{"slug": "plan-26-35-all-i-want-for-tesseramas-is-gp-u", "title": ".plan-26-35: All I want for Tesseramas is (GP)U", "summary": "GeoTessera 0.10 has been released, moving hosting to Source Cooperative with UTM-native Zarr routing and Matryoshka reads, while the full global run of Tessera v1.1 embeddings for 2017-2025 has been delayed by a month due to GPU shortages. A new paper by Julia Guerrero-Viu et al. finds that Tessera embeddings degrade gradually with shorter temporal windows, with a 39% drop in segmentation accuracy on PASTIS-R when contracting from a year to a month, but still outperform from-scratch models when labels are scarce.", "body_md": "I've been in Ireland again this week for the bank holiday, which also saw us celebrate [a year of Tessera hacking](https://anil.recoil.org/#a-year-of-tessera-embeddings) while hunting for more GPUs to support our users' embedding requests. I also got [Scrutineer scanning my own code](https://anil.recoil.org/#scrutineer-scanning-with-a-local-glm) using a local GLM-5.3 model, the [PROPL 2026 videos are live](https://anil.recoil.org/#propl-2026-videos-are-live), and I wrote a [text and data mining reservations library](https://anil.recoil.org/#tdm-reservations-for-evidence-tap) for [Evidence TAP](https://evidencetap.org).\n\nIt's been a whole year since the first GeoTessera release, woohoo! I [put together a brief recap](https://anil.recoil.org/notes/geotessera-a-year-on) and released [GeoTessera 0.10](https://github.com/ucam-eo/geotessera/releases/tag/v0.10.0), which moves our hosting over to the [Source Cooperative](https://source.coop/) with UTM-native Zarr routing and Matryoshka reads for the v2 beta.\n\nThe sync of the [Tessera v1.1 embeddings](https://anil.recoil.org/notes/tessera-v11-out) onto the Source Cooperative also finished this week, so those are now browsable via [tze.geotessera.org](https://tze.geotessera.org) as well (click on the model version on the top right). The full global run for v1.1 for 2017-2025 has unfortunately been delayed by a month due to GPU shortages. If you can help us get access to more GPUs then please get in touch. Smaller cards are fine, since we can parallelise the inference across many of them per tile. [Mark Elvers](https://www.tunbury.org/) has [mostly finished the v2 inference ablations](https://www.tunbury.org/2026/08/31/week-35-2025/), so compute is now what we're short of.\n\nRelatedly, I read a nice paper on the [temporal sensitivity of Tessera embeddings](https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.27175). The authors keep the Tessera encoder frozen and recompute its embeddings over successively shorter observation windows, from a full year (which is what we generate by default) right down to a single day (!). They then benchmark linear probes and UNet heads against from-scratch networks on various datasets.\n\nInterestingly, accuracy degrades gradually rather than collapsing. Contracting the temporal window from a year down to a month drops 39% of the segmentation accuracy on the phenology-driven PASTIS-R crop task. I was surprised to see that even single-day embeddings classify land cover at 3.4 times the background chance baseline, so temporal coverage seems practical to tune if you're willing to pay the inference cost.\n\nThe benefit of using embeddings is more evident when labels are scarce: with only 1% of the labels TESSERA-UNet already achieves ∼24 mIoU on PASTIS-R, some 50% above the best from-scratch UNet, and even the linear probe matches or exceeds every fully supervised from-scratch UNet there, while on DEN the embedding-based models stay essentially flat from 1% of the labels onwards and the from-scratch UNets only catch up between 30% and 100%, so the models only draw level on DEN at saturation. The embeddings thus pay off whenever the mapping task is phenology-driven or labels are scarce, and lose their edge only when it is spectral and labels are abundant, a combination rarely met in operational LULC production. --\n\n[Temporal Sensitivity Analysis of Tessera Embeddings], Julia Guerrero-Viu et al, Aug 2026\n\nI also wrote up some project ideas this week in preparation for the incoming MPhil students to Cambridge, covering [scanning the literature for species range and habitat maps](https://anil.recoil.org/ideas/literature-range-habitat-maps), the [generative detection of all the ghost roads in the world](https://anil.recoil.org/ideas/tessera-ghost-roads), and the [interpretable downscaling of local weather predictions](https://anil.recoil.org/ideas/tessera-interpretable-downscaling). I'll write more about these next week when back in Cambridge.\n\nMy [musings on security embargoes](https://anil.recoil.org/notes/rumour-is-the-exploit) were covered pretty widely online, with discussions on [HN](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49480466) and [Lobsters](https://lobste.rs/s/t73wqi/just_rumour_bug_is_enough_find_security). I loved seeing [Nick Craig-Wood participate](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49480777), as he maintains [rclone](https://rclone.org/) which we [use extensively to manage filesync in the EEG](https://www.tunbury.org/2026/01/06/ceph-notes/#copying-data). The rclone project fielded around 20 security disclosures in its first decade, and now 40+ in the last month alone. He's now considering merging security fixes straight to trunk, rather than holding embargoed branches. The Lobsters thread also pointed me at the [Zero Day Clock](https://zerodayclock.com/), which is a depressingly incredible graph.\n\nAs a followup, I deployed [Andrew Nesbitt](https://nesbitt.io)'s Scrutineer to scan my own OCaml code, but driven by GLM 5.3 running on my Mac Studio rather than a commercial code model. I wrote up quick [notes on the deployment](https://anil.recoil.org/notes/scrutineer-local-llm). The short version is it's surfacing hundreds of potential findings to triage, so there's some work ahead. [Thomas Gazagnaire](https://github.com/samoht) is giving me a hand though!\n\nTo support this, I refreshed my [ocaml-deepseek](https://tangled.org/anil.recoil.org/ocaml-deepseek) inference engine, which I first built for [language-integrated LLMs](https://anil.recoil.org/notes/language-integrated-llms) but am now exposing as a server. It is now renamed `ds4`\n\nto match the upstream project, and the `glm-5.3`\n\nbranch serves GLM 5.3 Flash over an OpenAI-compatible endpoint for Scrutineer to use.\n\nThe recordings from the third [Programming for the Planet](https://pldi26.sigplan.org/home/propl-2026) workshop at PLDI 2026 are now up on the ACM SIGPLAN [YouTube playlist](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXeET4GjfkHs), and of course also on our self-hosted [Watch EEG](https://watch.eeg.cl.cam.ac.uk). I wrote up [the talks and thoughts](https://anil.recoil.org/notes/pldi26-propl), and am very excited that [Cyrus Omar](https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~comar/) is visiting Cambridge on sabbatical for the year!\n\nThe Evidence TAP database is up to ~20 million fulltexts now, thanks to an import from Semantic Scholar as well as the download engine continuing to get education and conservation fulltexts.\n\nI also published [ocaml-tdmrep](https://tangled.org/anil.recoil.org/ocaml-tdmrep), an OCaml implementation of the W3C [TDM Reservation Protocol](https://www.w3.org/community/reports/tdmrep/CG-FINAL-tdmrep-20240202/), to help ensure the literature downloader respects publishers' machine-readable text-and-data-mining reservations while crawling open access versions.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/plan-26-35-all-i-want-for-tesseramas-is-gp-u", "canonical_source": "https://anil.recoil.org/notes/2026w35", "published_at": "2026-08-30 00:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-01 21:25:00.590068+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "machine-learning", "ai-research", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["GeoTessera", "Source Cooperative", "Tessera", "Julia Guerrero-Viu", "PASTIS-R", "DEN", "Evidence TAP", "Mark Elvers"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/plan-26-35-all-i-want-for-tesseramas-is-gp-u", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/plan-26-35-all-i-want-for-tesseramas-is-gp-u.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/plan-26-35-all-i-want-for-tesseramas-is-gp-u.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/plan-26-35-all-i-want-for-tesseramas-is-gp-u.jsonld"}}