Brandon Sanderson proves again he is a brilliant writer. His Stormlight universe is not only vast and imaginative, but the characters are both compelling and well written.

Way of the Kings has some slow parts, though, and even if I kind of liked that, it is uneven in regards to its characters: some get more focus, some just a few chapters. That means that if you identify with the lead characters you will enjoy the book, but if you empathize with the lesser ones you will probably get frustrated.

I particularly enjoyed the climax. It was as it should be: the tension was rising and Sanderson just wouldn't let it go, it just kept pushing it and pushing it, filling in the motivations of the character, adding burden upon burden, making choices as difficult and as important as possible before finally allowing the release of his characters making one. Alas, the wonderful ending is followed by epilogues, several of them, which just seem boring afterwards, in comparison.

Great series, though, I recommend it highly.

I am not going to keep it there for long, so try it out. It is based on Markdown CSS, by mrcoles.

Last year I wrote a blog post detailing my experience with social media after four months. This is the followup, after I've had a whole year to take advantage of these tools.

Social Media - what is it?

To me social media means the big two: Facebook and Twitter. I still have no idea what Instagram is and I don't really consider LinkedIn as social media. And Google+ is not worth mentioning. I know there are a lot of other social sites, but I ignored completely photo and video platforms - since I rarely express myself visually, and I've tried some technical platforms like StackOverflow, HackerRank or GitHub, but again didn't consider that "social media". Probably I should, since I love software development and having people to share this with would truly be a social experience for me, but I started this experiment with focus on general social interaction. Also... Slack... what the hell is that?

What I used social for

In the previous post I said that I am using Blogger to express myself, as I have done for more than a decade, and use some tool to automatically share this on Facebook and Twitter. Not surprisingly, very little people were engaged by this method of communication. It works better than RSS feeds, that's for sure, but most of the time people on social media (including myself) want to shut off their brain and read something light, not my crazy ramblings or technical posts. I've created a Facebook page for my blog, so people can use that as an entry point, if they want, but all the posts there are shares from Blogger.

I was saying that I was pleasantly surprised by Twitter and the quality of content there and less enthusiastic about Facebook. However, Twitter changed some things lately, mostly allowing videos, images and smileys (what you, young folks, call emoticons - or is it emoji?) to take less space. The effect is that there are a lot more visual opinions (let's call them that) on Twitter and thus becoming harder and harder to read. Also the amount of postings there is overwhelming. I tried to look for some tools to limit the number of tweets or organizing them somehow, but unfortunately I found none that did what I envisioned. The result is that occasionally - every week or so - I scroll through Twitter until I get tired and put links in my to read list, but most of the time I only cover a day or two of content.

I found that whenever I see something that I believe is worth sharing I put it on Facebook, rather than Twitter, mostly because I have few friends on Twitter and there is that 140 character limitation. However, most of the time I just post the link anyway and maybe say a few words. I wonder if that short circuits me thinking about the subject and then writing my opinion on it, as I am doing with this blog, but most likely I would rather not share than write so much every time, so I don't know if the occasional Facebook posts are taking away Blogger posts. I will actively try to not make it the case. I noticed, though, that people that like my Tweets are often not in my friends list, so I guess it's more general an audience. That being said, all my Facebook posts are fully public, anyway.

Speaking of Facebook, when I compile my weekly reading list I also scroll down through the Facebook wall, but even with my extension to filter posts based on own content and less images, videos and likes, I still get bored rather quickly. Sometimes the jokes are funny or the pictures interesting, but I am not really a Facebook reader. Lately I have been unfollowing people in order to keep a modicum of content curation on my wall. I was really disappointed by the events system, as well. A lot of people just mark all events they could possible go to with 'Interested' and then they never go. Also the events that appear on Facebook feel like complete bullshit most of the time anyway. The ones that I would have liked to attend either don't even appear or they are so niche that I never hear about them until it is too late.

One thing that I thought I would use Facebook for was the messenger app. And I do use it, but very rarely. In the Yahoo Messenger days I would chat a lot with people. Somehow all that became frivolous, not only for me, but other people as well. Now I see young people just getting a lot of notifications and ignoring them. So what's the point, anyway?

And speaking of... God, notifications are annoying. Everything wants to notify you of the very important thing that happened on it. It does so by blinking, beeping, animating or any other histrionic method of getting your attention. They do it incessantly until I stop caring. Notify away, I will ignore you.

What I will be using social for

I don't foresee any change in the future other than maybe using less social media altogether. I am half convinced that I should try to develop meaningful human relationships, at least as another experiment. Clearly social media does NOT connect people on a personal level at all. I've heard about these young kids that share everything they do on social media. Maybe they do, but I am not following them. To me that's another network altogether. The occasional curiosity to see what is "trending" or "popular" disgusts me every single time. The things my friends share are not truly representative of them. And if I make the first step and post some weird feeling or situation I am in, I mostly get no reaction. People avoid negative emotions unless they are manic: hate, anger, disgust take first stage while depressive thoughts, sadness or desperation are avoided. Same for positive emotions, by the way, when people are extra happy about having a child or something like that. Just mildly enjoying something and feeling good about oneself is generally ignored.

Conclusion

I am not going to commit social media suicide or anything, but I concluded that I want to know what people think, rather than what people feel, and social media is used more for the latter. Therefore my commitment to online electronic expression is not going to increase towards Facebook and Twitter. As always, I do hope I will blog more meaningful posts. Wish me luck!

This is how 2016 ends, not with a bang but a whimper. After a relatively calm Christmas followed an eventless New Year celebration. Part of me was lamenting the oldness of it all: two people alone on New Year's Eve, drinking gin tonic and campari cola and sitting at their respective electronic devices. The other part of me was happy that no one bothers me, that I don't have to pretend to enjoy loud noises and strong lights and fake emotions. Was it a nice end of year or just another win for my comfort zone?

It was a strangely quiet year for me, as well. Most of it I was in a sabbatical during which I did nothing of note and the last part was about getting hired and getting acquainted with my new place of work, which was fine. No real drama, no dead relatives I cared about, no fuss. I wrote my code, I watched my TV series, I read my tech news. It was more than quiet, it was boring.

Meanwhile, though, everybody else was going crazy: beloved celebrities died, elections went to hell just about everywhere, terror scares, immigration issues, civil wars, cyber wars, cold wars, global warming and so on and so on. Weird contrast, isn't it? Part of me laments I am growing apart from the world and people, the other part enjoys the hell out of it. Is that what growing old is? Just getting off the train and raising a middle finger?

So what about my New Year resolutions? I have none. I have some hopes, but resolutions? Nah! I am too comfortable ignoring everything that matters. If I go down that road, defining priorities, finding solutions to get what I want, getting rid of what I don't want, setting up goals, then I have to change my entire life. I have to start over. I have to make an effort, hurt people, push the drama button. Who needs that? I do have the heart of a child. I keep it in the freezer, never to be thawed.

Look at that title! If that doesn't trend on social media, I don't know what will.

Nothing spreads memes faster than an American election. The term post-truth was named the word of 2016 by Oxford Dictionaries, which is funny, considering the elections went on at the end if the year and that Oxford is in England, but it only emphasizes the impact that it had. However, like the cake, it is a lie. The truth of the matter is that Americans, like all masses of people, can't handle the truth, so they invent a more comfortable reality in which to dwell.

When Trump became president, people needed somebody to blame, someone other than themselves, of course. After all, only good things happen because of you and God, because you're awesome! And God, too, I'm sure. *The people* would never ever vote a narcissistic entertainer as their supreme leader, clearly. So they blamed social media. Now, I am not a fan of social media, but considering I've been blogging for more than a decade, I am not against it either. I've only recently and reluctantly joined Facebook, mainly for the messenger app, but when I saw the entire Internet rally against poor Zuckerberg (well, he is anything but poor, but you get the gist) I smirked, all superior and shit, because the idea was ludicrous. Not the idea that Facebook had a major impact on people's behavior, that one is totally true, but that this is a recent event, brought on by technology run amok and without checks.

Mass media is one of the pillars of American democracy, it has always swayed people one way or the other. The balance doesn't come because media is true to facts but because, like any other form of power, it is wielded by both sides equally. Facebook and the whole of Internet is just a distillation of that and when you distill shit you get... 3-methylindole - perhaps a bad metaphor. What I mean is that media has always been crap, it has always had an agenda and it was always under the control of people with power. Guttenberg himself was after all a goldsmith with political connections trying to satisfy investors. The Internet just gives you more granularity, more people to contribute in drowning facts into a sea of personal opinion.

We are not in the age of post truth, we are getting closer and closer to the actual truth which, as always, is not pretty, is not nice, is not politically correct. Instead it is painful, humbling and devastating. The truth, dear *the people*, is that this form of democracy is the worse political system that you can stomach while still functioning economically, mass media is not a pillar of anything, just another form of deadly power, and that when this political system that you wallow in turns its wheels you get people like Trump and Hillary Clinton representing you. And it's fine, because no one that is actually like you will ever reach a position of true power in any system. Normal people do not crave power, but comfort and security. Not even happiness.

So get over it, because after post-truth comes truth: you will forget about all the outrage in the customary six months and then everything will go #BackToNormal.

Nu, nu este vorba despre vacanta mea cu nevasta-mea in Bucovina, desi e funny si aia, ci despre apa Bucovina si disparitia bidoanelor de 5 litri din magazine.

In primul rind, hai sa dam sarci pe net. Dezamagire totala. Daca nu e ceva in engleza sau poate alta limba de larga circulatie internationala, Google esueaza lamentabil. Toate rezultatele sint ori magazinele mari care vind apa online ori despre altceva cu totul. Pasul doi: sosial midia. Putin mai mult succes, dar nu mult. Oamenii se lamenteaza de calitatea apei plate citind diverse articole panicarde cu cuvinte gen "colcaie" si "mizerie" in titlu. Cu toate astea Bucovina e pe primul loc la curatenie, chiar si in acele articole. Mai gasesti articole despre cum Apa Bucovina a fost cumparata de niste polonezi.

Desigur, putem merge direct la pagina Facebook a firmei, unde mai multe persoane s-au plins de lipsa bidoanelor. Din pacate, la orice intrebare se raspunde STAS cu:

Mai nou au bagat mai multe detalii:

Pe bune? Intii cineva din alta tara sau planeta a cerut multa apa Bucovina si nu a mai ramas ca sa ajunga si in Bucuresti, apoi problema s-a rezolvat, erau ei mai setosi si acum s-au potolit, asa ca putem sa luam iar apa de la jumatea lunii Decembrie. Dar sintem in 17 si tot nimic. E timpul sa scoatem armele babane: zvonurile!

La un magazin de linga mine cineva cu "surse" mi-a spus ca inchid linia de bidoane de 5L. Alt "informat" imi spune ca de fapt doar inlocuiesc aparatajul. Cineva care "se pricepe" spune ca asa "se face", intii scoti produsul de pe piata ca sa se vada cit de dorit este, apoi se introduce un inlocuitor, deobicei mai ieftin de produs, mai scump la cumparat si mai slab ca si calitate.

Acum ce sa cred? Daca era doar o chestie de imbunatatire hardware, de ce nu ar fi spus asta public? Daca inlocuiesc produsul cu altceva sau, mai rau, il scot de tot, de ce promit ca se va gasi din nou in magazine in aceeasi formula?

O ipoteza este ca aveau un surplus de sticle de 2L pe care nu le cumparau oamenii destul de repede. Alta ar fi ca s-ar fi intimplat ceva cu apa, o infestare cu ceva, o poluare cu ceva toxic sau dezgustator, si acum poti sa iei doar apa la sticle de 2L care a mai ramas, in timp ce ei incearca sa rezolve problema in tacere. Asa o fi, @apabucovina? Lasati zvonul asta sa se raspindeasca pina nu mai cumpara nimeni apa?

In mod clar, mai multi factori se intrunesc aici ca sa ne faca viata mizerabila (pardon da pan). Intii e lipsa de transparenta a producatorului. Era asa de greu sa fie sincer si direct? Apoi lipsa de profesionalism a jurnalistilor romani, atit de preocupati de ce fund sta pe ce scaun si ce gura vomeaza ce in politica, incit uita de lucruri de genul asta. In final, Americocentrismul internetului, care ne aduce doar informatii despre ce filme mai apar pe marile ecrane.

Pai atunci cum sa ne se umple tara de nationalijdi care beau apa de la chiuveta si nu ii intereseaza decit de ale lor?

The machines are here. They look like us, they walk like us, they speak like us, but they are not like us. Open your eyes and carefully look around, search for the suspect, for the out of place. Their actions give them away.

They walk to their destination if it is more efficient than driving. They always take the same route to get there, too, once they found out which one is the best. They are courteous for no reason, never get angry - unless it serves their nefarious purpose, they don't swear or do meaningless things. You will never see a machine throwing garbage on the ground. They are obsessively clean and never smell of anything. Watch out for people helping others with no apparent goal. Are they real people? In the office they will say hello to you even early mornings, then get to work almost immediately. Whenever you interrupt them from their tasks they will gladly stop whatever they are doing and listen to your problems. Be wary of people that never complain, a clear indicator of their origin.

Don't get fooled by their deception. You will see machines at restaurants, eating and drinking, even going to the toilet. They are only maintaining appearances. See how they will not shout at the waiter even if served poorly, watch them take blame for not looking at the price on the menu before ordering or for spilling a drink. By the way, that's also an act. Their superior agility would never allow them to do anything by accident. They are clever, but don't let them outsmart you. Some will appear to enjoy art, like paintings or sculptures or classical music, but most will have adapted and fake enjoying normal things like movies. They will be the ones that you will not notice in the cinema hall. They will not use their mobile devices, they will not talk over the movie, they will rarely eat anything from the entrance shop, but when they do they do it quietly. It's always the quiet ones.

Couples, even accompanied by children or pets, may be machines. Their children will be uncharacteristically mild mannered and well behaved. Their dogs will not bark or try to bite in anger, and their poop will be collected and thrown in the garbage rather than left behind. They all can be machines. The way they blend in our society is so complete and subtle that you will see people living together with machines and not know it. But you can still recognize them by the way they considerately care for the other person, even after long years of companionship. They don't seem to grasp the concept of getting fed up with another living being.

Their greatest trick, though, is behaving as they have our well being at heart. They do not. Slowly, subtly, underhandedly, they change the world and take away our humanity, turn us into soulless beings like them. Wake up! Do not be fooled! Rise up and destroy them all before it is too late!

I am often left dumbfounded by the motivations other people are assigning to my actions. Most of the time it is caused by their self-centeredness, their assumption that whatever I do is somehow related more to them than to me. And it made me think: am I a good/bad person, or is it all a matter of perception from others?

I rarely feel like I do something out of the ordinary for other people; instead I do it because that's who I am. I help a colleague because I like to help or I refuse to do so because I feel that what I am doing is more important. Same with friends or romantic relationships. Sometimes I need to make an effort to do something, but it's still my choice, my assessment of the situation and my decision to go a certain way. It's not a value judgment on the person, it's not an asshole move or some out of my way effort to improve their life. What I do IS me.

It's also a weird direction of reasoning, since I am aware of the physical impossibility for "free will" and I subscribe to the school of thought that it is all an illusion. I mean, logic dictates that either the world works top-bottom, with some central power of will trickling down reality or it is merely a manifestation of low level forces and laws of physics that lead inexorably towards the reality we perceive. In other words, if you believe in free will, you have to believe in some sort of god, and I don't. Yet living my life as if I have no free will makes no sense either. I need to play the game if I am to play the game. It's kind of circular.

Getting back to my original question: Isn't good or bad just a label I (and other people) assign to a pattern of behavior that belongs to me? And not before I do things, but always afterwards. Just like the illusion of free will there is the illusion of moral quality that guides my path. While one cannot quantify free will, they can measure the effect my behavior has on their life and goals and determine a value. But then is my "goodness" something like an average? Because then it would be more important the number of people I am affecting, rather than the absolute value of the effect per person. Who cares I help a colleague or pay attention to my wife? In the big sea of people, I am just a small fish that affects a few other small fish. We could all die tomorrow in the belly of a whale, all that goodness pointless.

So here I am, asking essentially a "who am I" question - painfully aware it has no final answer - in a world I think is determined by tiny laws of physics that create the illusion of self and with a quantity of consequence that is irrelevant even if it weren't so. I am torturing myself for no good reason, ain't I?

Yet the essence of the question still intrigues me. Is it necessary that I feel a good drive for my actions to be a good person, or is it a posterior calculation of their effect that determines that? If I work really well and fast for a month and then I do less the next, is it that I did good work in the first month or that I am a lazy bastard in the second? If I pay attention to someone or make a nice gesture, is it something to be lauded, or something to be criticized when I don't do it all the time? Is this a statistical problem or an issue of causality?

And I have to ask this question because if I feel no particular drive to do something and just "am myself", I don't think people should assign all kind of stupid motivations to my actions. And if I need to make this sustained effort to go outside my routine just to gain moral value... well, it just feels like a lot of bother. And I have to ask it because the same reasoning can be applied to other people. Is my father making terrible efforts to take care of just about everybody in his life, making him some sort of saint, or is it just what he does and can't help himself, in which case he's just a regular dude?

Personally I feel that I am just an amalgamation of experiences that led to the way I behave. I am neither good nor evil and my actions define me more than my intentions. While there is some sort of consistency that can be statistically assessed, it is highly dependent on the environment and any inference would go down the drain the moment that environment changes. But then, how can I be a good person? And does it even matter?

Today I received two DMCA notices. One of them might have been true, but the second was for a file which started with

/*
Copyright (c) 2010, Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
Code licensed under the BSD License:
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/license.html
version: 2.8.1
*/

Nice, huh?

The funny part is that these are files on my Google Drive, which are not used anywhere anymore and are accessible only by people with a direct link to them. Well, I removed the sharing on them, just in case. The DMCA is even more horrid than I thought. The links in it are general links towards a search engine for notices (not the link to the actual notice) and some legalese documents, the email it is coming from is noreply-6b094097@google.com and any hope that I might fight this is quashed with clear intention from the way the document is worded.

So remember: Google Drive is not yours, it's Google's. I wonder if I would have gotten the DMCA even if the file was not being shared. There is a high chance I would, since no one should be using the link directly.

Bleah, lawyers!

I have enabled Disqus comments on this blog and it is supposed to work like this: every old comment from Blogger has to be imported into Disqus and every new comment from Disqus needs to be also saved in the Blogger system. Importing works just fine, but "syncing" does not. Every time someone posts a comment I receive this email:

Hi siderite,
 
You are receiving this email because you've chosen to sync your
comments on Disqus with your Blogger blog. Unfortunately, we were not
able to access this blog.
 
This may happen if you've revoked access to Disqus. To re-enable,
please visit:
https://siderite.disqus.com/admin/discussions/import/platform/blogger/
 
Thanks,
The Disqus Team

Of course, I have not revoked any access, but I "reenable" just the same only to be presented with a link to resync that doesn't work. I mean, it is so crappy that it returns the javascript error "e._ajax is undefined" for a line where e._ajax is used instead of e.ajax and even if that would have worked, it uses a config object that is not defined.

It doesn't really matter, because the ajax call just accesses (well, it should access) https://siderite.disqus.com/admin/discussions/import/platform/blogger/resync/. And guess what happens when I go there: I receive an email that the Disqus access in Blogger has been revoked.

No reply for the Disqus team for months, for me or anybody else having this problem. They have a silly page that explains that, of course, they are not at fault, Blogger did some refactoring and broke their system. Yeah, I believe that. They probably renamed the ajax function in jQuery as well. Damn Google!

Having been so pleasantly surprised by First Light, the first book in The Red series, I quickly read the next two books: The Trials and Going Dark. However, possibly due to my high expectations, I have been disappointed by the continuation. Linda Nagata seemed to have reached that sweet spot between current tech trends and emergent future that makes stories feel both hard sci-fi and realistic. The integration between man and machine, the politics run by shadowy megarich "dragons" from the background, nuclear bombs detonated in major US cities, artificial intelligence and so on. The potential was immense!

Yet, the author chose to continue the story on the same flat note, like an ode to the Stockholm Syndrome, where the hero gets repeatedly coerced to run missions that at first seem bullshit, but in the end are rationalized as necessary and even dutiful by himself. The common intrusion of external forces into his emotional balance by way of direct brain stimulation also makes his feelings and motivations be completely isolated from the ones of the reader. A strange choice, considering the vast possibilities opened by the first book. Frankly, it felt like Nagata liked writing the first book and then was forced by publishers to make it "a trilogy", since that is the norm for fantasy and science fiction, but her heart wasn't really in it.

I don't want to spoil the ending, such as it is, but I will say it was disappointing as well, with no real closure for the reader of any of the important questions raised in First Light. Too bad, since I felt the story was beginning to touch on important subjects that needed to be discussed at a deeper level than just "boots on the ground".

I was listening to this Software Engineering Daily podcast about Facebook Relationship Algorithms and I had this weird idea. The more I was thinking about it, the more realistic it felt (as well as more than a bit creepy). Let me lay it out for you. The podcast is interesting in its own right, so go listen to it, it's instructive.

So they describe these metrics of your Facebook connections that they reached while trying to find an algorithm to detect your romantic relationship. They took a large sample of users that have declared their significant other and tried to find an automated way of predicting that from the other information Facebook had. The first idea was to use connectivity, one often used idea in sociology that the more common friends you have with someone, the closer you are, but it didn't quite work. One clear counterexample would be coworkers connected on social media. Instead, they realized that such functional connections often cluster, so you would have the cluster of coworkers, your family, your club friends, the people who share your hobby, etc. The romantic partner would be connected with many of these friends, but across clusters, in other words you would have many common friends that are not really connected with each other. By using this metric they called dispersion, they would guess with more than 50% accuracy from the first try who your partner is from the list of hundreds of your friends.

And here is my idea: why not reverse engineer it? Imagine you have someone you want to hook up with, but have no idea how to proceed. Maybe asking them on a date is not an option or maybe, like any engineer out there, you want to maximize the chances your experiment would work. Why not find the smallest subset of friends of that person that have the largest value of dispersion? So here is what this "hook me up" algorithm would do:

1. Collect the list of friends of your target
2. Find a sample that are well connected to the target, but less connected with each other
3. Approach each of them and befriend them

The result would be that you would become the "natural" choice for a relationship, by going backwards and reversing the direction of causality. Automatic stalking, courtesy of your friendly neighborhood software developer: Siderite! We live in an age in which information about us can be used or abused in innumerable ways and we become addicted and stuck to this way of relating. It's not a bad thing, but it has its drawbacks. It is good to know of them.

First Light is Linda Nagata's first book in The Red series, which follows a military man landing right into the middle of an emergence event. Stuck between his duty as a soldier, his love for his girlfriend and father, the maniacal ambitions of an all powerful defense contractor queen and a mysterious God-like entity which seems to like him, our hero does what he can to survive and do good by his own principles.

At first I thought it was going to be one of those cheap soldiering books. It was short, written by a woman, and frankly I expected a standard pulp fiction "read it on a train" kind of thing. Instead I was blown away by the subtlety with which the characters are being explored and the way the story was constructed. I loved the book and I plan to read all the series. I started reading The Dread Hammer, which is another Nagata book, this time fantasy, but it doesn't even come close to First Light. I may even dislike it.

Anyway, I can't say much about the plot without spoiling it, but I can certainly recommend this book. As I said, it is short enough to read and see if it evokes the same feelings. Instead of hurting it, the female perspective of the author enhances the experience and makes it unique. The technical aspects are spot on and the writing style is fluid and easy to read. Top marks!

Update May 2020: I used this on a web site and the body was white. It may be that the bug in Chrome was solved in the meantime.

Update October 2019: a CSS media feature (prefers-color-scheme) can be used in conjunction with this. A recent development, it's a media query that allows a browser to activate CSS code based on the theme set in the operating system. You set your preference in Windows or MacOS or wherever and then sites that use prefers-color-scheme will take advantage of that. Something like this:

@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
  html,img, video, object, [style*=url] {
    -webkit-filter:invert(100%) !important;
    filter:invert(100%) !important;
  }

  /* this was solving a bug in Chrome that seems to have been fixed
  body {
    background:black;
  }
  */
}

  I am a very light sensitive person. Shine a light in my eyes and you limit my productivity immensely. Not to mention it makes me irritable. Therefore I often have the desire to turn cheerful black on white sites to a dark theme, where the colors are reversed. I am sure other people have the same problem so I thought of building a browser extension to enable a switching button between the two.

  The first problem is that I need to interrogate all the elements in a page, including the ones that will be created later. The second is that even so I would have problems determining the dominant color of images. But there is something I can use which makes all of this unnecessary: using the invert CSS filter! Since I already use a browser extension that injects my own styles in any site - it's called Stylish and I highly recommend it - all I have to do is apply a filter on the entire site, right?

  Wrong! The problem is that when you invert an entire site, all images on the site get inverted, too. That also includes videos and Flash objects. The worst offenders here are the elements that sport a background image that is declared via CSS, since you can't create a CSS selector for them. I am going to present my partial solution and maybe you can help me find a more elegant or more complete one. Here is a general dark theme stylesheet, without the elements that have a background image declared via CSS (it does include those with a background image declared inline, though):

 html,img, video, object, [style*=url] {
    -webkit-filter:invert(100%) !important;
    filter:invert(100%) !important;
  }

 /* this was solving a bug in Chrome that seems to have been fixed
 body {
   background:black;
 }
 */

  What it does is invert the entire page (html), then reinvert video, img, and object elements, as well as those with "url" in the style attribute. In Chrome, at least, there seems to be a bug in the sense that the backgrounds of the direct child elements are not inverted, which means body, as the first child, needs to have the background set to black specifically. (this seems to have been solved by May 2020) The hack to invert elements with "url" in style is pretty ugly, too.

  What I think of a solution is this:

• inject Javascript to enumerate all elements present and future using document.createTreeWalker and Mutation Observers, check if they have a background image and if so, add a class to them
• inject the CSS above with an additional rule for the class for the elements with background image

  However, this doesn't completely solve the problem. One of the major issues is the inverted colors sometimes look dumb. For example a red background turns cyan, white text on light gray background turns black text on dark gray background, which makes it hard to read. I've tried various other filters, like hue-rotate or contrast, but it doesn't really help. Detecting individual color patterns doesn't really work, as the filter attribute affects an element and all of its children. The CSS above only works because the images are inverted again when the entire page has been inverted.

  The good news is that most of the time you may use the CSS above as a template, then add various rules (manually) to fix small issues with colors of backgrounds. Even if I don't package this in an extension, you have the power to create your own themes for various sites. Never again will you be subjects to the tyranny of the happy bright shiny people!