🌞 Adaptive Lighting: Home Assistant custom component for auto-adjusting color temperature and brightness of lights based on daylight. 🌙
Bas Nijholt
Senior Staff Engineer at IonQ
Hi, my name is Bas. I am a: Python and open-source enthusiast, Ph.D. in theoretical quantum mechanics, and full-time nerd. Originally I am from the Netherlands, but currently, I live near Seattle, Washington, USA.
Here (or here ) are some pretty pictures that I took, this is where I did my Ph.D., I work at IonQ (previously at Microsoft Quantum ), and see my LinkedIn for some technical details on my daily activities.
Interests
- Quantum Mechanics
- Landscape photography
- Open-source software
- Hiking in the mountains
- Homelab and home automation
- Artificial Intelligence
Education
- 2020PhD in computational Quantum MechanicsTU Delft
- 2015MSc in Applied PhysicsTU Delft
- 2012BSc in Applied PhysicsTU Delft
Blog Posts
Sparse scribblings on a variety of topics
- There is a lot of noise about elaborate AI workflows that 99% of people don’t need. Install it, use the best model, and ask it everything. The rest can come later, or never.
- Whenever I say that self-hosting AI is not economical, people hear that I am against self-hosting. I am not: I run Qwen3.8 27B at home and think open-weight models are great. This post compares it with GPT-6 Luna on the same benchmark, and explains why batching makes datacenters win.
- MindRoom grew one small group at a time at IonQ, until a company-wide demo made hundreds of people sign up in a day. What surprised me is that the heaviest users include engineers who already live in their coding agents.
- Friends keep asking how my homelab works, so I wrote it all down, starting from zero. Four NixOS machines run about 150 containers behind one Traefik front door, and with WireGuard and my own Headscale server I reach my self-hosted services from anywhere over encrypted HTTPS connections, while strangers on the internet get nothing. The part I think is the coolest is the balance: everything is declarative and lives in git, but with as little machinery as possible.
- Two years ago, a friend and I backed each other up through a TrueNAS VM on an iSCSI zvol. Now that I run NixOS, I replaced that machinery with zfs-tenant: OpenZFS delegation and a quota keep him inside one dataset, and a small SSH forced command plus zfs zone make sure he sees nothing else of my pool. His keys never leave his house, and a VM test checks each of those claims.
- TypeSafe’s Jev, a new fast and cheap classifier model that doesn’t require fine-tuning, was suddenly, literally everywhere I looked, so I tried it in MindRoom. I now use it for small decisions I would never have spent an LLM call on, like whether a “thanks” should interrupt an agent that is still working.
- I have run coding agents in YOLO mode since I started using them. Instructions in AGENTS.md did not stop them from force-pushing or merging PRs, so hooks do. As the models got better, I added an override the agent may only use after I explicitly approve an action.
- A small Docker recipe for running Diction’s streaming gateway against Qwen3-ASR through Agent CLI, plus a test from a bar in the Netherlands, an ocean away from the GPU.
- After replacing Proxmox and TrueNAS with NixOS, my GPU machine was the last one still on btrfs, picked years ago because forum threads had me convinced that ZFS and NixOS were a bad combination. What finally pushed me to fix it: I run AI agents in YOLO mode all day, the stories about frontier models wiping home directories kept coming, and my restic backups needed an hour and a half just to scan a hundred million files. The audit’s first finding: the backups had been silently dead for four months. This is the story of auditing my backups, verifying the restore path end-to-end, and wiping my daily driver so that nine machines share the exact same ZFS setup.
- TrueNAS was the last appliance OS in my homelab. The build-system change was the last straw, but the itch had been building for a while: too much UI state, unclear defaults, and virtualization churn around Incus. This is the story of how I gave an AI agent root-capable SSH access with strict instructions not to change anything, used it to inspect the live machine, recreated the config declaratively, and built a VM rehearsal to prove disko would only wipe the boot disk.
Projects
Open-source, see my GitHub profile
Many things in my house are automated using the Python Home Assistant framework. I’ve built some interseting automations and app, see my config files and AppDaemon apps 🏠 🤖
Python-adaptive
1.2kadaptive: tools for adaptive parallel sampling of mathematical functions to speed up simulations by orders of magnitude ⚙️
📱 lovelace-ios-themes: Home Assistant themes inspired by iOS Dark and Light Mode, with 28 variants built on HomeKit backgrounds. 🎨
💻 rsync-time-machine.py: Your cross-platform, flexible, and incremental backup solution using rsync, offering Time Machine-style backups with added versatility. 💽🚀. 🔄
🏠 Home Assistant Streamdeck YAML: Control Home Assistant on Stream Deck across all OS with YAML configuration. 🎛️
Compose Farm
316🚜 Compose Farm: Run Docker Compose stacks across multiple hosts over plain SSH, with no agents to install. Stacks stay plain folders you can keep in Git, and cf apply makes the hosts match your config. 🐳
💻 Markdown Code Runner: Auto-execute code blocks in Markdown files and refresh the output in-place. 🔄
home-assistant-macbook-touch-bar: Displaying sensors and controlling IoT devices using the Macbook Pro’s touch bar 🤖💻
aiokef: An asyncio Python library that provides an API to communicate KEF speakers 🔈
thesis-cover: each unique copy is designed using quantum simulation data, neural networks, machine learning, and Python
adaptive-scheduler: Run simulations adaptively on many cores (>10k) and easily manage starting and restarting using mpi4py.futures, ipyparallel, or dask-mpi 🎉
pfapack
23🔢 pfapack: Efficient numerical computation of the Pfaffian for dense and banded skew-symmetric matrices, packaging the algorithms from arXiv:1102.3440 by Michael Wimmer. 🧮
instacron: Instagram for the lazy - automatically upload a photo to Instagram with autogenerated caption containing #hashtags, a quote, and camera information 📸🌅
🤝 zfs-tenant: Give a friend a quota-capped corner of your ZFS pool for their raw encrypted backups, without giving them a shell. Their keys never leave their house, so you can’t read what they store. 💾
yaml2bib: Convert a readable yaml file with DOIs only to a properly formatted BibTeX file. 📃
🔁 pixi-to-conda-lock: Convert a pixi.lock into a conda-lock.yml, so you can use the fast pixi solver and still ship a conda-lock file. 🐍
thesis.pdf: Towards realistic numerical simulations of Majorana devices (2020)
🕸️ graphviz-anywidget: Interactive Graphviz widget for Jupyter with search, highlighting, and graph traversal, rendered by Graphviz compiled to WebAssembly. Built to visualize pipefunc pipelines. 🔍
🎤 wyoming-mlx-whisper: Wyoming protocol server for near real-time Whisper speech-to-text on Apple Silicon, for use with Home Assistant voice or agent-cli. 🍏
🖥️ slurm-usage: Save SLURM job efficiency metrics to Parquet before SLURM purges them after 30 days, and chart CPU, memory, and node usage per user and group. 📈
🔎 CodeStructure: Extract Python code signatures without execution, providing a clear structure overview. 📚
📅 calendar-of-life: Plot your life as a grid with one dot per week and one row per year, colored by life stage. Inspired by Kurzgesagt and Tim Urban. ⏳
📋 clip-files: Copy all files of a given type in a project to your clipboard, with their paths and a token count, ready to paste into ChatGPT or Claude. 🤖
hpc05: a thin wrapper around ipyparallel to easily start workers remotely on a HPC cluster 🖥
ipynb_git_filters: remove ipynb’s output on each commit to keep a clean history. Not very smart but very useful 🤖
🏷️ calver-auto-release: GitHub Action that creates a release with a Calendar Versioning (CalVer) tag on every commit to main. 📅
🔑 zfs-unlock: Unlock encrypted OpenZFS datasets automatically after every reboot, while the passphrases stay on a separate device (a Raspberry Pi, say) and travel over a restricted SSH channel. 🔒
⬇️ gh-download: Download files or folders from GitHub repositories, including private ones, using your existing gh CLI login. 📁
numthreads: Simple Python package to set the number of threads used by OpenBLAS, MKL, OMP, NumExpr, and Accelerate
🔌 matrix-mcp: Lets Claude Code, Codex, and other MCP clients read and write Matrix chats, including end-to-end encrypted rooms, so local coding agents can join MindRoom conversations. 💬
🗃️ github-backup-sync: Mirror every GitHub repository you have access to into local bare clones, with the gh CLI handling authentication. 💽
💰 tiller-streamlit: Streamlit dashboard and JSON API for the personal finance data in a Tiller spreadsheet. 📊
⚡ pytest-shm: pytest plugin that puts temporary files on the /dev/shm tmpfs, so test suites that fsync stop waiting on the disk. 🧪
WenFire: WebApp visualizing your path to financial independence, built with personalizable assumptions and interactive visualizations. Ignite your journey to early retirement! 💸
crypto-bot: an async cryptocurrency bot using zmq, asyncio, websockets and mad triangular arbitrage trading strategies ♲💵
Tying Quantum Knots. An online course for which I wrote a lot of code. See the course website which is generated using these Jupyter notebooks.
No projects match that search.Try another word, or show every one again.
Photography
The hobby
I enjoy traveling and photography.
The best photos I would like to share with the world, however, the problem is that I am too lazy to do so, therefore I wrote a program (instacron ) that will do that job for me.
It takes a photo and adds: a random quote, camera and location info, and #hashtags related to the photo.
More photos on Instagram.
Publications
Citation metrics at Google Scholar
- 2026Quantum-classical auxiliary field quantum Monte Carlo with matchgate shadows on trapped ion quantum computers
Physical Review Research (PRR), July 2026
- 2025Interferometric single-shot parity measurement in InAs–Al hybrid devices
Nature, February 2025
- 2023Pre-screening and tuning heterojunctions for topological quantum computer
US Patent 11,808,796 B2, November 2023
- 2022InAs-Al Hybrid Devices Passing the Topological Gap Protocol
Physical Review B (PRB), November 2022
- 2021Adaptive: parallel active learning of mathematical functions
Preprint, September 2021
- 2021
- 2020Enhanced proximity effect in zigzag-shaped Majorana Josephson junctions
Physical Review Letters (PRL), August 2020
- 2020Towards realistic numerical simulations of Majorana devices
Ph.D. thesis, May 2020
- 2019Reproducing topological properties with quasi-Majorana states
SciPost Physics (SciPost Phys.), November 2019
- 2019Spin-Orbit Protection of Induced Superconductivity in Majorana Nanowires
Physical Review Letters (PRL), May 2019
- 2017Supercurrent interference in few-mode nanowire Josephson junctions
Physical Review Letters (PRL), November 2017
- 2017Robustness of Majorana bound states in the short junction limit
Physical Review B (PRB), March 2017
- 2017Annealing helicase HARP closes RPA-stabilized DNA bubbles non-processively
Nucleic Acids Research (NAR), February 2017
- 2016Orbital effect of magnetic field on the Majorana phase diagram
Physical Review B (PRB), June 2016
- 2016Conductance quantization at zero magnetic field in InSb nanowires
Nano letters (Nano Lett.), April 2016
Contact
bas@nijho.lt- LocationKirkland, Washington
- DirectionsFind me online or in person in Kirkland, WA.
- Telegram@basnijholt
- Twitterbasnijholt
- GitHubbasnijholt
© OpenStreetMap contributors
Kirkland, WashingtonOpenStreetMap