Dunno why I remembered "The Quantum Thief" by Hannu Rajaniemi. Basically, you had fine-grained control over what others perceived of you. Your friends can see you completely, while strangers can only see a blur.

It was an amazing book.

Thanks for the book recom.

BTW, I will also recommend 'a hero of our time' by Lermontov. In it, you will get an updated view of what the meaning of 'friends' will be. :)

EDIT: since this is getting upvotes, I will also mention that Lermontov is a descendant of the Learmonts, who were British folk.

Also, the book is small but it's jampacked with a lot of wisdom--street and abstract both-- and presented using a language that shines with poetry, it shines even through translation (Penguin Classics trans. is best).

I know Hannu, and he tells an interesting story about getting his first book published. I should write it up sometime ... in my Copious Free Time ...

This comment box is too small to contain the story.

* The Quantum Thief

* The Fractal Prince

* The Causal Angel

Actually, most of the story is on his WikiPedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannu_Rajaniemi

The 1st 2 were great but I didnt like the 3rd one. Its like the author was in a hurry to finish the book and just started killing characters to make his wordcount.

The 1st 2 are independent, I recommened people stop after 2nd book

Makes me think of a Black Mirror episode where similar technology ends up with unlucky/unwanted people becoming inaudible blurs in perception of everyone.

As digital dystopias go, this is one of the worst I've seen; the episode ending with this happening to the protagonist shook me to the core.

uhm, spoiler alert?

Don't worry, doesn't actually spoil plot of the episode, it's all spelled out for you pretty clearly at the start.

And it’s not even a good episode so, you know… nothing lost here anyways.

Judging by how many people in this thread seem eager to reinvent the hellhole presented in that episode, it's good enough to recommend as required watching.

The episode is 12 years old. At some point it must be acceptable to stop coddling anyone who hasn't seen something yet to allow discussion, no?

I think OP was doing a "hu-mor" there

There was a Black Mirror episode called White Christmas with similar concept.

For the past 20+ years I'm using the same desktop color across various OSes: #000000 This is one of the first things that I modify on a fresh install.

Funny thing:

"Windows 7 boots slower if you set a solid background color" 28.jan.2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42856262 117 comments

"Why did Windows 7 log on slower for months if you had a solid color background?" 28.apr.2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43827214 296 comments

Wasn't that Yanis Varoufakis?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanis_Varoufakis

Nope, Varoufakis consulted with Valve

Ah, that's correct.

Got it wrong, because he did write some articles about the EVE economy, like this one: https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2014/01/30/war-spikes-in-the-...

He has however written about the game before, and been interviewed about it: https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2014/01/30/war-spikes-in-the-...

that's very interesting, is there a place to read his achievements related to Steam? genuinely curious, because Steam is very popular now, and wondering what he did there, and whether his theories helped boost Steam economy/marketplace or not

So many good memories... reading the Light Fantastic for first time, getting Eric in that big format with many illustrations, the witches, Vimes and the guards during my uni years, Mort, Maurice, and so on and so on... and then... the profound melancholy in the Tiffany Aching books that brings tears to my eyes...

Only if we had designers who like the default datalist appearance...

In my experience, lack of style customizability is the biggest obstacle to using native HTML features

Adding money to a CIV 1 save game file with the PCTOOLS hex editor.

I think it was possible, but it degraded much more quickly, requiring more frequent repairs.

That's what I did: https://github.com/tuzemec/zedokai-darkest-machine

I like it! Thanks

Try this: https://zed-themes.com/

Awesome! It handles my kinda complicated setup with docking station, USB and DisplayPort switches pretty well.