4 ms·

In general I think the population at large, and especially programmer types, know way too little about lighting given how ubiquitous both lighting and photograp

In general I think the population at large, and especially programmer types, know way too little about lighting given how ubiquitous both lighting and photography/videography is in our everyday life. Good on you for fighting the warm light fight!

Der_Einzige 2y ago
They claim to know a lot but then none of them build proper Cf Lumen or F.Lux style tooling (i.e. super easy default instead of requiring tons of setup) for turning ALL blue light off (red shifting) IN THE DEFAULT OS as the primary way to use your device at night. None of that wussy shifting the color temperature brown shit that doesn't meaningfully reduce blue light hazard. I can literally preserve my whole night vision and have zero eye strain in pitch black conditions by red shifting my computer screen. No one supports this because we are stupid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_effects_of_high-energy_visible_light https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_effects_of_high-ene... The laser pointer community of all groups understands this stuff well. They recommend green lasers because they use the lowest power for the highest visibility at night. Blue lasers are easy to get super powerful, but unlike a lower powered green one, which usually will only temporarily blind you if you make a mistake - a powerful blue laser will straight up destroy your eyes forever. Permanent blindness.
- Karrot_Kream 2y ago
  > The laser pointer community of all groups understands this stuff well This has been my major frustration also. Different enthusiast communities all discover these things independently and talk about them in their own domain language. Night photography and astral photography talks about red shifting as well.
- c0balt 2y ago
  > They claim to know a lot but then none of them build proper Cf Lumen or F.Lux style tooling (i.e. super easy default instead of requiring tons of setup) for turning ALL blue light off (red shifting) IN THE DEFAULT OS as the primary way to use your device at night. Probably not what you are aiming for but for Linux this is a somewhat solved problems. The default DM, Gnome, has built-in color shift with a time schedule AFAIK. For Wayland and xorg there are also numerous other solutions that do a display-level redshift, I can recommend wl-sunset for Wayland.
  - scns 2y ago
    KDE does too
  - rubicks 2y ago
    Can confirm https://github.com/jonls/redshift https://github.com/jonls/redshift works great; been using it for years.
- onli 2y ago
  I don't really get that impression. To the contrary: How dangerous blue light is supposed to be is commonly repeated, with many products for filtering it out, like glasses, and software in all devices that does the red shifting. Android has it by default, Linux does, macOS - is Windows missing? Or is there something in the implementation of those measures that you object to? But note that the wikipedia article you link states clearly that the eye strain attributed to blue light has no scientific evidence. That's also what I found out last time I looked into it - all those very strong statements about how dangerous blue light emission is supposed to be has no equivalent scientific studies that prove them. I think there was also a prominent article about that here on HN. I think the effect might be completely made up, as it is something that is easy to believe and to subjectively feel that it works, by a placebo effect basically.
  - teslabox 2y ago
    There are old studies on the hazard of blue light. I found a few of them on https://scholar.google.com https://scholar.google.com - I suspect they’re hard to find if you don’t know about specific keywords to include in your query. The blue light problem has to do with how high energy blue photons interact with specific substances found in minute quantities in our eyes, leading to inflammation.
  - Der_Einzige 2y ago
    It's insanity to be told that your claim is basically psudoscience or fake when night vision preservation, the mechanism of prevented eye-strain, is a well confirmed and relied upon part of our biology. Go talk to astronomers. I'm aware of Wikipedia claiming what you say it does. That's an incitement of Wikipedia and the big blue light crowd. Further, actual studies of filteirng blue light needed the right display tech. Before OLED, I couldn't actually "turn off the non red pixels", and thus never fully eliminated blue light from my display. Most of the "science" around blue light is trash. Yes, I say this as someone who actively published at top AI conferences and is intimately familiar with peer review. I'm going to keep on preserving my night vision and browsing the internet for hours with zero issues at night while being told that my red shifted phone is placebo. You try turning your OLED phone on at full brightness in the middle of the night with and without the red-shift and tell me which hurts your eyes more...
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  What do I need to preserve night vision for? Unless I'm using my computer to help stargaze, I would rather have color graphics.
- vijucat 2y ago
  I literally feel sad when I turn off the blue light (using f.lux) or turn on eye saver mode on my monitor. No idea how to fix this.

Der_Einzige 2y ago

They claim to know a lot but then none of them build proper Cf Lumen or F.Lux style tooling (i.e. super easy default instead of requiring tons of setup) for turning ALL blue light off (red shifting) IN THE DEFAULT OS as the primary way to use your device at night. None of that wussy shifting the color temperature brown shit that doesn't meaningfully reduce blue light hazard. I can literally preserve my whole night vision and have zero eye strain in pitch black conditions by red shifting my computer screen. No one supports this because we are stupid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_effects_of_high-energy_visible_light https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_effects_of_high-ene... The laser pointer community of all groups understands this stuff well. They recommend green lasers because they use the lowest power for the highest visibility at night. Blue lasers are easy to get super powerful, but unlike a lower powered green one, which usually will only temporarily blind you if you make a mistake - a powerful blue laser will straight up destroy your eyes forever. Permanent blindness.

Karrot_Kream 2y ago
> The laser pointer community of all groups understands this stuff well This has been my major frustration also. Different enthusiast communities all discover these things independently and talk about them in their own domain language. Night photography and astral photography talks about red shifting as well.
c0balt 2y ago
> They claim to know a lot but then none of them build proper Cf Lumen or F.Lux style tooling (i.e. super easy default instead of requiring tons of setup) for turning ALL blue light off (red shifting) IN THE DEFAULT OS as the primary way to use your device at night. Probably not what you are aiming for but for Linux this is a somewhat solved problems. The default DM, Gnome, has built-in color shift with a time schedule AFAIK. For Wayland and xorg there are also numerous other solutions that do a display-level redshift, I can recommend wl-sunset for Wayland.
- scns 2y ago
  KDE does too
- rubicks 2y ago
  Can confirm https://github.com/jonls/redshift https://github.com/jonls/redshift works great; been using it for years.
onli 2y ago
I don't really get that impression. To the contrary: How dangerous blue light is supposed to be is commonly repeated, with many products for filtering it out, like glasses, and software in all devices that does the red shifting. Android has it by default, Linux does, macOS - is Windows missing? Or is there something in the implementation of those measures that you object to? But note that the wikipedia article you link states clearly that the eye strain attributed to blue light has no scientific evidence. That's also what I found out last time I looked into it - all those very strong statements about how dangerous blue light emission is supposed to be has no equivalent scientific studies that prove them. I think there was also a prominent article about that here on HN. I think the effect might be completely made up, as it is something that is easy to believe and to subjectively feel that it works, by a placebo effect basically.
- teslabox 2y ago
  There are old studies on the hazard of blue light. I found a few of them on https://scholar.google.com https://scholar.google.com - I suspect they’re hard to find if you don’t know about specific keywords to include in your query. The blue light problem has to do with how high energy blue photons interact with specific substances found in minute quantities in our eyes, leading to inflammation.
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  It's insanity to be told that your claim is basically psudoscience or fake when night vision preservation, the mechanism of prevented eye-strain, is a well confirmed and relied upon part of our biology. Go talk to astronomers. I'm aware of Wikipedia claiming what you say it does. That's an incitement of Wikipedia and the big blue light crowd. Further, actual studies of filteirng blue light needed the right display tech. Before OLED, I couldn't actually "turn off the non red pixels", and thus never fully eliminated blue light from my display. Most of the "science" around blue light is trash. Yes, I say this as someone who actively published at top AI conferences and is intimately familiar with peer review. I'm going to keep on preserving my night vision and browsing the internet for hours with zero issues at night while being told that my red shifted phone is placebo. You try turning your OLED phone on at full brightness in the middle of the night with and without the red-shift and tell me which hurts your eyes more...
Dylan16807 2y ago
What do I need to preserve night vision for? Unless I'm using my computer to help stargaze, I would rather have color graphics.
vijucat 2y ago
I literally feel sad when I turn off the blue light (using f.lux) or turn on eye saver mode on my monitor. No idea how to fix this.