Artificial truth

In 2023, I did, amongst other things:

• Donated some money:
  • $400 to FSFE
  • $5000 to NOYB
  • $5000 to Riseup
  • $5000 to the Internet Archive
  • $5000 to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America
  • $1000 to days for girls, on the advice of chik from darkscience.
  • $200 each, as a Open Source Peer Bonus, courtesy of Google, to
    • Rich Felker for their work on musl.
    • Blaž Hrastnik for their work on Helix.
    • Justin Keyes for their work on Neovim.
    • Jean Abou-Samra for their work on Pygments.
• Read a couple of books:
  • Le tueur
  • Some Warhammer 40,000:
    • Sons of the Hydra, neat.
    • Dark Imperium (Anthology)
    • Shroud of Night, forgettable.
    • The Black Legion duology, solid.
    • Renegades: Harrowmaster, witty.
    • Assassinorum: Kingmaker, decent.
    • Night Lords: The Omnibus, outstanding.
    • The Deacon of Wounds great writing style.
    • Assassinorum: Execution force, forgettable.
    • The Infinite and the Divine, highly entertaining.
    • The End and the Death vol. 1, a teensy bit over the top.
    • The End and the Death vol. 2, almost there, almost there, ...
    • The Macharian Crusade Omnibus, a writing style a tad heavy.
    • The Dark Imperium trilogy, nice to see the setting moving forward!
    • The first 5 tomes of the Dawn of Fire heptalogy, definitely a series of books.
    • The Lion: Son of the Forest, I've seen Dragon Balls episodes with a quicker pace.
    • Finished the Beast Arises dodecalogy. The last chapter of the final book deserved a book on its own, instead of being speedrunned in ~30 pages.
  • It's OK to Be Angry About Capitalism
  • Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations: a reference
  • Beyond choices: The design of ethical gameplay
  • Non, le masculin ne l’emporte pas sur le féminin !
  • This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate
  • Break 'em Up: Recovering Our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money.
  • The Performance of Open Source Applications: contains some really nice tidbits.
  • The Architecture of Open Source Applications, Part 1.: computers were a mistake.
  • Kill It with Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems (and Future Proof Modern Ones)
  • Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech
  • Locksport - A Hacker’s Guide to Lockpicking, Impressioning, and Safe Cracking: great
  • How I Rob Banks (and other such places), written in an unbearably cocky style, mildly entertaining.
  • How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex: An Unexpected History, a bit too shallow for my taste.
  • The End of Average, great book, except the part where the author argues that the goal of schools is to prepare kids for jobs.
  • Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track, I'm not there yet, but it helped me understand some coworker's jobs and struggles.
  • Metal Gear Solid. Hideo Kojima's Magnum Opus: deluge of superlatives directed at Kojima, speculative opinionated wild rambling, no mention of the rampant sexism, typos and frenchisms, … prefer the wikipedia and fandom pages instead.
  • The Mirage: I was expecting more of a description of an alternative history than a novel with a lame plot and forgettable characters. The humour is goofy and unsubtle: a punk rock group called Green Desert has an anti-war anthem named "Arabian Idiot"; a morning talk show called Jazeera & Friends, … but this is completely on par with the post-11-September anti-muslim/Iraqi rhetoric, making it both funny and perfectly adequate.
• Moved back to France.
• Volunteered at a library.
• Refused to sell websec.fr
• Listened to some music.
• Attended some concerts:
  • Eisbrecher, along with Maerzfeld
  • Gojira, along with Alien Weaponry
  • Katatonia, along with SOM and Sólstafir
  • Heaven Shall Burn, along with Trivium, Malevolence, and Obituary
  • Igorrr, along with Der Weg einer Freiheit, Amenra, and Hangman's Chain
• Played some video games:
  • On a computer:
    • MyHouse.WAD: wow.
    • >observer_: didn't like it.
    • Sea of Thieves, ~ok with friends.
    • Blood West: Thief in the Far West.
    • Half Life: Alyx: impressive in every way.
    • High on Life: excruciatingly tedious at best.
    • Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty: glorious.
    • Rainbow Six: Siege: better than Counter Strike.
    • Hogwarts Legacy: breathtaking and well rounded.
    • Rewind or Die felt like playing resident evil again <3
    • Outer Wilds: the controls were too terrible for me to play.
    • The Last of Us Part 1: ok-ish, not my jam, Joel is a moron.
    • The Witcher 3 - Wild Hunt: when did video game get so long…
    • Apex Legends: a lame version of Titanfall 2, ok-ish when playing ranked.
    • Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters: XCOM with Grey knights.
    • Metal: Hellsinger: looked super-lame on gameplay videos, but was surprisingly fun.
    • Starfield: a buggy clunky quickly-boring Skyrim in space, quickly went back to Cyberpunk 2077.
    • Industria: catastrophic performances for looking utterly terrible, along with a clunky feeling, promptly uninstalled.
    • Journey to the Savage Planet: Rich in poop-oriented jokes, trying hard to be funny and maybe even subversive but systematically falling flat.
    • Baldur's Gate 3: not a fan of the Dungeons & Dragons dice-based gameplay, nor of the hard dialog choices cutting entire parts of the game, but still an amazing game.
    • Metal Gear Solid V: The Definitive Experience, so Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. I bought it after having seen the former being run at the AGDQ 2023. Truly amazing game overall, except for the sexualisation of the sole female character.
  • On a (glorious) Steam Deck:
    • UNDYING: nice zombie-related game.
    • God of War, surprisingly "wholesome".
    • Dredge, terrific indie game: gorgeous looking, simple yet gripping gameplay, interesting lore and story, …
    • Vampyr, because I miss Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. It could have been so much more instead of being "meh".
• Ported Snuffleupagus to PHP8.3.
• Contributed to a couple of software:
  • lite-xl
  • Alpine linux, by:
    • becoming a package maintainer
    • documenting a bit the compiler-based mitigations, and enabling some missing ones.
  • Because of runZero, I
    • contributed to recog to improve some of its fingerprints;
    • made it less trivial to detect Sonarr/Lidarr/Radarr/… versions.
  • isoalloc
  • pygments, mainly by adding lexers.
  • bazaar, making it work on Alpine Linux.
  • oss-fuzz, including some python fuzzers.
  • mimalloc-bench, resulting in some real world improvements.
  • mutagen, since it's used by mat2. I even integrated it into OSS-Fuzz.
  • metasploit, by doing a lot of code reviews for pull-requests, and landing some modules, like a SPIP RCE, courtesy of Laluka and coiffeur.
  • chrony, spending some time debugging how to enable its seccomp sandbox on Alpine Linux, resulting in a couple of improvements, and of course a now-enabled-by-default sandbox there.
• Got a CVE for a bug I reported in 2020!
• Kept maintaining OpenMW's infrastructure.
• Learnt some Rust so I could hang out with the cool kids.
• Helped organise the GoogleCTF, which was pretty well received.
• Added more possible subtitles to this blog, bringing their numbers above 1100.
• Reduced the size of this website's webpages; most should now be around 10kb.
• Contributed a bit to Wikipedia, in English and in French under my usual nickname.
• Moved my emails away from Gandi over to Migadu, given their ludicrous post-acquisition price increase.
• Investigated what hardening-related compiler flags where enabled by default by popular Linux distributions.
• Contributed a bit (by crunching numbers) to Stockfish, an open-source chess engine with an Elo rating around 3500.
• Got featured a couple of times on Hackernew/reddit/lobste.rs/… frontpage, thanks to a karma junkie marketing-able friend
• Kept maintaining Nos Oignons's infrastructure with corl3ss. We're back at handling around 2% of tor's exit traffic! Our little non-profit is now 10 years old.
• Took over the development and maintenance of sin's fortify-headers. It's used by OpenWrt, Alpine Linux, and soon in Gentoo Hardened's musl flavour.
• Ported my resume/cover letter template from LaTeX to typst and felt so much joy purging away all the LaTeX/TeXLive/XeTeX/LuaTeX/… garbage from my computer, to never have to touch it again.
• Got a "Documented Feedback from Employee Relations" from HR at work for saying "Awkward to have yet another middle aged rich white het guy come talk about diversity and inclusion." on an internal chatroom, about this middle aged rich white het guy invited to give an internal talk about diversity and inclusion.