A world without nature feels rather impermanent, doesn't it? It's difficult to imagine a healthy future without clean air, fresh water and diverse wildlife. Yet important policy is being decided at the moment that will sideline "nature-based solutions" for net-zero carbon targets.

Choosing where we source the food that we eat makes a difference to the environment, but by how much? After churning through around 100 petabytes of data, beginning with our LIFE metric and moving onto food provenance maps and import/export data for the world, we now know the answer can vary by three orders of magnitude for species extinction risks.

We've been having great fun at the EEG recently releasing embeddings of our new TESSERA geospatial foundation model. A foundation model is designed to be used for downstream tasks without having to retrain a full model for every individual task.

That's a wrap for the next decade with Aarhus 2025, where I presented our paper on "Steps towards an Ecology for the Internet". I was a little unsure about how to approach the presentation, largely because the ideas seem a little crazy if they'd been proposed even a year ago! Luckily my co-authors strengthened my spine with encouragement and gin, and the event was tremendous fun packed with useful insights.

Since I wrote about the new ATProto-powered Tangled Git forge a few months ago, it's come along by leaps and bounds! First, and most excitingly, they've added continuous integration via Spindles which are built in a nice ATProto style: The pipelines are Nix-only right now, so I braved using it ^[1] for a new GPS Exchange Format library in OCaml that I wrote.

I'm emerging reenergised from an epic trip to the Okavango Delta in Botswana, where we spent weeks in the wilderness gathering ground truth for TESSERA (and enjoying the wildlife!). Piecing together our locations was quite important, and so I took a cue from Ryan Gibb and deployed OwnTracks and HomeAssistant Device Tracker before I headed out there.

I've been hacking with Sadiq Jaffer (^), Jon Ludlam (^) and Ryan Gibb (^) on various approaches to improving the agentic coding experience for OCaml. We jotted down our notes in a draft paper to keep track of everything going on, including summarising previous experiments with Qwen3 for FoCS. Since then, there's been a flurry of extra activity from others which we need to integrate!

I've just taken Kyutai's speech-to-text model for a spin on my Mac laptop, and it's stunningly good. As background, this is what the prolific Laurent Mazare has been hacking on; he has made a ton of contributions to the OCaml community as well, such as ocaml-torch and starred in a very fun Signals to Threads episode on machine learning at Jane Street back in 2020.

I was a bit sleepy getting into the Royal Society Future of Scientific Publishing conference early this morning, but was quickly woken up by the dramatic passion on show as publishers, librarians, academics and funders all got together for a "frank exchange of views" at a meeting that didn't pull any punches! These are my hot-off-the-press livenotes and only lightly edited; a more cleaned up version will be available from the RS in due course.

For the past few years, Sadiq Jaffer and I been working with our colleagues in Conservation Evidence to do analysis at scale on the academic literature. Getting local access to millions of fulltext papers has not been without drama, but made possible thanks to huge amounts of help from our University Library who helped us navigate our relationships with scientific publishers.

The exam marking is over, and a glorious Cambridge summer awaits! This year, we have a sizeable cohort of undergraduate and graduate interns joining us from next week. This note serves as a point of coordination to keep track of what's going on, and I'll update it as we get ourselves organised.