FPL Reading: 1 May 2026
A digest of posts from FPL members and collaborators.
FPL Members
KC Sivaramakrishnan
From Convergence to Confidence: Push-button verification for RDTs
What does it mean for a replicated data type to be correct? For most of the literature, my own prior work included, the answer has been convergence: two replicas that have applied the same operations end up in the same state. I argued in my PaPoC 2026 keynote last week that for…
Durwasa Chakraborty
On Shooting in Black and White (An Entropy Argument)
There’s a question I get asked often enough that I’ve started collecting answers for it: why do you shoot everything in black and white?
Friends
Anil Madhavapeddy
Helping tropical forest protection keep up with a fast-changing world
Our paper on learning lessons from past REDD+ over-crediting came out in Nature Communications today, led by Thomas Swinfield, and is the culmination of years of work in 4C. It’s a comprehensive ex-post synthesis of first-generation REDD+ projects worldwide, and I wanted to…
.plan-26-17: Unwedging kernels, dogfood deployments, and managing beef leakage
After the travel marathon of the past fortnight I got to catch up with hacking this week! I did pop down to London once for a Royal Society policy meeting on AI in science with the European Commission and discovered that the EU still has a (much-shrunken) delegation in London; a…
AI, science and the UK–EU relationship at the Royal Society
Following the US, China, France and India meetings, my policy bingo card continues with a Royal Society meeting on AI in Science with the European Commission. I discovered that the EU Delegation to the UK has an office in London that is much reduced since Brexit, but…
.plan-26-16: Chennai, Cambridge, Belfast: a week on the wing
I spent most of the week in the air with hops to Chennai, Cambridge and Belfast. The reason was the FP Launchpad ‘takeoff’ at IIT Madras where I spent half the week, in a campus teeming with banyan trees and monkeys! I’ve sketched out two project ideas inspired by the visit: an…