@avsm

Professor of Planetary Computing @Cambridge_CL

 Cambridge, England
anil.recoil.org/
Joined April 2008
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Made the cover of @CACMmag 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 writeup has been a long time coming: cacm.acm.org/research/a-deca…. A heady mix of Go, OCaml, Swift, Linux, nested kernels, ancient network protocols like SLIRP, all mixed up into a container cauldron... The article also comes with cool art and a video interview that was a lot of fun to film around @pembroke1347 and my overgrown office. I left some musings on my blog too anil.recoil.org/notes/cacm-d… with @mugofsoup and @justincormack
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oh come it's not so hard to escape this just shift-Z^w^q:FFSWTF^zkillall vimfg^Zsudo reboot
Ferenc Huszár
@fhuszar6h
I heard OpenAI are testing GPT-7 Astra inside vim so the agents can’t escape.
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weird bug of the week: why's there a 1-in-5 checkerboard pattern in our species occurrence data? only (on) the amazon! github.com/gbif/occurrence/i…

AWS open-data snapshots missing every 20th parquet file (~5% of records) since 2025-07-01 · Issue...

TL;DR Details: Since the 2025-07-01 snapshot, every monthly occurrence snapshot in the GBIF open-data buckets on AWS is missing the parquet files whose number is a multiple of 20 (000000, 000020, 0...

github.com
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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.
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Anil Madhavapeddy retweeted
KC Sivaramakrishnan@kc_srk23h
FP Launchpad is running a PL Winter School between Dec 7th and 11th at IIT Madras: fplaunchpad.org/winter-schoo…. Application to attend will open early next week. Please share widely.
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Signals and Threads and the Slate Gabfest are the only two podcasts I listen to regularly, I think because the presenters share my basic sense of curiosity (any topic is interesting if you look at it right!) and thus avoid the podcast falling into a repetitive rut. That's your 20% contribution Ron!
Yaron (Ron) Minsky
@yminskyOct 11
I'm desperately curious to know what the 20% of me "doing my thing" consists of....
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Is this the first time an open source packaging maintainer has been covered by the beeb? bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cw30… Definite xkcd.com/2347/ vibes

The PHP developer who became the unsung hero of the internet

The PHP developer who became the unsung hero of the internet

bbc.co.uk
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Anil Madhavapeddy retweeted
Ilya Sergey@ilyasergeyOct 23
Historical moment indeed: formal methods are now verifying real-world binaries at scale! But the specs are single-entry (not API), proofs are huge, and reuse is largely copy-and-adapt. Compositional reasoning and modular abstractions are how the FM community can make this scale.
Anthropic
@AnthropicAIOct 22
New on our Frontier Red Team blog: using Claude to formally verify software at large scale. Formal verification can prove that code is free of certain bugs, but historically it has only been feasible for small codebases (or required a lot of expert time). With AI models, however, this is beginning to change. In collaboration with @theoremlabs, we used Claude to prove security properties in over one hundred real-world open-source libraries over the span of a few weeks. Read our research in full here: anthropic.com/research/forma…

LLMs are making formal software verification feasible at a much larger scale

Claude formally proved security properties in the compiled code of 123 open-source libraries. Along the way, it found bugs that had eluded detection for years.

anthropic.com
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Anil Madhavapeddy retweeted
marius eriksen@mariusOct 23
What if your workspace was a live wiki, a graph with everything extractable, linkable; and that works across whatever hosts you do your work on? And what if it was optimized for reading?
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Someone at lunch commented to me that they'd heard on the BBC today that an AI hallucination drug called PHP has been doing the rounds...
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I’m 1 Uni of Cam, 2 Citrix and 3 Jane Street logos behind the times on my swag, if I’m not mistaken
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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
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The @trailofbits+OCaml "patch the planet" week is ongoing, and the lesson we've learnt is to ponder really, really, really hard about exposing more C interfaces from our favourite programming languages ever again
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Anil Madhavapeddy retweeted
Ben James
@BenJames_____Oct 20
10 Downing Street is recruiting a Director of AI in the No10 Policy Unit, where I work. They will advise the Prime Minister on AI. This is an important role for the UK!
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.plan-2026-w42: Lectures start with unexpected questions as always, and a sampling of some of the 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 from... well, read on for yourself: anil.recoil.org/notes/2026w4…

.plan-26-42: Tails of the unexpected

Back to lecturing Foundations of CS, why List.tl raises, a record Tessera crowd at the CCI, and a sample of termtime meetings from Japanese AI governance to NVIDIA and samosa socials.

anil.recoil.org
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One of the best things to happen to Indian academia is this human dynamo moving back to India and making awesome things happen there. IIT-M is lucky to have him and smart to promote him.
KC Sivaramakrishnan@kc_srkOct 19
To those I was assisting: please note that I’ve now stopped assisting and started associating.
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something that trips up students every single year is why OCaml (and Scala and Standard ML and GHC) have list tail functions that error on an empty list, instead of just returning an empty list
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Next week: the dramatic discovery of zstd
ClaudeDevs
@ClaudeDevsOct 16
We keep improving performance across Claude, and you may have noticed it starts responding sooner! Claude Code now gzips the conversation it sends on every turn, so it reaches the model faster. Cloud sessions also start up as soon as you start typing.
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And me! I'm deploying so many throwaway services on @exedev and it's got an auth layer so it can be selectively shared
Darren Shepherd
@ibuildthecloudOct 16
exe.dev is basically my digital ocean replacement since digital ocean sold their soul to share holder value. I really like the exe.dev pricing/resource model. Great for me, don't know if it's great for them :)
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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 :-)
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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/2026w4…

.plan-26-41: Hello, is it Part II you're looking for?

The Foundations of Computer Science notes are now done as a Forest with live OCaml toplevels, and Part II projects sorted.

anil.recoil.org
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