AI-powered thing for real, then start by creating a comprehensive suite of evaluation test cases (aka an ‘eval suite’) w…Fine Financials Alastair Tse — I built the finance app of my dreams with Claude Code. Day and night, in my retired/unemployed state I laid down prompt after prompt and designed a sp…Prompt injection and the perils of leaving it to AI to handle AI Tom Loosemore — I’ve written recently about how citizens’ adoption of AI is putting stress on public services that rely on friction to reduce demand. I…Notes from week 27 Mark Elvers — The week 26 summary worked well, so I’m doing it again. This is really a nine-day week as the last weekly post was on 26 June.Notes from week 27 Mark Elvers — The week 26 summary worked well, so I’m doing it again. This is really a nine-day week as the last weekly post was on 26 June.Weekly Updates - 2026-07-05 Andres Zuñiga-Gonzalez — Introduction This will mostly be a recap of the 3-30-300 project and the paper I have re-submitted. I will talk about a python package I’ve been dev…ANWeeknotes: 2026 Weeks 26 & 27 Aneesh Naik — Since my last post, I have changed the domain name of the website from aneeshnaik.github.io to aneeshnaik.com. Any RSS subscriptions will likely break…
TESSERA heads to Toronto to map the farms satellites can't see TESSERA — New University of Cambridge research shows the TESSERA AI model can classify crops in the world's smallest fields more accurately than current methods…Maintaining a monument Michael Dales — Last week we took our semi-regular trip to the Uffington White Horse, a 3000 year old horse carved into the chalk of a hillside somewhere between Swin…FPL Reading: 1 July 2026 FP Launchpad — Durwasa: GADTs in OCaml: The Type-Level Superpower Your Other Languages Wish They Had. Anil: .plan-26-26: Gelato, geospatial, and players of games, A …Month Notes for June 2026 Alastair Tse — I'm not sure what I'm doing with these notes, are they blog posts or social media posts? I dunno. But they are here. I get an incredible buzz when I g…
Corrupt copies on the OpenBSD CI worker Mark Elvers — Last week I updated the OpenBSD workers to OCaml 5.5.0 and took that opportunity to deploy OpenBSD 7.8. Shortly after, issue#1061 was opened as jobs r…Webbplats update (part 2) Michael Dales — I wrote a few weeks ago about wanting to move the OCaml based software I wrote to host this and my other websites, called Webbplats, over to OCaml's n…Weekly Updates - 2026-06-28 Andres Zuñiga-Gonzalez — Introduction This is BIG update on the Local Climate Zones (LCZ) classification problem. I will talk about different patch classification methods I’…Notes from week 26 Mark Elvers — While I typically write posts as I go, I’ve only managed one this week because there’s been a lot going on. To catch up, I’m going to try to wri…Notes from week 26 Mark Elvers — While I typically write posts as I go, I’ve only managed one this week because there’s been a lot going on. To catch up, I’m going to try to wri…Sabbatical Diary: Weeks 35---38 Richard Mortier — Well. Apologies for another hiatus—that was a very busy few weeks. I’ll put to one side some personal matters I’ve had to deal with, and some ex…FreeBSD git-daemon leak Mark Elvers — The FreeBSD CI workers get slower over time. Is this a build-up on ZFS snapshots or something else?Weeknotes 2026 week 24-25 Jon Ludlam — I have now finally finished almost all of the end-of-term duties, incuding marking of 128 Foundations of Computer Science exam questions. Phew! It end…First Class Docs in OCaml Jon Ludlam — The quality of reference documentation available in OCaml for libraries has improved enormously over the past few years. Docs are now built for every …AO2026-25 Akshay Oppiliappan — A new spindle engine The spindle codebase now includes a new engine, microvm. This engine utilizes qemu's microVMs as its isolation layer, as opposed …
Anglesey Project Update Andres Zuñiga-Gonzalez — Introduction In the Anglesey project with the North Wales Wildlife Trust (NWWT), we’ve been working on measuring vegetation health from satellite im…A proof-of-work puzzle Mark Elvers — This post explores two more sustainable solutions to the crawler bots issue affecting opam-repo-ciAvoiding node and npm, somewhat, with Deno and JSR Michael Dales — For the last few months I've slowly been iterating the lidar data viewer from a static HTML/Javascript thing with a few manually built JSON files to i…Weeknotes 2026-W25 Jon Sterling — For the past month, each week has been increasingly difficult. These final two weeks of term has been so concentrated with meetings, logistics, Depart…A Shell is Born Patrick Ferris — Merry passed a milestone this week after installing the following packages vim fakeroot fakechroot debootstrap and successfully performing a fakechroo…Scraping opam-repo-ci to a standstill Mark Elvers — Jan reported that opam-repo-ci, opam.ci.ocaml.org, had become unresponsive.Docker 29 manifest list Mark Elvers — On the base image builder, we have recently seen a significant increase in the number of times we hit the Docker rate limits on manifest pushes. Most …FPL Reading: 15 June 2026 FP Launchpad — KC introduces an interactive O(x)Caml course book. Anil writes about TESSERA v1.1, Earth embeddings, CVPR, and self-hosting email.Using OxCaml to implement type-safe reference counting between OCaml and Python Jane Street — Jane Street is known for being an OCaml shop, but for years now Python has been our second major programming language, acting as the primary tool for …AO2026-24 Akshay Oppiliappan — API-First Appviews The Tangled appview does too many things: it presently is a monolith that handles creation and ingestion of Tangled AT records, off…
An O(x)Caml book that runs KC Sivaramakrishnan — I am building a course, “Functional Programming with OCaml”, for the NPTEL MOOC platform: twelve modules of recorded lectures. The course book is …Putting get.dune.build behind a Cloudflare Tunnel Mark Elvers — There have been reports that get.dune.build is unreliable when used via GitHub Actions.Removing HCS containers Mark Elvers — The Windows workers in the windows-x86_64 pool have a habit of quietly falling off the cluster. The ocluster-worker service is still RUNNING, but the …TESSERA v1.1: more stable embeddings, fewer artefacts TESSERA — v1.1 embeddings are more temporally stable year-on-year and have far fewer artefacts in low-observation areas, and nothing in your workflow has to cha…Compressing embeddings Mark Elvers — I’ve been distracted by the idea that ML embeddings could be considered as images with many colour channels.Deploying Ubuntu 26.04 on the CI workers Mark Elvers — As mentioned in the Docker 29 post, I have been moving the Linux workers to Ubuntu 26.04 so we can test io_uring on the 7.0 kernel. There are eighteen…NKQTCat: Queer and Trans People in Category Theory Neel Krishnaswami — I just saw a poster for the QTCat workshop, which is a workshop for queer and trans people in category theory, which is being held this August 12-14, …
Week 23, June 2026 Jon Ludlam — ...and previous weeks. Current topics General odoc directions OCaml Docs CI Dune Odoc rules Exams! General odoc directions While docs are, in general,…AO2026-23 Akshay Oppiliappan — I spent all of this week attending my brother's wedding at Florence, so here are some pictures instead: Florence Cecina Rome
Formal methods and the future of programming Jane Street — I’ve been telling people for the last 25 years that Jane Street as an organization was just not interested in formal methods.Docker 29 and COPY –link –chown Mark Elvers — After deploying the QEMU RISC-V machines, the base image builder ran into issues on the first Docker build.How does street lighting impact wildlife and when should we turn off the lights? Conservation Evidence — Samuel Challéat and colleagues share insights from their work exploring the effects of part-night lighting - a potential conservation action in artif…Weeknotes 2026-W23 Jon Sterling — It has been a hell of a month! I am dying to get back to doing science with my students. Part IA Examining We are well past the point of no return for…ANWeeknotes: 2026 Week 23 Aneesh Naik — I’ve been up in Edinburgh this week after a fun couple of weeks down in Cambridge. What I was working on Research I made incremental progress on var…
ANWeeknotes: 2026 Weeks 24 & 25 Aneesh Naik — This note covers the last two weeks, from Monday 6th to present. I might settle into a fortnightly pattern rather than a weekly one. What I was workin…
TESSERA arrives in Denver for its CVPR Debut TESSERA — A new AI model developed at the University of Cambridge distils millions of satellite images into a format that is easily used by researchers to revea…Spotting broken A10s in Azure Mark Elvers — In the previous post I mentioned that two A10s developed ECC faults during the UK processing. This occasional annoyance needs constant vigilance as fa…Emulating RISC-V workers when the hardware goes away Mark Elvers — Scaleway provide the RISC-V workers for OCaml CI, and they have been down for about a week with no real evidence that they’ll be back anytime soon. …OCaml CI lingering solves Mark Elvers — By now, you’ll know that I’ve been looking at OCaml CI more than I ever had before and was confused by the solver jobs, which seemed to hang aroun…OCaml CI GitHub Rate Limit Mark Elvers — While looking at OCaml CI for the FD leak, I noticed some odd pending events in the OCaml CI build graph.Tangled, or federated enough git Michael Dales — For a long time I’ve been stuck waiting for my perfect alternative to GitHub to appear. Whilst I've been historically a fan of GitHub, and used it f…FPL Reading: 1 June 2026 FP Launchpad — Pranav: The EuroSys 2026 Experience. Anil: .plan-26-22: From digital rewilding in Edinburgh to uring and Tessera hackery, Rewilding the Web: my worksh…AO2026-22 Akshay Oppiliappan — Notch on My Watch I have had the (dis)pleasure of using a notched display on my laptop (a Macbook Air). Today, on the flight Helsinki, I thought I mig…
Opam’s Nix system dependency mechanism Ryan Gibb — Jun. 2026Ryan Gibb.Caml in the Capital. The OCaml language package manager, Opam, has support for interfacing with system package mangers to provide d…JPRadcliffe Day 2026: Honoring Dr. Ruth Simmons John Palfrey — John Palfrey, May 29, 2026, Cambridge, MA, USA Thank you, Dean Brown-Nagin, and all Radcliffe Institute staff for putting on such a wonderful day for …
Month Notes for May 2026 Alastair Tse — It's been two months since I left my job. What have I been up to? A lot of have asked me privately. Here's a dump of what's been happening. I went on …Sabbatical Diary: Weeks 33---34 Richard Mortier — A quiet couple of weeks, as I more or less anticipated. Caught up with some reading for various committees. I’m on sabbatical so am not allowed to a…ANWeeknotes: 2026 Week 22 Aneesh Naik — In the group I’ve joined at the University of Cambridge, there is something of a culture of writing “weeknotes” at the end of each week. The ide…
OCaml-CI HTTP 502 errors Mark Elvers — Over the last few weeks, I have restarted the OCaml-CI web container every 3 or 4 days because users are encountering HTTP 502 errors.Webbplats update (part 1) Michael Dales — This website is hosted using Webbplats, my own OCaml based thing that is kinda like a static site generator, but dynamic. It was built upon Dream, a w…strace-ui, Bonsai_term, and the TUI renaissance Jane Street — We’ve always found strace useful but somewhat hard to work with. Its output is often inscrutable, it’s hard to follow subprocesses or threads, and…AO2026-21 Akshay Oppiliappan — Moving to Knot-Owned Data AT is all about user-owned data. To specify a code forge built on AT would mean, users own the following: issue submissions …
Geocaml Hacking Michael Dales — A couple of weeks ago I wrote about building a point cloud visualisation tool in OCaml, and I've found a little time this week to crunch of that more,…Train Lines Alastair Tse — I decided to revisit an old project of mine, rendering train lines in Japan. I gave a talk at Tokyo Tech Meetup about my obsession with open geo data …Processing the UK with Tessera v1.1 on Azure Mark Elvers — Sadiq asked me to process the UK with Tessera v1.1 on Azure using the most cost-effective method.Prompting `bash` with `git` and `jj` Richard Mortier — I recently decided to make a push on trying out jujutsu as an alternative to git. Being easily distracted by side-quests I decided that I should sort …Cambridge's TESSERA Helping to Protect UK Hedgehogs from Space TESSERA — Researchers at the University of Cambridge have teamed up with the Cambridge Conservation Initiative to use TESSERA's satellite AI to map hedgehog hab…LLM Navigator Alastair Tse — I had an idea about creating a browser that doesn't use the internet. What does that even mean? The idea is seeing whether you could get an AI to drea…Publishing System Alastair Tse — I'm making some big changes to how the internals of my blog works. Everything is driven out of an Obsidian Vault with some custom tools (partially vib…AO2026-20 Akshay Oppiliappan — SSH PTYs for Great Good All my work happens over SSH. None of my client machines (ranging from macbooks to android tablets) require any form of setup …
LLM Hackathon Andres Zuñiga-Gonzalez — Introduction Last week I placed 2nd in the Hackathon for Multi-Agent Systems for Scientific Research, organised by Accelerate Programme for Scientific…Dishwasher Alastair Tse — Using AI coding agents is a little like using a dishwasher. There's no proper way to load the dishwasher, like there's no proper way to really prompt …Sabbatical Diary: Week 32 Richard Mortier — Some progress this week, as I enter the last third of the sabbatical so the end is really starting to feel imminent. Reviewed a second UKRI research p…FPL Reading: 15 May 2026 FP Launchpad — KC: Shrinking the OxCaml js_of_ocaml bundle: 285 MB to 4 MB, Capsules: compile-time lock discipline in OxCaml and 1 more. Durwasa: Prof CPR and the Re…O(x)Caml in Space Thomas Gazagnaire — On 23 April, our pure-OCaml CCSDS protocol stack booted up in low Earth orbit! The project, codename Borealis, is running inside DPhi Space's ClusterG…NKBidirectional Typechecking That Does Not Stop Neel Krishnaswami — html { color: #1a1a1a; background-color: #fdfdfd; } body { margin: 0 auto; max-width: 36em; padding-left: 50px; padding-right: 50px; padding-top: 50px…
Odd opam update behaviour Mark Elvers — A few days after retiring opam 2.0 from the build pipeline, ocaml-ci Jon noticed that some jobs were failing. I immediately concluded that the removal…Weeknotes May 2026 weeks 18-19 Jon Ludlam — Over the past two weeks I've been mainly wrestling with odoc. I made a release of odoc - 3.2.0 - and a PR to opam-repository. In parallel, I also just…AO2026-19 Akshay Oppiliappan — Evidence Based Vouching Vouch on Tangled is evolving a bit more with evidences. If you recieve a PR on Tangled, the UI helpfully suggests that you vou…
Shrinking the OxCaml js_of_ocaml bundle: 285 MB to 4 MB KC Sivaramakrishnan — In the previous post on capsules, I cheated. The lecture I was adapting (from my CS6868 course on language abstractions for parallelism) used Await_ca…Sabbatical Diary: Week 31 Richard Mortier — Quieter week with a flurry at the end. A good seminar, an excellent friend’s birthday meal, and of course, I voted.[1] Finally got round to setting …Weeknotes 2026-W19 Jon Sterling — Just a quick note this week. I haven’t been able to work on Project Pterodactyl in a while, as I have been focused on clearing out my writing backlo…Capsules: compile-time lock discipline in OxCaml KC Sivaramakrishnan — In the previous post we fixed the racy gensym with Portable.Atomic. That worked because the shared state was a single integer with atomic primitives. …FP Launchpad members win prize at LeanLang Hackathon, IISc Bangalore FP Launchpad — The LeanLang for Verified Autonomy Hackathon was a two-day event at IISc Bangalore organised by Prof. Siddharth Gadgil and Emergence AI, focused on ap…FP Launchpad members win prize at LeanLang Hackathon, IISc Bangalore FP Launchpad — FP Launchpad researcher Vimala S. and PhD student Durwasa C. took 2nd prize at the LeanLang for Verified Autonomy Hackathon at IISc Bangalore. Read mo…Machine Learning in OxCaml Mark Elvers — The inspiration for this post came from Dave’s Garage YouTube Channel. It featured dbrll/ATTN-11, which used machine learning on a PDP-11 to reverse…Retiring opam 2.0 from the build pipeline Mark Elvers — ocurrent/docker-base-images publishes the ocaml/opam:* Docker images which the OCaml CI systems use. For each distro, it tracks 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.…News update from Conservation Evidence Conservation Evidence — This blog post is an overview of recent and ongoing activities involving the Conservation Evidence team.Data race freedom in OxCaml KC Sivaramakrishnan — A while back I wired up x-ocaml so this blog could embed live, editable OCaml notebooks. That post used a vanilla OCaml 5 toplevel. Today the toplevel…Twitter Alastair Tse — Finally deleted all my tweets from Twitter. The web API rate limits to 200 deletes per 15 mins, and I had 13209 tweets - roughly 16 hours if nothing w…Weird Windows container version numbers Mark Elvers — Running ver in a Windows container doesn’t report the version number that you expect.AO2026-18 Akshay Oppiliappan — We Need a Federation of Forges I wrote a bit about forge federation, the full post is on the Tangled blog but also on this site. I have taken to expla…
Island Alastair Tse — Have any of you wondered why island is not pronounced is-land?TESSERA at the FP Launchpad kickoff at IIT Madras TESSERA — A talk on functionally programming petabytes of Earth observations at the launch of the FP Launchpad Centre for Functional Systems Research and Educat…There’s something rather fishy going on at Conservation Evidence… Conservation Evidence — Ann Thornton and Vanessa Cutts present the latest Conservation Evidence synopsis on habitat creation and restoration for fish in inland habitats, and …Weeknotes 2026-W18 Jon Sterling — An injury healing I am moving a bit slower than I would like at the start of term because I injured myself last week—I took a tumble and tremendousl…FPL Reading: 1 May 2026 FP Launchpad — KC: From Convergence to Confidence: Push-button verification for RDTs. Anil: Helping tropical forest protection keep up with a fast-changing world, .p…Sabbatical Diary: Week 30 Richard Mortier — Quite a travelling week in the end. I returned from the UK Systems Challenges workshop and have posted all those slide decks that I’ve been sent (mo…