setheron

proposed by John Ericsson (Nix core contributor) for the idea of Null namespaces to make namespaces cheaper for when doing finegrained sandboxed builds.

What about the cyborgs ? Whatever their name was.... I can't remember. But they were the "thinking machine" class?

I remember working on https://github.com/fzakaria/sqlelf and I was curious about some performance;

Immediately the maintainer responded with a very thorough set of benchmarks and improvements!

The nicest part was that it turns out we lived in the same small-ish town and I didn't even know it.

The kernel's RNG is seeded from a seed passed at boot.

Small update: https://fzakaria.com/2026/10/07/nix-wrote-half-of-my-debugge...

I have written https://fzakaria.com/2020/05/31/containers-from-first-princi... a while ago in similar vein.

You can ask for as many schedules as you need `rewind check --all --schedules 3000` (for 1 in 1_000 lets say) but the code also pushes the scheduler toward bad timing: it switches threads at random points and sometimes stalls a process for up to about a millisecond, the way a busy CI machine would.

Code models and linking of objects.

We can work on harder problems at the frontier of the models knowledge. I'm working on one such domain, and I find AI use helpful, but I still need to be incredibly astute.

Stuck feeling it's so cool and also so complicated.

You might like https://fzakaria.com/2026/08/24/actually-queryable-executabl...

I like your phrasing; I think too often we get caught trying to optimize for everything.

For my own edification I often let performance & size slip to see if I can re-imagine something simpler from the start from a complete new direction;

This is often the greenfield hubris because it doesn't have all the same battle-scars of the full implementation so I try to make sure I take a very different approach to make it worthwhile :)

Then I just have faith that performance and size can always be improved over time.

I won't share any feedback specially but choosing low level primitives as research I found challenging due to the unfamiliarty in peer review circles.

I enjoyed all the papers I read on my graduate classes that bordered on "art" whereas now they seem to be obsessed with performance only.

I might look at this next; with Nix it's easy to explore and rebuild seamlessly ;P

(author) I'm enjoying the comments. When I published a short-paper with this idea in academic circles, the feedback wasn't so kind

(author) In the post I say I did write sqlelf which is just that, sqlite + virtual tables prior to this.

That's an interesting idea as well. Daniel wrote https://github.com/danielfullmer/nkv which also was a pretty fun experiment on how to improve data access within Nix. I love these cursed ideas.

(author) If you have questions, happy to try and answer some.

If you dynamically sold an SO are you still static even if you did it "custom" ? At that point it's a dynamic loader in another name?

(author) -- fun to see this here. I wrote this on the way (on the airplane) to DEFCON34 and Nix Vegas[1] I didn't even get a chance to cruise around and see anything of DEFCON proper since the Nix community had me captive the whole time!

I gave 3 talks that I will update on my site[2] once they released.

[1]: https://nix.vegas [2]: https://fzakaria.com/talks

I dunno about all this hullabaloo. I'm at https://nix.vegas/ having fun and using Nix.

https://imgflip.com/i/aye90c

This also can be handled by binfmt_misc; I include a demo of it in a gist.

Feel free to email me! (author)

I would love to learn more about this; I'm deeply interested in replacing ELF with something either simpler or maybe leveraging sqlite for much of the functionality.

(author) YESSSSSSS