[DRAFT] Finite fields for mortal comprehension

So you've got the “natural numbers”, $\mathbb{N}=\left\{0, 1, 2, \dots\right\}$. Or the “counting numbers”, or whatever you want to call them. Addition works, and multiplication works. But subtraction is broken, because there isn't any natural number equal to $2-3$. We might think about fixing subtraction, and one way of doing this is by moving to the integers, which allows negative numbers: $\mathbb{Z}=\left\{\dots, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, \dots\right\}$. But …

Firefox: play videos on Rocky Linux / Red Hat 9

Red Hat / Rocky Linux doesn't include patent-encumbered video codecs out of the box, so sudo dnf install \ "https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/free/el/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E '%rhel').noarch.rpm" \ "https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/el/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E '%rhel').noarch.rpm" \ && \ sudo dnf install ffmpeg I didn't even need to restart Firefox afterwards; it just all seemed to start working immediately

Rocky Linux 9 & HP Elitebook 8470p

Annoyingly, the Rocky 9 installer ISO didn't come with the Wi-Fi drivers for my HP Elitebook 8470p. The laptop seems to have a “Intel Corporation Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 (rev 3e)” PCIe Wi-Fi adapter, which worked fine out-of-the-box on Ubuntu and every other distro I tried on it, but not this one. I diagnosed this via dmesg: [ 108.888963] Intel(R) Wireless WiFi driver for Linux [ 108.889046] iwlwifi 0000:25:00.0: enabling …

Attempt to recover Amazon Seller account linked to old phone number

tl;dr: actual human seller support is NOT available over email or phone; it's ONLY available through a portal that you can access if you're already logged in. If you can't access your account, you're just *screwed*. I'm posting this not to help anyone per se, but more as a scream into the void about Amazon's worthless Seller Support representatives. 8 months and 14 days after the day my account …

[DRAFT] Transcript: Babylon Bee congress testimony March 28 2023

(Personally, I think TBB is dead wrong here, and their opinion is actually dangerous. I’m unconvinced that UGC-centric websites should or even CAN be regulated like a utility. Dillon’s redactive quoting of §230 in the closing remark belies bad faith. I’m leaving this post tagged as “draft” because I haven't properly expressed my thoughts here, but I am archiving Dillon’s statement in full because I had a seriously hard …

[DRAFT] Bijection between strings and positive integers

It’s probably the case that all math is trivial. So the statement that “[some particular mathematical result] is trivial” would, then, be trivially true — and useless! It might be better to say that “all math is trivial — if you have the intuition for it”. And this problem was not at all trivial (for me) to figure out, however inevitable and even obvious it looks (to me) in …

Edgar Allan Poe Proves Stockfish Can't Exist

A summary of Edgar Allan Poe’s Maelzel’s Chess-Player. §1–§4, §6–10, §11–14, and §15–18 describe the physical appearance, (public) operation, and cultural/historical context of the chess robot; §5 and §19 actually present the argument that the robot can't be a “genuine” (or “pure machine”) mechanical chess player — that it must have a human operator. §5 sketches the outline of the argument: Abridged Original Verbiage It’s inconceivable that any physical …

Remove 1px bar at top of full-screen Firefox

If you have a keen eye, you probably noticed the 1-pixel black bar at the top of your screen when you enter F11-fullscreen in Firefox. To fix this, you'll need to create this file: /* …/Profiles/xxxxxxxx.default-esr/chrome/userChrome.css */ #fullscr-toggler { // background-color: red; display: none; } (If you can't figure out how to open that file or create it in the first place, this tutorial seems pretty good for Windows. …

Bijection between sets and multisets

To take a multiset and reversibly transform it into a set of the same cardinality … start with the multiset's smallest element, add 0 to it; then go to the next element (which might be a duplicate), and add 1 to it (which will guarantee it's no longer a duplicate); then go to the next element (which might still be a duplicate of the first), and add 2 to it (which will guarantee it's no longer a duplicate of the first or second elements), and so on. After this transformation is applied, you'll have a set with no duplicates, from a k−1-elements-larger universe, that can easily be transformed back by just subtracting instead of adding!