Switching to Picom (Compton) on the MATE desktop

You may have read some convoluted (and outdated—Compton was abandoned in 2017) tutorials on the matter like MakeTechEasier's, or perused the excellent Arch Wiki article's page on it to some despair, but if you are just a layperson who installed the MATE desktop for e.g. Ubuntu 20.04 (Fossa) and wants a slightly faster (i.e. GPU-accelerated) environment, there is a workaround that doesn't take too long to set up: …

[DRAFT] U.S. Obscenity Ban: Name & Blame

An 1873 federal bill to ban smut, abortion pamphlets, and sex toys was never found unconstitutional; instead, only the clauses that meaningfully impacted the ability of the American public to be sexually promiscuous were overturned, piecemeal, under the banner of "civil rights". I will attempt to give a breakdown (including partisan affiliation) of the people behind this bill's tortured history.

Python: Using XOFs for general-purpose Random

As always, one's own stack overflow answers make the best blog posts. In this case, we craft a version of random.Random with a few modifications: Pulls its data from an arbitrary stream (in our case, a DRBG such as a hash function or deterministic CSPRNG) Wastes noticeably fewer bits when generating random integers Has fixed code for .shuffle, on the offchance CPython ever changes theirs, and to make it …