Anil Madhavapeddy

Made the cover of @acm.org with "A Decade of Docker Containers", recapping much systems work! Docker grew so fast in those early days that we never got a chance to write an academic paper about it, so this has been a long time coming cacm.acm.org/research/a-d... w/ @justincormack.bsky.social djs55

Spent the weekend setting up a full wireguard mesh across the (globally distributed) family so that we don't have to expose their machines to the internet for self hosted services any more.

Is this the first time an open source packaging maintainer has been covered by the beeb? www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... Definite xkcd.com/2347/ vibes

Upgrading from OpenBSD 7.9 to 8.0 is just too easy now. I miss having to print out the FAQ, grab the install ramdisks, merge /etc manually, and pray to the BSD gods for driver rain

.plan-2026-w42: Lectures start with unexpected questions, and a sampling of meetings I'm lucky enough to take: from the Japanese secretariat, to hosting samosa socials at Pembroke College on responsible AI, to undisclosed locations in London to hear about AI safety... anil.recoil.org/notes/2026w42

Welcome to the 2026 Cambridge 1A CST students for their first Foundations of Computer Science lecture! They’ve started a journey in the most rapidly paced eras in our field I’ve ever seen. May the functional programming gods spark the same enduring joy in CS as it did for me :-)

Announcing Cilium, Flux CD, StackHPC, and Tessera - University of Cambridge have been shortlisted as finalists in the Software category of The OpenUK Awards, sponsored by Red Badger. See the full shortlist: openuk.uk/awards/

2026w41: a week into full term, and our Computer Science Part II projects are so much fun: everything from 'debugging Bach' with a musical OCaml DSL to figuring out how to teach AI to stop predicting that elephants swim in the oceans off the Gabonese coast anil.recoil.org/notes/2026w41

Finished up the Cambridge 1A Foundations of Computer Science course notes, now as a forester. This'll may be the last year this course (which has been going for thirty years) will run in its current form, but I need to meditate to figure out its new shape. www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/262...

The first thought that sprung to mind when I saw Anthropic's "dont offend your computer" ToC change was Father Jack who LOVED HIS BRICK www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1ZU...

OCaml's module system really is a perfect fit for agentic programming in the large anil.recoil.org/notes/ocaml-...

Delighted that Bidirectional Type Slicing has been (conditionally) accepted to POPL27, with tons of good expository suggestions from the reviewers! Their attention to detail is massively appreciated. arxiv.org/abs/2607.12197

Been trying to capture the seasons with my new notes page design. Still not quite there but getting better... anil.recoil.org/notes

Oh, nice @infoq.com article that quotes me on some of the implications of @anil.recoil.org's blog "Just a rumour of a bug is enough to find a security exploit these days". It's pretty ironic that AI has been trained heavily on Open Source but is now upending it. www.infoq.com/news/2026/10...

plan-2026-40: now locked into Cambridge as term starts! Also a fun day trip to Oxford to talk to the Intelligent Earth PhD cohort, and did a mega release of @geotessera.org 0.11 with wall-to-wall embeddings for 2017-2025 now supported 🌍 anil.recoil.org/notes/2026w40

I run a meetup called Geo Tokyo and we built a website for it - geotokyo.com

If there are any R users that would like to test a @geotessera.org access library, then github.com/ucam-eo/geot... is open for issues and feedback before the first release!

Open source still rocks: a great writeup from dClimate on how they rebuilt our @geotessera.org inference stack to be specialised to AWS, and did a full run of 2017-2025 you can now browse on tze.geotessera.org ! This would have been years of work ...a year ago. blog.dclimate.net/how-we-re-en...

.plan: it's the end of my sabbatical this week, so I'm making a winter reading list, and enjoying a storm of research (although I really wish the thousands of OSS security issues weren't a thing) anil.recoil.org/notes/2026w39

Good news for the Scottish Highlands in our latest paper mapping natural woodland regeneration up there with lidar, measuring the effect of deer population control on sapling survival into mature tree growth 🌎 anil.recoil.org/notes/cairng...

Weeknotes 2026#38 see an exciting milestone for Tessera as community contributions from dClimate have lead to complete wall-to-wall global maps being made available for v1.1 for 2017-2025. My notes on what's going into integrating and validating them anil.recoil.org/notes/2026w38

Just added support for searching for info about threatened species near you to the Dash of Life! dashoflife.org/near-me 🌎

If AI's moving too fast for you, then consider training your agent with a hugging skill and deliver optimal load-bearing intra-hug squeezes regularly dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

New preprint on breaking brain-computer interfaces; this isnt where you want vulnerabilities! We categorise them as "NERVE Attacks": neuro-mimetic forgery, evasion via signal desync, replay-based hijacking, tapping unencrypted radio links and embedding backdoors. anil.recoil.org/notes/nerve-...

Term time's almost here, and I've refreshed my Cambridge MPhil/Part II student project ideas. A heady mix of planetary computing and systems/PL to whet anyone's appetite for challenge! anil.recoil.org/notes/studen...

I continue to be a huge fan of omg.lol from afar. would love it if PDS hosting had that vibe in the future: positive aesthetic, bundled services, not a huge corporation

The cybersecurity guards in frontier models perfectly illustrate the weird incentives in software engineering. They equally block vulnerability construction _and_ attempts to improve the correctness of software because they are both the same task.

spammed low-quality package contributions to OCaml are coming in with a really lovely smile now github.com/ocaml/opam-r...

Some quick thoughts after trying out Scrutineer by @andrewnez.bsky.social for managing local code scanning workflows anil.recoil.org/notes/scruti...

I recently gave a talk at the OCaml Workshop called “JSON parsing in OxCaml: fast, but not too fast.” The companion post: pianykh.com/blog/posts/2... Some of the “not too fast” part may be a skill issue. Fortunately, investigating skill issues is where a lot of the interesting stuff happens.

The directed graph of voting results for LLM usage is very Debian (and perhaps something applicable to mainstream voting on complex issues!) vote.debian.org/~secretary/g...

I enjoyed all of these talks at PROPL26 very much, but the ambition of the 'differentiable earth simulator' is fairly staggering! 🌏

GeoTessera 0.10 is out now, a year after our first release! Highlights: switches to the @source.coop for hosting, adds support for v2 beta (with matryoshka), and much better Zarr streaming support (see tze.geotessera.org for this in the browser). anil.recoil.org/notes/geotes...

I feel two out of three ain't bad for me on the Dolly Parton advice scale: "Never ignore your roots, your home, or your hair”

I've had to respond to multiple OSS security issues recently and the wild thing is that agents can now generate exploits just on the *rumour* of a bug. This throws security embargoes out the window, as the fix is less important than the knowledge of its existence anil.recoil.org/notes/rumour...

I remain a bit shocked just how many of the requests to my website are direct agent calls now. It feels weird to be able to directly manipulate the context windows of tens of thousands of inquisitive tool-using LLMs...

.plan-2026-w33 anil.recoil.org/notes/2026w33: Tessera dons the mask of Zarro (v3), evidencetap.org is live, weather prediction downscaling paper is out, OCaml perf and security fixes, busy summer! 🌏

I've been porting my 26-27 Cambridge 1A lectures for Foundations of CS to be interactive toplevels via @jonmsterling.com's Forester tool anil.recoil.org/notes/forest...

.plan-2026-w31, where I finally find a use for serverless computing after many moons of Dockering anil.recoil.org/notes/2026w32

I updated my website to the latest oxcaml-5.2.0-minus39 and made some notes about how the opam packaging works anil.recoil.org/notes/oxcaml... : this might be helpful if you're trying out the performance extensions with your own non-Jane Street codebases

Article on how microcontrollers in resource-constrained environments work! Performing ML inference on tiny hardware improves privacy by running locally, lowers costs for model vendors, and eliminates dependence on network. Notes anil.recoil.org/notes/sigmob..., article dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Weeknotes time! Spent a few days sorting out petabytes of our uni infrastructure, ranging from the ever-ballooning TESSERA and to our growing living evidence database of papers. Also some really fun RA jobs just opened for Deep Learning with SDMs, if youre job hunting 🌍 anil.recoil.org/notes/2026w31

I still haven't seen a beaver in the UK, but I can certainly appreciate the results of their beavering! Thanks busy beavers! www.standard.co.uk/news/environ...

Read our latest paper on tree species classification using geospatial embeddings model, this time in the gorgeous Trentino region www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 🌎