fidzu : geek

After more than 13 years leading Lucasfilm, Kathleen Kennedy is stepping down. "When George Lucas asked me to take over Lucasfilm upon his retirement, I couldn't have imagined what lay ahead," said Kennedy. "It has been a true privilege to spend more than a decade working alongside the extraordinary talent at Lucasfilm." The Associated Press reports: The Walt Disney Co. announced Thursday that it will now turn to Dave Filoni to steer "Star Wars," as president and chief creative officer, into its sixth decade and beyond. Filoni, who served as the chief commercial officer of Lucasfilm, will inherit the mantle of one of the movies marquee franchises, alongside Lynwen Brennan, president and general manager of Lucasfilm's businesses, who will serve as co-president. Kennedy, Lucas' handpicked successor, had presided over the ever-expanding science-fiction world of "Star Wars" since Disney acquired it in 2012. In announcing Thursday's news, Bob Iger, chief executive officer of the Walt Disney Co. called her "a visionary filmmaker." Kennedy oversaw a highly lucrative but often contentious period in "Star Wars" history that yielded a blockbuster trilogy and acclaimed streaming spinoffs such as "The Mandalorian" and "Andor," yet found increasing frustration from longtime fans. Under Kennedy's stewardship, Lucasfilm amassed more than $5.6 billion in box office and helped establish Disney+ as a streaming destination -- achievements that easily validated the $4.05 billion Disney plunked down for the company. But Kennedy also struggled to deliver the big-screen magic that Lucas captured in the original trilogy from the late 1970s and early 1980s, and her relationship with "Star Wars" loyalists became a saga of its own.

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16 Jan 2026 10:00am GMT

In a reversal from previous years, U.S. carbon emissions rose 2.4% in 2025 compared with the year before. NBC News reports: The increase in greenhouse gas emissions is attributable to a combination of a cool winter, the explosive growth of data centers and cryptocurrency mining and higher natural gas prices, according to the Rhodium Group, an independent research firm. Environmental policy rollbacks by President Donald Trump's administration were not significant factors in the increase because they were only put in place this year, the study authors said. Heat-trapping gases from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas are the major cause of worsening global warming, scientists say. American emissions of carbon dioxide and methane had dropped 20% from 2005 to 2024, with a few one- or two-year increases in the overall downward trend. Traditionally, carbon pollution has risen alongside economic growth, but efforts to boost cleaner energy in recent years decoupled the two, so emissions would drop as gross domestic product rose. But that changed last year with pollution actually growing faster than economic activity, said study co-author Ben King, a director in Rhodium's energy group. He estimated the U.S. put 5.9 billion tons (5.35 billion metric tons) of carbon dioxide equivalent in the air in 2025, which is 139 million tons (126 million metric tons) more than in 2024. The cold 2025 winter meant more heating of buildings, which often comes from natural gas and fuel oil that are big greenhouse gas emitters, King said. A significant and noticeable jump in electricity demand from data centers and cryptocurrency mining meant more power plants producing energy. That included plants using coal, which creates more carbon pollution than other fuel sources. A rise in natural gas prices helped create an 13% increase in coal power, which had shrunk by nearly two-thirds since its peak in 2007, King said.

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16 Jan 2026 7:00am GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Screen time spent gaming or on social media does not cause mental health problems in teenagers, according to a large-scale study. [...] Researchers at the University of Manchester followed 25,000 11- to 14-year-olds over three school years, tracking their self-reported social media habits, gaming frequency and emotional difficulties to find out whether technology use genuinely predicted later mental health difficulties. Participants were asked how much time on a normal weekday in term time they spent on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and other social media, or gaming. They were also asked questions about their feelings, mood and wider mental health. The study found no evidence for boys or girls that heavier social media use or more frequent gaming increased teenagers' symptoms of anxiety or depression over the following year. Increases in girls' and boys' social media use from year 8 to year 9 and from year 9 to year 10 had zero detrimental impact on their mental health the following year, the authors found. More time spent gaming also had a zero negative effect on pupils' mental health. "We know families are worried, but our results do not support the idea that simply spending time on social media or gaming leads to mental health problems -- the story is far more complex than that," said the lead author Dr Qiqi Cheng. The research, published in the Journal of Public Health, also examined whether how pupils use social media makes a difference, with participants asked how much time spent chatting with others, posting stories, pictures and videos, browsing feeds, profiles or scrolling through photos and stories. The scientists found that actively chatting on social media or passive scrolling feeds did not appear to drive mental health difficulties. The authors stressed that the findings did not mean online experiences were harmless. Hurtful messages, online pressures and extreme content could have detrimental effects on wellbeing, but focusing on screen time alone was not helpful, they said.

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16 Jan 2026 3:30am GMT

Speaking of NixOS' use of 9P, what if you want to, for whatever inexplicable reason, use macOS, but make it immutable? Immutable Linux distributions are getting a lot of attention lately, and similar concepts are used by Android and iOS, so it makes sense for people stuck on macOS to want similar functionality. Apple doesn't offer anything to make this happen, but of course, there's always Nix. And I literally do mean always. Only try out Nix if you're willing to first be sucked into a pit of despair and madness before coming out enlightened on the other end - I managed to only narrowly avoid this very thing happening to me last year, so be advised. Nix is no laughing matter. Anyway, yes, you can use Nix to make macOS immutable. But managing a good working environment on macOS has long been a game of "hope for the best." We've all been there: a curl | sh here, a manual brew install there, and six months later, you're staring at a broken PATH and a Python environment that seems to have developed its own consciousness. I've spent a lot of time recently moving my entire workflow into a declarative system using nix. From my zsh setup to my odin toolchain, here is why the transition from the imperative world of Homebrew to the immutable world of nix-darwin has been both a revelation and a fight. ↫ Carette Antonin Of course it's been a fight - it's Nix, after all - but it's quite impressive and awesome that Nix can be used in this way. I would rather discover what electricity from light sockets tastes like than descend into this particular flavour of Nix madness, but if you're really sick of macOS being a pile of trash for - among a lot of other things - homebrew and similar bolted-on systems held together by duct tape and spit, this might be a solution for you.

16 Jan 2026 12:09am GMT

If you're only even remotely aware of the operating system Plan 9, you'll most likely know that it takes the UNIX concept of "everything is a file" to the absolute extreme. In order to make sure all these files - and thus the components of Plan 9 - can properly communicate with one another, there's 9P, or the Plan 9 Filesystem Protocol. Several Plan 9 applications are 9P file servers, for instance, and even things like windows are files. It's a lot more complicated than this, of course, but that's not relevant right now. Since Plan 9 wasn't exactly a smashing success that took the operating system world by storm, you might not be aware that 9P is actually implemented in a few odd places. My favourite is how Microsoft turned to 9P for a crucial feature of its Windows Subsystem for Linux: accessing files inside a Linux VM running on Windows. To put it briefly: a 9P protocol file server facilitates file related requests, with Windows acting as the client. We've modified the WSL init daemon to initiate a 9P server. This server contains protocols that support Linux metadata, including permissions. A Windows service and driver that act as the client and talks to the 9P server (which is running inside of a WSL instance). Client and server communicate over AF_UNIX sockets, since WSL allows interop between a Windows application and a Linux application using AF_UNIX as described in this post. ↫ Craig Loewen at Microsoft's Dev Blogs This implementation is still around today, so if you're using Windows Subsystem for Linux, you're using a little bit of Plan 9 as glue to make it all come together. Similarly, if you're using QEMU and sharing files between the host and a VM through the VirtFS driver, you're also using 9P. Both NixOS and GNU Guix use 9P when they build themselves inside a virtual machine, too, and there's probably a few other places where you can run into 9P. I don't know, I thought this was interesting.

15 Jan 2026 11:53pm GMT

Pharma execs had avoided conflict with Trump admin, but now join doctors in rebukes.

15 Jan 2026 11:01pm GMT

NYT says US hackers were able to turn off power and then quickly turn it back on.

15 Jan 2026 9:29pm GMT

An interesting new take on Trek includes some characters you already know.

15 Jan 2026 9:09pm GMT

Are you a normal person and thus sick of all the nonsensical, non-browser stuff browser makers keep adding to your browser, but for whatever reason you don't want to or cannot switch to one of the forks of your browser of choice? Just the Browser helps you remove AI features, telemetry data reporting, sponsored content, product integrations, and other annoyances from desktop web browsers. The goal is to give you "just the browser" and nothing else, using hidden settings in web browsers intended for companies and other organizations. This project includes configuration files for popular web browsers, documentation for installing and modifying them, and easy installation scripts. Everything is open-source on GitHub. ↫ Just The Browser's website It comes in the form of scripts for Windows, Linux, or macOS, and can be used for Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox. It's all open source so you can check the scripts for yourself, but there are also manual guides for each browser if you're not too keen on running an unknown script. The changes won't be erased by updates, unless the specific settings and configuration flags used are actually removed or altered by the browser makers. That's all there's to it - a very straightforward tool.

14 Jan 2026 12:42am GMT

In the recent blog post on the work funded by Sovereign Tech Fund (STF), we provided an overview of the "File Hierarchy for the Verification of OS Artifacts" (VOA) and the voa project as its reference implementation. VOA is a generic framework for verifying any kind of distribution artifacts (i.e. files) using arbitrary signature verification technologies. The voa CLI ⌨️ The voa project offers the voa(1) command line interface (CLI) which makes use of the voa(5) configuration file format for technology backends. It is recommended to read the respective man pages to get …

11 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

In 2024 the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) started funding work on the ALPM project, which provides a Rust-based framework for Arch Linux Package Management. Refer to the project's FAQ and mission statement to learn more about the relation to the tooling currently in use on Arch Linux. The funding has now concluded, but over the time of 15 months allowed us to create various tools and integrations that we will highlight in the following sections. We have worked on six milestones with focus on various aspects of the package management ecosystem, ranging from formalizing, parsing and writing of …

10 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

Did you know you can have newlines in pathnames? The design is very human and this absolutely doesn't have any unforeseen consequences! Also a friendly reminder that you can store anything on a nameserver if you try hard enough.

Originally posted by me on donotsta.re (2025-12-23)

09 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT