Achieving the goals of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), requires robust monitoring and reporting to track progress and guide action. However, our ability to understand trends is challenged because biodiversity data are fragmented and biased. This stems from the many different approaches used to record data, aggregate records, and analyze them to detect trends and attribute causes.

Biodiversity is declining in many parts of the world. Biological diversity measurement and monitoring are fundamental to the assessment of the causes and consequences of environmental changes, identification of key areas for the protection of biodiversity or ecosystem services, determining the effectiveness of actions, and the creation of decision-support tools critical to maintaining a sustainable planet.

What if you could really revoke your actual biometric identity, and install a new one, by live rewriting your biological self? We propose some novel mechanisms for hot swapping identity based in novel biotechnology. We discuss the potential positive use cases, and negative consequences if such technology was to become available and affordable.

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.

Docker is a developer tool used by millions of developers to build, share and run software stacks. The Docker Desktop clients for Mac and Windows have long used a novel combination of virtualisation and OCaml unikernels to seamlessly run Linux containers on these non-Linux hosts.

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.