This is part 3 of 5 of a series of posts ^[1] about ICFP 2025. It's been about six years since we wrote the papers on parallelism and effects, and four years since we helped to release upstream OCaml 5.0 with multicore support, a mammoth effort that took up years of work for my OCaml Labs and Tarides crew.

This is part 2 of 5 of a series of posts ^[1] about ICFP 2025. Several extensions to "oxidize" OCaml (Rust performancew with ML ergonomics!) have been developing rapidly in a fork called OxCaml. I helped an intrepid crew from Jane Street, IIT-M, Tarides, Brown and Cambridge pull together a really fun tutorial in ICFP 2025 that you can try out too!

This is part 1 of 5 of a series of posts ^[1] about ICFP 2025. The first outing of PROPL was last year in London, and this time around Dominic Orchard and I invited KC Sivaramakrishnan to be the PC chair and held it at ICFP/SPLASH. The uptake was encouraging, and we got enough submissions to have a proper published proceedings in the ACM Digital Library for the first time!

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.