makeworld makew0rld

The Scott Alexander Email: An Explainer

So, Scott Alexander sent an email to someone in 2014. In 2021 the person who got that email thought that Scott was not being honest about his relationship to the neoreactionary movement, so they published it.

Although this has been widely available, even people who have read it have often missed what the email is saying. There are some cases of genuine ambiguity, where there can be more than one meaning. There are also cases where there is only one plausible meaning, but that meaning is expressed indirectly, subtly, or by linking to something else. Because what the email is saying can be difficult to understand, it seems like it would be of general interest to publish an explainer that went over these ambiguities and the links.

It has sometimes been said that this email should not be read because it was released without permission. This seems like a bad position.

First, because information is information. We know, due to the circumstances, that this was somewhat i

Debian 13

Caution Upgrading from Debian 12 to Debian 13 on machines with mdadm has intermittently failed for me; symptom is that grub EFI is not up to date and system boots into BIOS. Root cause under investigation; it might not be related to mdadm.

To start, read the official release notes.

If your install fits into "vanilla Debian plus maybe a handful of 3rd-party repos", then this guide for a simple upgrade to Debian 13 "trixie" from Debian 12 "bookworm" can be helpful. 3rd-party repos are handled with a find command.

Note upgrade is only supported from Debian 12 to Debian 13. If you are on Debian 11, upgrade to Debian 12 first. Then once on Debian 12, you can upgrade to Debian 13.

Update

I've put both the MP3 and M3U8 lists in one repo, hosted on Codeberg. It is mirrored to this gist.

This gist will be maintained, and supersedes all IRC and email description of Dioscuri.

Dioscuri, a Gemini-adjacent protocol for interaction

Dioscuri is a protocol intended to supplement Gemini for doing things like performing remote actions or running an application server. It is the POST to Gemini's GET. Dioscuri servers will run on a different port from Gemini servers, so that they do not interfere with each other; it will often be useful to run multiple servers on one host, so no fixed port is specified. The use of client certificates for authorization is strongly recommended, especially if requests are interpreted to affect server-side state.

The name "Dioscuri" is the Latin version of the Classical Greek name Διόσκουροι for the Heavenly Twins, Castor and Pollux/Polydeukes, who were called Gemini in Latin; the constellation is named after them. I say dee-OH-skoo-ree, but Greeks, classicists, and others should feel free to pronounce the name their way.

Great thanks to the members of [#gemini](ir

CBC Radio Stream URLs

Using these URLs, you can listen to CBC radio streams with applications like VLC or Transistor. The files are M3U playlists, so you can use them as-is, edit them to suit your tastes, or use individual URLs.

This playlist contains the .m3u8 URLs from the CBC Listen website, which uses the HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) protocol. The audio stream is broken up into multiple tiny files, which are then fed into the .m3u8 playlist file that delivers them to your computer in the right order. This should work with modern media players.

This legacy playlist uses good old-fashioned MP3 streams found on PublicRadioFan.com. It will work with older programs like Winamp that don't support HLS. I don't know how lo

ANSI Escape Sequences

Standard escape codes are prefixed with Escape:

Ctrl-Key: ^[
Octal: \033
Unicode: \u001b
Hexadecimal: \x1B
Decimal: 27

Thanks to /u/zpoo32 for reporting several issues in this list!

Deemix

deemix: just the cli and the library
deemix-pyweb: the app with a GUI
deemix-server: just the server part of deemix-pyweb

	#!/usr/bin/env bash

	# Based on https://gist.github.com/eduncan911/68775dba9d3c028181e4
	# but improved to use the `go` command so it never goes out of date.

	type setopt >/dev/null 2>&1

	contains() {
	# Source: https://stackoverflow.com/a/8063398/7361270
	[[ $1 =~ (^\|[[:space:]])$2($\|[[:space:]]) ]]

	Reverse Engineering the Apple Airscan / eSCL Protocol

	I am not certain of the origins, one person involved in IPP printing claimed it was proprietary of HP , but then again they have their own protocol. AirScan/eSCL is used by other manufacturers too like Xerox, Kyocera, Canon and more. Mopria also seems to claim some responsibility for it but then again it seems not completely. In any case it seems shrouded in such secrecy that to date several years after its implementation, unless someone wants to take it all apart.

	I offer this as my contribution. It is not perfect but almost there.

	As I began looking for information to make a scanner more compatible, I could only find fragments of information. Even Apple Developer Forums offered zero help.

	Server/Client in eSCL / AirScan:
	There is a “server”and a “client” the client can be a desktop computer or mobile device. The server is a scanner or another device configured to emulate a hardware scanner, even a desktop computer. In my case I did this on Linux, so

	#!/bin/bash

	IN=$1
	OUT=$2

	true ${SD_PARAMS:="-55dB:d=0.3"};
	true ${MIN_FRAGMENT_DURATION:="20"};
	export MIN_FRAGMENT_DURATION

	if [ -z "$OUT" ]; then