I’ve been on PTO for the past two weeks to recharge and I am feeling energized to go back to work tomorrow. Part of this is getting the rest I’ve needed and spending time on my hobbies. But another part of this is the massive shift in public opinion on LLMs and their usefulness. I thought LLMs were a dead-end tech and not a path to true AGI (Artificial Generalized Intelligence - the holy grail of computer science) around 2023 or 2024, so seeing the entire industry be fully onboard with this tech has been very demoralizing. It has done nothing but take up space from real research that could be happening. I used to love reading Hacker News every day to expand my knowledge, but the majority of the content the past few years have just been “how you can better utilize LLMs”. So let’s start by talking about the problems with them.

I’ve been interested in algebraic effects in programming languages for a while, but they’ve been theoretical-only for a while. That’s soon to change though!

OCaml early on adopted algebraic effects and handlers as a way to implement concurrency, something that had been lacking in the language until now. But changing the langugage’s memory model, runtime, garbage collector, etc. proved to be a long task.

OCaml 5.0 is on the horizon at last and includes an implementation of algebraic effects. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any good tutorials on the version of effect handlers in 5.0. I found a really good tutorial from 5 years ago that was based on a proposed version of OCaml effects, but nothing modern.

I currently work for a company called Pure Storage. One of their products is called Flashblade. I couldn’t find any examples on how to use Flashblade’s S3 capabilities programmatically anywhere online, so I’m putting this out to hopefully help people realize they can move their object store into their data center with very little changes to their code.

Code Snippets

Most of the work with the libraries I’ve used involves figuring out how to get the client configured properly. Once that’s done, all of the methods work just like they do with Amazon S3.