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!

Python has no(?) multiset

I saw an online resource that claimed “The collections.Counter class in the Python standard library implements a multiset (or bag) type that allows elements in the set to have more than one occurrence.” However, (and despite the fact that he is quoting comments in the CPython source code,) this is misleading. While the collections.Counter class does allow you to have more than 1 occurrence of elements in a set, …

Weird issues trying to transfer a domain (XYZ's EPP infrastructure broken?)

tldr: XYZ infrastructure is literally collapsing, they couldn't transfer in one of their own domains without a staff override. Initial transfer attempt Namecheap e-mails me the “transfer Authorization Code” Gen.xyz web interface claims “Invalid EPP Code” I contact Gen.xyz support Gen.xyz staff tells me“Please request a new EPP code from Namecheap” I contact Namecheap support via web chat “I need a new EPP for my domain, ishygddt.xyz; XYZ support …

EC point serialization formats

I looked into this when trying to make a piece of toy software to serialize and de-serialize *all* OpenSSH-supported public key formats. While OpenSSH uses standardized formats for private keys, the ssh-* AAAA/3NzaC0… format you're used to pasting into remote servers is actually a "proprietary" (though with freely-licensed spec and implementation) encoding—it's not JSON, and not any standardized BER/DER codec; instead, it's mostly a Length-Value encoding (think TLV without the T) …