fidzu : geek

Seattle was late to the light rail party -- the city rejected transit ballot measures in 1968 and 1971, missing out on federal funding that built Atlanta's MARTA, and didn't approve a plan including rail until 1996 -- but the Pacific Northwest city is now in the middle of a multibillion-dollar building boom that has produced the highest post-pandemic ridership recovery of any US light rail system. The Link system opened its first line in 2009, funded largely by voter-approved tax measures from 2008 and 2016. The north-south 1 Line now stretches 41 miles after a $3 billion extension to Lynnwood opened in June 2025 and a $2.5 billion leg to Federal Way debuted in December. Ridership is up 24% since 2019, and 3.4 million people rode Link trains in October 2025. Test trains have been running since September across the I-90 floating bridge over Lake Washington -- what Sound Transit claims is the world's first light rail on a floating structure -- preparing for a May 31 opening. The Crosslake Connection is part of the 2 Line, a 14-mile, $3.7 billion extension voters approved in 2008 that was originally slated to open in 2020. The expansion hasn't come without problems. Sound Transit faces a roughly $30 billion budget shortfall, and a planned Ballard extension has ballooned to $22 billion, double original estimates.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

16 Jan 2026 6:13pm GMT

Verizon is offering affected customers a $20 account credit following a nationwide network outage on Wednesday that left users across the US unable to connect, forcing phones into SOS mode for roughly ten hours before the carrier restored service around 10:15PM ET. Customers will receive a text message when the credit becomes available and can redeem it through the myVerizon app by clicking "Take action."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

16 Jan 2026 5:25pm GMT

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said this week that his company's software engineering headcount has remained "mostly flat" over the past year as internal AI tools have delivered substantial productivity gains. Speaking on TBPN, Benioff said he has about 15,000 engineers who are "more productive than ever." The company has redirected its hiring efforts toward sales and customer engagement roles, hiring 20% more account executives this year as it pushes its Agentforce agentic AI service. Human salespeople remain essential for explaining the "intricacies and nuances" of agentic AI to skeptical enterprise customers, he argued. Other parts of the business have seen deeper cuts. In a separate appearance on The Logan Bartlett Show, Benioff said that Salesforce had reduced its customer support workforce by roughly 50%.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

16 Jan 2026 4:49pm 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