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setheronon Linux 7.3

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

setheronon Butlerian Jihad

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

setheronon apsw: Another Python SQLite Wrapper

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.

setheronon Nix wrote half of my debugger

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

setheronon Rewind VM: a flaky build you only catch once

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

setheronon Linux containers in 500 lines of code (2016)

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

setheronon Rewind VM: a flaky build you only catch once

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.

setheronon I am done with this shit

Code models and linking of objects.

setheronon I am done with this shit

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.

setheronon A build graph that rolls dice

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

setheronon Executable Is a SQLite Database

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

setheronon Executable Is a SQLite Database

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.

setheronon Executable Is a SQLite Database

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.

setheronon Executable Is a SQLite Database

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

setheronon Executable Is a SQLite Database

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

setheronon Executable Is a SQLite Database

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

setheronon Three ways to smuggle SQLite into Nix

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.

setheronon Three ways to smuggle SQLite into Nix

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

setheronon Solo – a .so loader for static Linux binaries

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?

setheronon Super Mario Derivations

(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

setheronon The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

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

https://imgflip.com/i/aye90c

setheronon Linux kernel will support $ORIGIN, sort of

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

setheronon Linux kernel will support $ORIGIN, sort of

Feel free to email me! (author)

setheronon Linux kernel will support $ORIGIN, sort of

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.

setheronon Linux kernel will support $ORIGIN, sort of

(author) YESSSSSSS

setheronon Linux kernel will support $ORIGIN, sort of

(author) You did a great job articulating the points!

setheronon Don't you mean extinct?

I don't want to curate my own AGENTS file. I'd rather just copy someone else's verbatim similar to code formatting style.

Fabien, care to share your whole file? I'll plug it into my NixOS machine.

setheronon An update on residential proxies and the scraper situation

https://fzakaria.com/2026/07/09/who-does-anubis-actually-sto...

I wrote about this recently as well.

setheronon A native graphical shell for SSH

I'm confused -- does this compile it live when the server ships code? How do we resolve dependencies, toolset etc.. Is the idea to just pick an old enough platform toolchain you expect to be present?

setheronon A TacoSprint 2026 Retrospective

We also wrote an academic-style trip report at https://fzakaria.com/assets/pdfs/Attention_Nix_and_Tacos_is_... (arxiv submission is pending!)