Notes from Christina Sørensen — software engineer, NixOS Steering Committee, author of eza.
I almost didn’t post this. But I’ve seen how others have represented this issue in public and semi-public channels, and I felt it was good to both correct the record, and also ensure that I’m not misrepresented, so that the electorate has an accurate view of my perspective on moderation, not a second hand one. I’m closing the door on anyone using my silence to misrepresent my position or distance…
A quick one. NixOS recently got a trademark. Awesome. Now what. As a governance insider, I’ll give you a general gist of what this likely means: Using the word “NixOs” for products generally wont be permitted. “Nix” can be used in some cases, albeit only when there is no confusion or product conflict with official NixOS foundation projects. Using the NixOS logo may also get a similar treatment, so…
What a Danish threat assessment gets right about AI I read Det biologiske trusselsbillede 2026 , published this summer by the Centre for Biosecurity and Biopreparedness (CBB) at Statens Serum Institut. It’s the first update since 2020 to Denmark’s national assessment of man-made biological threats, and on artificial intelligence I think it brings a more holistic perspective than is typically seen…
A follow-up to running Gemma 4 on a 2016 Xeon. I took that 25-flag config apart one flag at a time, to find which ones actually do the work, which are harmful, and which are just pitfalls. Most of my tuned config will do nothing for the typical user. A couple of weeks ago I got Gemma 4, a 26-billion-parameter model, running at reading speed on a 2016 Xeon with no GPU and 128 GB of DDR3 . That post…
The previous post covered getting Gemma 4’s MTP drafters quantized and paired with a verifier. This one is about running the result on a machine that has no business running it. I have a recycled server. To its credit, it has a whopping 128 GB RAM, but it’s DDR3… That RAM is 5-6 times slower than the current best laptop ram. It also has a single Intel Xeon E5-2620 v4 from 2016, which is about 5…
A while after Gemma 4 came out, Google released a set of Multi-Token-Prediction (MTP) drafters for it. Pairing a large model (the verifier ) with a tiny MTP drafter (the assistant ) enables speculative decoding: the small model guesses the next few tokens, and the big model verifies them in one parallel pass. When it works, the throughput gain is most of the way to free. To put it shortly: MTPs…
I’ve been quantizing Gemma 4 and it’s MTP drafters recently. The next two posts are about how that went. This one is about why it was so much work. When a lab releases a model under an open license, what they almost always release is the weights. Sometimes a tokenizer. Occasionally a short technical report. Rarely the training data, data-processing code, training code, evaluation harness, or the…
And here I thought we’d have a boring election cycle If you’ve not been following NixOS governance, recently the moderation team decided to all collectively resign. I’ve been informed that I’ve been one of the people that certain steering committee members have wanted to moderate harder, specifically because I’ve been calling out their undisclosed conflicts of interest, and providing actual level…
A Global Network of Ground Stations At 38c3 I attended a workshop on building a sattelite ground stations for communicating with LoRa based sattelites, typically used for research or weather probes. Generally speaking, these are so called “cubesats” , which are small, relatively inexpensive sattelites usually built up of off the shelf components in a modular fashion. In fact, it turns out that…
What is a conventional commit? In case you’re not aware, conventional commits is a standard format for writing commit summaries. It looks like this. build(deps): bump git2 from 0.18.3 to 0.19.0 Bumps [git2](https://github.com/rust-lang/git2-rs) from 0.18.3 to 0.19.0. - [Changelog](https://github.com/rust-lang/git2-rs/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md)…
I should preface this with the fact that I am by no means a lawyer or anything like it. Nothing here constitutes a legal argument or should be taken as true. I may be completely wrong or have missed crucial details. As part of a rust project I’ve been working on at dayjob, I’ve had to audit all dependencies for license compatibility with the AGPLv3, our preferred license. Sadly, I encountered what…
This isn’t the article that’s gonna explain merge vs rebase for people that haven’t used git before (sorry). Rather, this is gonna be about some more meta things for maintainers, release engineers, and other people who care about development process. Git gives you a lot of options. How you use it isn’t prescribed in advance. There are a lot of ways that people might use git differently, but here,…
Introduction Git is often perceived as a necessary evil, a tool to be tolerated rather than mastered. But treating your primary work tool as a mystery is a vulnerability. When the abstraction leaks — and it always does — the developer who understands the internals can surgically repair the damage. In contrast, those who rely on surface-level knowledge often leave behind a sloppy timeline. A…
Foreword from the future As 2025 is coming to an end… I’ve been reading over some of my old posts. The tone here is obviously on the more polemic side, but it would be a disservice to my former self to erase the record of my views on academia when I was on the inside. I think it’s worthwhile to conserve not just the more reasoned and polished version of “why did you leave academia” — that I now…
This isn’t a tutorial, it’s more a “here’s what that thing I’ve been working on is about.” [1] I like Nix a lot. It’s a so called “obvious good idea”. Even with much of its baggage, some technical, some cultural, it’s probably one of the most interesting things currently happening in software, and you’re making a mistake if you’re not paying attention to it. My desktop, laptop, build server, and…
This post is very low quality for comedic effect. A detailed list of instructions Take one nix , apply this patch [1] : What does this do? It adds a new token $ to the nix languages parser and exposes it as __dollar , essentially by copying the way this works for __lessThan . Hack on your nix: nix develop ./bootstrap.sh ./configure $configureFlags --prefix=$(pwd)/outputs/out…
Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you. – The Puppet Master The Beginning May 3, 2014. Benjamin “Ogham” Sago has just made his first commit to Exa . This will go on to be one of the most used ls alternatives, with ~22k stars, 655 forks, and 151 contributors. For almost a decade, he maintains exa. Yet, around 2021, activity is drastically slowing. Eventually, the project falls dead.…
Learning The better you get the worse you get. The more I learn the more I learn that I don’t know much. This can be overwhelming at times. I think it’s pretty normal to feel this way. But I also see it can easily become a limiting type of negative feedback. Looking back at old projects, old essays, old anything, I see flaws. I was so naive. Simultaneously, I feel like I see how my output has…