I've spent the last few months getting more familiar with Nix. Although "Nix" is an informal verb meaning to cancel, reject, or veto a plan or idea, and the term also functions as a noun representing "nothing" (derived from the German nichts), my interaction has been with the software aspect https://nixos.org/.
As a background, Nix is a powerful, functional package manager and build system designed for reproducible, declarative, and reliable software management. Key aspects of Nix technology include declarative configuration, reproducible builds, atomic upgrades/rollbacks and a pure functional language to define packages and configurations. There is also NixOS, a Linux distribution built on top of the Nix package manager which allows the entire operating system configuration to be declared and managed in a single file.
One of the best resources for grokking Nix is Dolstra's Phd thesis https://edolstra.github.io/pubs/phd-thesis.pdf. And in fact Dolstra was a speaker at https://planetnix.com/2025/speakers/ which I attended in Pasadena recently. The conference also featured an insightful talk from Shopify on their Nix usage and a surprisingly large presence of Anthropic folks in the vendor area. Maybe the latter detail explains why Claude Opus is so good at writing and debugging Nix derivations and closures?
Another speaker at PlanetNix was Kelsey Hightower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelsey_Hightower who at 45 noted that this was going to be his last conference talk. This was the first time I'd seen Kelsey in person. He opined about AI and its impact on software engineering as did many talks at the conference. His "I'm done with conference speaking at 45" definitely made me pause about the passage of time.
Speaking of the passage of time, fast forward a week or so from PlanetNix and today I noticed that the USPTO just issued US Patent #12,578,956. My issue rate has definitely dwindled and this one marks my 490th issued US patent. I was curiously hoping to hit 500 as a lifetime goal but the dozen or so applications left in suspended or office action status don't augur well for that milestone. To get an appreciation of the span of time here, my first issued patent was October 1999 https://patents.google.com/patent/US5940587A/en, or a quarter of a century ago...
Regarding the specific patent that landed today
I enjoyed my collaboration with these Intel colleagues working in this problem domain. The IP represents work done on system updates, an area that has been alternately touched upon other places https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tianocore-docs/Docs/master/White_Papers/A_Tour_Beyond_BIOS_Capsule_Update_and_Recovery_in_EDK_II.pdf, https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-6106-4, https://embeddedcomputing.com/technology/security/software-security/understanding-uefi-firmware-update-and-its-vital-role-in-keeping-computing-systems-secure, https://github.com/vincentjzimmer/Documents/blob/master/SF11_EFIS002_100.pdf, ....
Regarding the theme of the passage of time, of my co-inventors from 2021 when this was filed I believe they are now distributed as follows: Niv - Intel, Prashant - Microsoft, Subrata - Google, Ofir - Google, Baiju - retired, Yazan - Nvidia, Kumar - Google, Vincent - Anduril. So it looks like Google has the highest density here at 38% as these five years have progressed.
Speaking of progressing, time to progress to a non-blogging state and close this item. Good night.
