marimo @a@asentientbot.ca

Beware of geeks bearing gifts. When prison-tech companies started offering "free" tablets to America's vast army of prisoners, it set off alarm-bells for prison reform advocates - but not for the law-enforcement agencies that manage the great American carceral enterprise.

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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch

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alright it took the better part of my weekend but I finally back-ported Mastodon to iOS 4

It was kind of a trip out when I realized that the three primary colors aren't some objective fact of physics, but just an artifact of the kind of cones we have in our eyes.

this DLL would be better if it had more 0x90s in it

I saw this online somewhere and I just had to recreate it. This is my coding happy place.

Until I was about 14, I thought the cones you sometimes see dogs wearing were to make the dog's bark sound louder and, thus, more effective for scaring away potential burglars.

what i'm saying is: download the things you love. download even the things you like, that you find any significance in at all. hoard data. disk space scarcity is more or less no longer real if you have even a small amount of money to spend. anything that is not saved will be lost

One of my favourite graphics on Wikipedia is this illustration of the maximum dimensions of a PDF page: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Seitengroesse_PDF_7.png

Correction: not the maximum size of a PDF file, but a page within a PDF file. (Thanks Uwe.)

Curious what the two most dominant traits of American capitalism are? Hate suburbs? Want to know about my history sucking in mold and asbestos unfiltered? TODAY on LASERCHRONICLES: THE AMERICAN SHOPPING MALL EXPERIMENT: https://laserdyke.substack.com/p/the-uniquely-american-shopping-mall?r=50o2x&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

you can use computers every day for thirty years and still be utterly blown away by new error messages you cannot even begin to comprehend

Google has announced that they will now consider an account dead and delete it if it receives no logins for two years. If you have any gmail accounts you don't use often, or have custody of someone else's while they're in jail/the hospital/the tundra or whatever, you should set a recurring alarm on your calendar to manually log into it every few months.

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