Volatile Testimony

$ uname -r 7.1.5-cachyos That is one line of Nix: boot.kernelPackages = pkgs.cachyosKernels.linuxPackages-cachyos-latest; The line is boring.

I have a flagship android phone, a Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra, to be exact.

The Premise I have a NixOS config that assumes a lot: a tmpfs root, a niri compositor, Noctalia, a hybrid AMD/NVIDIA GPU, sops-nix secrets at /run/secrets, MicroVMs for Tor egress.

I was running a shell MCP server in Claude without thinking about it.

A year ago I blew away my root partition and replaced it with a tmpfs.

We have all seen them in screenshots, the ubiquitous Linux flavor symbol and a bunch of specs with two rows of colored squares.

Claude Code is a brilliant agent trapped in a text box.

A NixOS switch that restarts your display manager will kill said display manager halfway through if you started it from a terminal inside that session. greetd goes down, your compositor goes with it, your terminal a mere whelped babe/child of the composit…

Most NixOS configs describe what a system has. volnixos is built around what a system doesn’t have: a persistent root filesystem.

Every AI coding session ends the same way.

Claude Code is careful engineering trapped in an invisible container.

The standard approach to a pentesting environment is a Kali VM: download a 4GB ISO, allocate 40GB of disk, boot it with VirtualBox, and accept that you’re running a completely separate OS that diverges from your host the moment you update anything.

Every repo I ship and every post on this site carries a small mark: built with AI, not by AI.

MCP servers run with your full user permissions by default.

Moving a directory into the persistence list on an impermanent NixOS host looks trivial until nixos-rebuild switch dies with: home-lowcache-.gemini.mount: Mount path /home/lowcache/.gemini is not canonical (contains a symlink).

Here’s a heresy for a NixOS blog: sometimes I just want to install a binary.