Artificial truth

In 2021, amongst other things, I

• Donated money:
  • 250 EUR to Nos Oignons.
  • 500 EUR to the Tor Project.
  • 133.70 EUR to vim, my daily driver for more than 10 years.
  • 150 USD/month for Rich Felker for his stellar work on musl.
  • 12 USD/month to Hector Marcan, for his work on Asahi Linux.
  • 10 USD/month for neovim, for being a healthy competitor to vim.
  • ~5000 USD to L214 for their amazing actions, investigations and campaigns.
  • ~3300 USD to the Citizen Lab for their exemplary work against spyware vendors.
  • ~1000 USD to ████████████, for his amazing work on ███████.
  • 1337 EUR to infokiosques.net to allow them to budget a redesign of the site's frontend.
  • ~5000 USD to Signal for allowing me to easily and securely communicate with friends and family.
  • ~5500 USD to Planned Parenthood Federation of America Global Programs and International Planned Parenthood Federation for kicking the patriarchy in the nuts.
• Read more books:
  • In French:
    • Ad Absurdo
    • Fermentations, since I missed bars.
    • Le vrai sexe de la vraie vie, awesome and refreshing.
    • La Caste des Méta-Barons, found childhod memories.
  • I Hate Fairyland :')
  • Effective C++, sad reading.
  • Liar Game, full of game theory ♥
  • What if, fun read, recommended.
  • 45/61 books for the Horus Heresy.
  • Mating in captivity, weird and a bit disappointing.
  • All Quiet on the Western Front, disappointed to not have read it in school as a kid.
  • Howl and other poems, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, …"
• Published 38 blogposts.
• Deployed an OONI probe.
• Played some videogames:
  • Superliminal, weird and refreshing.
  • A Plague tale: Innocence, great adventure game.
  • What remains of Edith Finch: amazing in every single way.
  • Dying light, amazing scenery, scary zombies, great level design, …
  • Rage 2, like the first one, but a bit better, still not ground breaking.
  • Metro Exodus - Enhanced edition, excellent post-apocalyptic FPS.
  • Deathloop, fun concept, another pleasant game from Arkane Studios.
  • Necromunda: Hired Gun, the best Warhammer 40k FPS I've player, but still pretty meh.
  • Unravel Two: terrific game to play with people who have never played video games before.
  • The Outer Worlds: glorious during the first few hours, utterly boring and disapointing aftewards.
  • GTFO: stealthy cooperative horror game, great with smart teammates, keyboard-breaking level of frustrating otherwise.
  • Styx: Shards of Darkness, way better than its previous opus (Styx: Master of Shadows), a great spiritual successor to Thief.
  • The unfinished Swan, by the same people who created "What remains of Edith Finch", nice, daring gameplay-wise, and poetic.
  • Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice: beautiful, tense, poetic and horrible, gandiose usage of sounds, simple yet amusing puzzles, … and the depiction of psychosis is beyond impressive.
  • Hitman, the World of Assassination trilogy. I have fond memories of playing the first one 21 years ago, and I was surprised how good and deep gameplay-wise the new ones are.
• Contributed to MusicBrainz
• Contributed to various software:
  • Jellyfin
  • OpenMW:
    • sysadmin work.
    • #include cleanup
    • a ton of small optimisations
    • continuous integration improvement
    • fuzzing and fixing the resulting crashes
    • moved the wiki from mediawiki to gitlab's wiki
  • Alpine Linux
  • AdGuardHome, because the web is a cesspool.
  • metasploit, to improve a bit Alpine Linux's security posture
  • recog, because it's used by rumble, which I use on my LAN.
  • hardened_malloc, because I'd like to package it in Alpine Linux.
  • isoalloc, mostly small changes and documentation/comparison
  • mimalloc-bench because I'm really curious about the performance tradeofs of secure allocators.
• Became a member of the Core Tor people.
• Switched from Picard to beets to tag my music
• Created a twitter account for this blog: @dustriorg
• Deprecated my old ssh-rsa key in favour of an ed25919 one.
• Reached a bit more than 550 possible subtitles for this blog.
• Joined the Satanic Temple, if only to spice up family reunions.
• Did gruesome old-school system administration for Nos Oignons
• Got the maximum score on SSL Labs and imirhil because I'm puerile.
• Deployed a rebuilderd instance, mentioned on reproducible-builds.org.
• Correctly deployed DKIM, DMARC, SPF, CAA, DNSSEC, MTA-STS, TLS-RPT, …
• Have been writing things on this little corner of the web since more than 10 years!
• Finally deployed IPv6, both on my LAN, and on some of my services, like this blog.
• Disabled logging in ~all my chat mediums, and enabled auto-expiration when possible.
• Co-organised ██████████ again, with Gynvael Coldwind, zetatwo, and Bitshift.
• Got an AKG K702: way more comfortable than my WH-1000XM3, and with a neutral sound.
• Refreshed a bit the theme of this blog: moving away from skeleton to milligram and simplifying its structure.
• Removed the Reddit app from my phone, because I've got better things to do with my life than doomscrolling.
• Attended Agarri's Burp training: I learned a few tricks, highly recommended if you don't know much about Burp.
• Published a short analysis of a Spectre exploit, which has been featured on Slashdot, Hackernews' frontpage, and a ton of news websites.
• Learned C++, an horribly mystical trigger-happy footgun language with a number of gotchas and edge cases seemingly between ℵ₀ and ℵ₁ depending on who you ask.
• Sold all my bitcoin for around 25.000 USD: I got them for free a couple of years ago, some from more shady sources than other, and didn't want to be part of the crypto-coin shitshow, even passively.
• Managed to take a one-week vacation to Verona, Venice and Como, reading books next to the pool away from screens. Of course, 4h after I left my flat, my whole infrastructure went down, but fortunately a helpful hand was able to power-reset it, but it was a nice exercise in "I'm on holidays: zero-fucks given about computers".
• Got navidrome accepted into the Google Summer of Code, and co-mentored a student, Samarjeet Singh, together with deluan, my partner in crime in this adventure and lead developer of navidrome.