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You may have read some convoluted (and outdated—Compton was abandoned in 2017) tutorials on the matter like MakeTechEasier's, or perused the excellent Arch Wiki article's page on it to some despair, but if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.

Javascript: calling asynchronously-initialized libraries from synchronous code

With the power of await, this isn't so difficult: let nacl, scrypt; function main() { /* Synchronous code that calls nacl and scrypt */ } (async () => { [nacl, scrypt] = await Promise.all([new Promise(nacl_factory.instantiate), new Promise(scrypt_module_factory)]); return main(); })();