.plan-26-26: Gelato, geospatial, and players of games

Anil Madhavapeddy spoke at the CHIA annual conference in Cambridge on AI for science and career guidance for young scientists, and wrote up notes from the first Cloud-Native Geospatial Forum held in London during Climate Action Week. He also discussed ongoing work on the TESSERA biodiversity project and porting code to Eio.

A blistering heatweave threw everything off this week; we even had a big power cut through central Cambridge that drove many of us to seek haven in gelato shops. While melting, I spoke at CHIA's annual conference https://anil.recoil.org/ speaking-at-the-annual-chia-conference in the Cambridge Union on AI for Science, and dispensed a touch of career guidance to young scientists. I also wrote up the Cloud-Native Geospatial Forum https://anil.recoil.org/ cloud-native-geospatial-forum London, the first such gathering outside the US. Plus the usual fun links https://anil.recoil.org/ fun-links at the end. I gave a talk in the Cambridge Union https://cus.org/ for the CHIA https://www.chia.cam.ac.uk/ annual conference https://www.ai.cam.ac.uk/events/chia-s-annual-conference-ai-for-a-changing-world/ about "AI for a changing world". I spoke there on TESSERA https://anil.recoil.org/projects/tessera and our work on using it to find biodiversity worldwide. Afterwards, there was a panel hosted by Ramit Debnath https://www.arct.cam.ac.uk/staff/dr-ramit-debnath-mphil-esd-phd-gates-cantab about what young scientists need to consider with the advent of AI in the field. It's definitely a strange moment to be giving career advice to budding scientists. On one hand, data driven machine learning has opened many, many doors to finding new discoveries https://royalsociety.org/news-resources/projects/science-in-the-age-of-ai/ . But on the other hand, it's never been a worse time to be young and job hunting https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/publication/canaries-in-the-coal-mine-six-facts-about-the-recent-employment-effects-of-artificial-intelligence/ due to so many entry level jobs disappearing abruptly. Still, the Cambridge students are as upbeat and as full of energy as ever, so I'm confident that the youth will find their way just fine; I just wish we could do more to help from the professorial end On a similar note, I was delighted to see the happy faces of our Pembroke undergraduates upon finishing their exams. They've all worked really hard this year and I'm delighted for them irrespective of whatever the results say I did run into Emily, Shrey and Sophie at 6am when I was out for my morning jog and they were just returning from St John's May Ball... I wrote up notes from the Cloud-Native Geospatial Forum https://anil.recoil.org/notes/cng-london-2026 , the first such gathering outside the US, held in the Jellicoe during London Climate Action Week. It was a cracking collection of 50 practitioners geeking out over geospatial coordinate systems and Zarr access patterns and that sort of thing. My favourite talk was the Barrios Visibles https://www.barriosvisibles.org/en work that surfaced 3.4 million people missing from Argentina's official record of informal settlements The overall theme that came up repeatedly was provenance and trust, which aligned with last week's PROPL https://anil.recoil.org/notes/2026w25 discussions too. After the event was done, Isaac Corley is helping me out with a transfer to the Source Coop https://source.coop of the TESSERA embeddings. This will, I hope, solve a big headache we have with distributing the growing number and variations of the core model. We've been working on the v2 release https://www.tunbury.org/2026/06/26/week-26-2025/ which will be even more data and excitement when out soon I continued to port code over to Eio from my internal trees, most notably with a nice HTTP client capability. I haven't quite had a chance to finish this up well enough to publish yet, but will do so when back from holiday in a few weeks. I've also made progress on Eio Windows, but got a bit stuck with getting in a rabbit hole with IORing and RIO. I've decided to stick to IOCP for the first refresh and save the fancy ring stuff for later on. Meanwhile, Thomas Leonard https://github.com/https://roscidus.com kindly reviewed and merged my longstanding Eio sockopts PR https://github.com/ocaml-multicore/eio/pull/575 and I also debugged FreeBSD ptys for that feature https://github.com/ocaml-multicore/eio/pull/531 to add pty support into Eio processes directly. I'm on vacation for the next couple of weeks heading up to the deep north to find some arctic foxes. Stay cool everyone