5 ms·

> My eyes will thank you Sometimes I think the most hate for light mode is from people without autobrightness in their displays. Or from those who don’t know h

by piskov 9mo ago

> My eyes will thank you Sometimes I think the most hate for light mode is from people without autobrightness in their displays. Or from those who don’t know how to change it easily. Sure, if I were to constantly blind myself with 10k lux, I would hate white background too. But it isn’t supposed to be like that: make it the same brightness as the surroundings and voila. I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black. Also with glossy display (like 6k xdr) the only way I can deal with reflections is by always using light mode. Alabaster code theme is my favorite. If you don’t have auto brightness, there are many apps to change it easily via UI or keyboard instead of manual knobs of your monitor — most of them for the past 10 years support control via hdmi/displayport — I don’t see people complaining “I hate listening to most music because my headphones are always at 90% volume — every soundtrack should be lounge cafe del mar.” Or “I use this browser extension to make everything 5% loud.” Well, just turn down the volume knob, dummy.

troupo 9mo ago
> I’ve never met a person saying he hates books and wishes they were white on black. Books don't emit light. They reflect it. That's the difference.
- piskov 9mo ago
  It doesn’t matter what the source is (unless you have crt days flicker, bad tn panel polarization or what have you). Irritation comes from the difference in brightness.
  - Krutonium 9mo ago
    Reflection means it's got no difference (or a negligable technically) difference in brightness.
    - orbital-decay 9mo ago
      My mirror disagrees.
- Retr0id 9mo ago
  The retina can't tell the difference between reflected light and emitted light
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - cwillu 9mo ago
    Unless you're in the habit of reading your books with a flashlight, the context makes it very different.
- adrianmonk 9mo ago
  I think that reinforces their point if anything. With reflected light, you have a natural, inherent form of auto-brightness because the amount of light coming off the page depends on the amount of light in the room.
  - jchw 9mo ago
    Books are not designed to reproduce colors though, and monitors are. If you have aggressive auto-brightness settings, that wouldn't actually make a monitor appear more like a book, it would just make it so the stuff that is actually supposed to look blisteringly white is merely mild. Which, sure, is an improvement for eye strain, but it's more of a workaround than a solution, and since it would muck up color reproduction a lot of users couldn't do this all the time anyways.
itopaloglu83 9mo ago
Not everybody own $4k monitors, so automatic brightness isn’t always available. Regardless though, due to the design inconsistencies of the system, one screen is too bright that causes to reduce the brightness and another one uses literally 1/1,000,000 contrast difference between tabs to distinguish the active one, so it’s impossible to get a base brightness correct. I’m using a MacBook Pro M4 and as I move around the house, automatic brightness either tries to blind me despite I’ve been in a dark room for a minute, or simply refuses to turn the brightness up when the sun is shining down into the room. It’s certainly designed for a certain environment, but not definitely a home.
- piskov 9mo ago
  If it helps, you can disable auto brightness in accessibility settings so that only manual change remains
- layer8 9mo ago
  Monitors used to have easy rotary buttons to adjust brightness and contrast. Though I don’t remember it actually being necessary that often. Of course, the monitors rarely changed location.
  - illiac786 9mo ago
    In assuming you are not using your keyboard to set brightness because it’s an external display plugged into a laptop? Search for a DDC application for your desktop, it’s amazing, the brightness controls of your laptop will then control the external display as well. I use lunar on my MacBook, it was a revelation.
    - treffer 9mo ago
      Or switch to HDR if you have a capable display. I was pleasantly surprised that HDR also means you can control brightness - it is all software I that case! And the brightness keys on an external Apple keyboard work.
Quothling 9mo ago
It's probably also because a lot of people sit in rooms which are poorly lit. Part of it is probably because it's really hard to establish proper lighting with modern LEDs. This is anecdotal, but our lamps haven't really changed in the way they are designed, We now have six lamps where we had three before, and there is still "less" light in our living room because LED's create and emit light differently. I usually work with darkmode at home, and light mode in the office because our office is basically the surface of the sun.
- D13Fd 9mo ago
  Have you tried high-CRI LEDs? I find that they are much closer to the incandescent lighting feel.
Krutonium 9mo ago
>I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black. I love books. But I also have a brain-vision disability that makes it so that I physically struggle to read black text on a white background. If I could get books inverted, I would.
cosmic_cheese 9mo ago
I use both auto (when available) and manual brightness adjustments, and the environment in which I do most of my computing gets ample natural light. The problem persists, however, because as the linked posts notes light mode is far brighter than it used to be, and now if I crank brightness down low enough to feel comfortable I'm sacrificing contrast and color vividness to such a degree that (for me) it's actively distracting. So, dark mode on high brightness it is. For code editing, I've always tended towards dark themes ever since they became readily available in IDEs in the late 2000s simply because syntax coloration "pops" so much more strongly than is possible with a light theme. When I use a light theme for code editing it feels almost like staring at a sheet of undifferentiated text in comparison.
- piskov 9mo ago
  > because syntax coloration "pops" so much more strongly than is possible with a light theme. That’s why I mentioned alabaster: the only thing it highlights is comments and constants. Nowadays I can’t stand “normal” themes even for a minute: they are like blinking Christmas lights for me, too much distraction. Imaging reading the book where each word has different colors for nouns, verbs, what have you — nuts! :-)
  - cosmic_cheese 9mo ago
    Feels like a difference in mental structures. Without robust syntax coloring, parsing code is considerably more difficult for me. In more human terms it feels kind of like trying to communicate without being able to use adjectives or something.
    - piskov 9mo ago
      It took a couple of days 10+ years ago to see what the fuss is about (I was an avid “christmas-lighter” before), and I never came back. Also check this: https://tonsky.me/blog/syntax-highlighting/ https://tonsky.me/blog/syntax-highlighting/
      - deleted 9mo ago
nitwit005 9mo ago
If you turn down the brightness, the background and text will become more similar in color, as both will move closer to black. A dark background reduces total brightness without that effect.
- topspin 9mo ago
  Exactly. Contrast or, more precisely, the dynamic range we desire, is ruined by dimming displays enough not to cause pain and fatigue. It's a dumb solution, and we may all safely ignore it, knowing it won't occur. "Dark mode" haters will just have to cope as dark becomes the default.
VerifiedReports 9mo ago
No, it isn't. Making your entire screen dark for all content isn't a solution for a dumb GUI color scheme. "Back in the day, light mode wasn’t called “light mode”. It was just the way that computers were, we didn’t really think about turning everything light or dark. Sure, some applications were often dark (photo editors, IDEs, terminals) but everything else was light, and that was fine." Several incorrect statements there. "Back in the day," computers displayed white text on a dark background (usually a blue background) out of the box. This was deemed the most legible. The opposite was called "inverse." The Atari 8-bit and Commodore 64 computers (and possibly others) even had dedicated keys that toggled between regular and inverse text; it is called that in the manual. Word even had a checkbox option in it entitled "Blue background, white text." It wasn't removed until 2007, concurrent with lots of other UI regressions in Windows. Microsoft also removed the color-scheme editor from Windows, with which people had been able to set up global color schemes (including "dark" ones) since 1991. When people finally realized how dumb it is to read dark text off the surface of a glaring light bulb all day, companies had to run around slapping hard-coded "dark modes" onto everything... after abandoning better solutions (user-defined system-wide color schemes) that had existed since the early '90s on every platform except the vaunted Mac. So how did we end up suffering through decades of inverse GUIs? I've always attributed it to 1. The "desktop publishing" fad of the late '80s / early '90s, which sought to make the screen analogous to a piece of paper. 2. The Mac, which imitated Xerox's GUI, which was inverse. Possibly related to #1. 3. Windows defaulting to an inverse scheme (although it provided a way to easily change the global scheme), as it imitated the Mac.
- orbital-decay 9mo ago
  >"Back in the day," computers displayed white text on a dark background (usually a blue background) out of the box. This was deemed the most legible. That just prevented CRT degradation and it had less ghosting and flickering, especially as most CRTs in the home computer era were just terrible home TVs, and CRTs in the mainframe era were equally terrible. The saturated blue background was absolutely insufferable and I had ghosting and shifted color perception for minutes after using NC and Borland software for a long time. I loathe it till this day, just like garish CGA colors which were an assault on my eyes. 80's and 90's had a general concept of a desktop with windows as paper documents, because the first real use case for personal computers and workstations was assisting office jobs. Funny how you call the normal light scheme inverted. IIRC PC text/graphics modes used this term for dark backgrounds.
Normal_gaussian 9mo ago
The pages in books are a range of colours, very few are gloss white. I've just flicked through a few on my shelf; the whitest book I have is the wiring regs and they are notably less white than my wife's artists paper. Most of my books are a kind of murky brown not too dissimilar in mental feel to the HN background.
- layer8 9mo ago
  That’s why display brightness should be set such that it is similar to how a book page would look in comparable ambient lighting. “White” isn’t a specific brightness level.
  - Normal_gaussian 9mo ago
    You are aware that many of us use our displays for more than just reading text? And often multiple things at a time?
doodlesdev 9mo ago
> I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black. That's because paper used to print books isn't always white. Most of the books I've read this year and last year had a somewhat yellow-ish tint to them (they were newly printed). I know I'm not the only person bothered by pure white paper in books. I absolutely agree about setting brightness correctly, though. It's very usual for me to instantly reduce brightness whenever I have to use someone's computer. No idea how people use their screens so bright.
- crote 9mo ago
  > That's because paper used to print books isn't always white. Isn't it basically rule #1 of UX design to never use pure white / pure black?
  - doodlesdev 9mo ago
    Yes, that's what's being discussed here. I'm disagreeing with the people who are defending using pure white as a background in light mode. Pure black is more understandable, because it helps with battery life on mobile and notebooks, although I believe it shouldn't be the default dark mode.
topspin 9mo ago
> I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black. I've never seen a book actually radiate its own light. Perhaps if there had been 600+ sq. inch self illuminating books, we might have invented dark mode long ago. During the early days of CRTs, dark mode was the norm. VT50/100/220, 3270 etc. were almost always dark with illuminated characters, and even when not, they were only ~12-14" diagonal, and there was only one. Most PC/DOS machines were the same. The moment raster displays appeared, everything went "light mode," but they still weren't very large. Then, displays got huge and multiplied, easily able to overwhelm human eyes with excessive power. The ~30-year detour into Apple/Microsoft's paper-mimicry is ending due to basic ergonomics. No need for your tut-tutting.
- layer8 9mo ago
  Books reflect ambient light. Monitor brightness should be set to a similar light level. You can hold a book next to the display and adjust accordingly.
  - ronjakoi 9mo ago
    That's an unreasonable ask. I'm not gonna fiddle with the brightness of my monitor throughout the day, thanks
    - Alejandro9R 9mo ago
      I mean, if you have a modern digital display you might be able to change the brightness through the DDC/CI protocol and a simple app or extension, available in every much every OS. With a keyboard shortcut or two clicks you change it. Fiddle with monitor settings is painful, but that protocol is a godsend. Even one of my cheapest 13 years old monitor supports it.
    - layer8 9mo ago
      If you control your ambient lighting or use automatic adjustment, you don’t have to.
taneq 9mo ago
> I don’t see people complaining “I hate listening to most music because my headphones are always at 90% volume Volume and loudness are different things (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war) and pervasive loudness is absolutely a thing. Just turning down the volume doesn’t fix dynamic range compression.
- Normal_gaussian 9mo ago
  We also apply multiple kinds of normalisation to audio tracks to have them play at the appropriate level for their use case; so that the user doesn't have to adjust the volume when the TV switches from showing a war film, a panel show, a news program, a music channel, and a nature documentary - each is played with appropriate settings pre-baked relative to the others.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
Kerrick 9mo ago
> I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black. Plenty of books are printed non-bleached paper, which is more of a cream color, to reduce the contrast and reflectivity of the background.
152334H 9mo ago
> I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black. Wow. This is the most insightful statement I've read today. It's finally clicked [U+2014] why I prefer e-ink to hardback, in spite of the alluring texture of plup across fingers. It's because it should've been white-on-black, not black-on-white. It makes so much intuitive sense.
illiac786 9mo ago
Autobrightness only works for screens which are against a wall. Your eyes care about what is behind the screen, not in front of it, and that’s one thing autobrightness never took into account. I used to jailbreak my iPhone 4s to get some dark mode.
barrell 9mo ago
I’m personally a high fan of light mode, and rarely use dark mode. That being said, the comparison with paper isn’t very apt. LCDs produce their own light, and OLEDS exacerbate the difference by only emitting light for the background, and none for the text. It’s very different from using ambient reflected light. If you take a non backlight e-ink display and put it next to a light mode OLED with the same brightness as the environment, the difference is (slight pun intended) night and day. There’s no configuration possible on my phone to make it more legible than a book it sits next to in low light conditions. Also after years of having light mode only Phrasing, I recently added a dark mode. Not to look cool in dark mode, but because it’s often the first thing I use in the morning and last think I use at night. After a year of minim-brightness still-squinting at the screen, it was truly remarkable the physical difference a #000 background made in the dark with an OLED screen.
godelski 9mo ago
I'm writing this comment at night, on my phone with its absolute lowest brightness; it is still too bright. Maybe, just maybe, people aren't "holding it wrong" Unlike screens produced light. To make them the same brightness as ambient would make them unreadable in my current situation. Yet a black background is much more pleasant. Why? Because the light being produced is less. You're right that the contrast matters. Black background and white text gets us closer to ambient light level while providing contrast. You simply cannot do same with black text on white background. I mean go to a dark room, put down the phone and ask yourself what the natural background is. It's black. That's the ambient level
- piskov 9mo ago
  Treat yourself to a new phone: they go as low as 1 nit nowdays. Either you lower your display brightness or up your room lights — goal is the same: equal ambient and display brightness
  - godelski 9mo ago
    My phone already goes down to 1 nit. 1 nit is still too bright
- notafox 9mo ago
  Night Filter app is great Night Filter is an easy-to-use screen filter app for your Android device. Adjust brightness and colour, set up schedules, and reduce eye strain for comfortable night-time reading. [1] [1] https://nightfilter.app/ https://nightfilter.app/
port11 9mo ago
There’s plenty of research about the fatigue and damage caused by displays, with brightness being a factor. Most displays I’ve used, at the lowest brightness, will still be fatiguing. The human eye has never been exposed to this much direct light at close quarters, lots of it being in the blue+ parts of the spectrum. Needing light themes to offset display reflections seems like a very good case of form over function. Nano-texture Apple displays largely address that, but then they’re much more expensive. The idiocy of fashion-driven design… Aside from the LG Ultrafine, I’ve never owned an external monitor with auto-brightness. Example meta reviews: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12886-024-03721-1 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12886-024-03721-1 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9434525/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9434525/
pshirshov 9mo ago
Books reflect light, not emit it.

by piskov 9mo ago

troupo 9mo ago

> I’ve never met a person saying he hates books and wishes they were white on black. Books don't emit light. They reflect it. That's the difference.

piskov 9mo ago
It doesn’t matter what the source is (unless you have crt days flicker, bad tn panel polarization or what have you). Irritation comes from the difference in brightness.
- Krutonium 9mo ago
  Reflection means it's got no difference (or a negligable technically) difference in brightness.
  - orbital-decay 9mo ago
    My mirror disagrees.
Retr0id 9mo ago
The retina can't tell the difference between reflected light and emitted light
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- cwillu 9mo ago
  Unless you're in the habit of reading your books with a flashlight, the context makes it very different.
adrianmonk 9mo ago
I think that reinforces their point if anything. With reflected light, you have a natural, inherent form of auto-brightness because the amount of light coming off the page depends on the amount of light in the room.
- jchw 9mo ago
  Books are not designed to reproduce colors though, and monitors are. If you have aggressive auto-brightness settings, that wouldn't actually make a monitor appear more like a book, it would just make it so the stuff that is actually supposed to look blisteringly white is merely mild. Which, sure, is an improvement for eye strain, but it's more of a workaround than a solution, and since it would muck up color reproduction a lot of users couldn't do this all the time anyways.

itopaloglu83 9mo ago

Not everybody own $4k monitors, so automatic brightness isn’t always available. Regardless though, due to the design inconsistencies of the system, one screen is too bright that causes to reduce the brightness and another one uses literally 1/1,000,000 contrast difference between tabs to distinguish the active one, so it’s impossible to get a base brightness correct. I’m using a MacBook Pro M4 and as I move around the house, automatic brightness either tries to blind me despite I’ve been in a dark room for a minute, or simply refuses to turn the brightness up when the sun is shining down into the room. It’s certainly designed for a certain environment, but not definitely a home.

piskov 9mo ago
If it helps, you can disable auto brightness in accessibility settings so that only manual change remains
layer8 9mo ago
Monitors used to have easy rotary buttons to adjust brightness and contrast. Though I don’t remember it actually being necessary that often. Of course, the monitors rarely changed location.
- illiac786 9mo ago
  In assuming you are not using your keyboard to set brightness because it’s an external display plugged into a laptop? Search for a DDC application for your desktop, it’s amazing, the brightness controls of your laptop will then control the external display as well. I use lunar on my MacBook, it was a revelation.
  - treffer 9mo ago
    Or switch to HDR if you have a capable display. I was pleasantly surprised that HDR also means you can control brightness - it is all software I that case! And the brightness keys on an external Apple keyboard work.

Quothling 9mo ago

It's probably also because a lot of people sit in rooms which are poorly lit. Part of it is probably because it's really hard to establish proper lighting with modern LEDs. This is anecdotal, but our lamps haven't really changed in the way they are designed, We now have six lamps where we had three before, and there is still "less" light in our living room because LED's create and emit light differently. I usually work with darkmode at home, and light mode in the office because our office is basically the surface of the sun.

D13Fd 9mo ago
Have you tried high-CRI LEDs? I find that they are much closer to the incandescent lighting feel.

Krutonium 9mo ago

>I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black. I love books. But I also have a brain-vision disability that makes it so that I physically struggle to read black text on a white background. If I could get books inverted, I would.

cosmic_cheese 9mo ago

I use both auto (when available) and manual brightness adjustments, and the environment in which I do most of my computing gets ample natural light. The problem persists, however, because as the linked posts notes light mode is far brighter than it used to be, and now if I crank brightness down low enough to feel comfortable I'm sacrificing contrast and color vividness to such a degree that (for me) it's actively distracting. So, dark mode on high brightness it is. For code editing, I've always tended towards dark themes ever since they became readily available in IDEs in the late 2000s simply because syntax coloration "pops" so much more strongly than is possible with a light theme. When I use a light theme for code editing it feels almost like staring at a sheet of undifferentiated text in comparison.

piskov 9mo ago
> because syntax coloration "pops" so much more strongly than is possible with a light theme. That’s why I mentioned alabaster: the only thing it highlights is comments and constants. Nowadays I can’t stand “normal” themes even for a minute: they are like blinking Christmas lights for me, too much distraction. Imaging reading the book where each word has different colors for nouns, verbs, what have you — nuts! :-)
- cosmic_cheese 9mo ago
  Feels like a difference in mental structures. Without robust syntax coloring, parsing code is considerably more difficult for me. In more human terms it feels kind of like trying to communicate without being able to use adjectives or something.
  - piskov 9mo ago
    It took a couple of days 10+ years ago to see what the fuss is about (I was an avid “christmas-lighter” before), and I never came back. Also check this: https://tonsky.me/blog/syntax-highlighting/ https://tonsky.me/blog/syntax-highlighting/
    - deleted 9mo ago

nitwit005 9mo ago

If you turn down the brightness, the background and text will become more similar in color, as both will move closer to black. A dark background reduces total brightness without that effect.

topspin 9mo ago
Exactly. Contrast or, more precisely, the dynamic range we desire, is ruined by dimming displays enough not to cause pain and fatigue. It's a dumb solution, and we may all safely ignore it, knowing it won't occur. "Dark mode" haters will just have to cope as dark becomes the default.

VerifiedReports 9mo ago

No, it isn't. Making your entire screen dark for all content isn't a solution for a dumb GUI color scheme. "Back in the day, light mode wasn’t called “light mode”. It was just the way that computers were, we didn’t really think about turning everything light or dark. Sure, some applications were often dark (photo editors, IDEs, terminals) but everything else was light, and that was fine." Several incorrect statements there. "Back in the day," computers displayed white text on a dark background (usually a blue background) out of the box. This was deemed the most legible. The opposite was called "inverse." The Atari 8-bit and Commodore 64 computers (and possibly others) even had dedicated keys that toggled between regular and inverse text; it is called that in the manual. Word even had a checkbox option in it entitled "Blue background, white text." It wasn't removed until 2007, concurrent with lots of other UI regressions in Windows. Microsoft also removed the color-scheme editor from Windows, with which people had been able to set up global color schemes (including "dark" ones) since 1991. When people finally realized how dumb it is to read dark text off the surface of a glaring light bulb all day, companies had to run around slapping hard-coded "dark modes" onto everything... after abandoning better solutions (user-defined system-wide color schemes) that had existed since the early '90s on every platform except the vaunted Mac. So how did we end up suffering through decades of inverse GUIs? I've always attributed it to 1. The "desktop publishing" fad of the late '80s / early '90s, which sought to make the screen analogous to a piece of paper. 2. The Mac, which imitated Xerox's GUI, which was inverse. Possibly related to #1. 3. Windows defaulting to an inverse scheme (although it provided a way to easily change the global scheme), as it imitated the Mac.

orbital-decay 9mo ago
>"Back in the day," computers displayed white text on a dark background (usually a blue background) out of the box. This was deemed the most legible. That just prevented CRT degradation and it had less ghosting and flickering, especially as most CRTs in the home computer era were just terrible home TVs, and CRTs in the mainframe era were equally terrible. The saturated blue background was absolutely insufferable and I had ghosting and shifted color perception for minutes after using NC and Borland software for a long time. I loathe it till this day, just like garish CGA colors which were an assault on my eyes. 80's and 90's had a general concept of a desktop with windows as paper documents, because the first real use case for personal computers and workstations was assisting office jobs. Funny how you call the normal light scheme inverted. IIRC PC text/graphics modes used this term for dark backgrounds.

Normal_gaussian 9mo ago

The pages in books are a range of colours, very few are gloss white. I've just flicked through a few on my shelf; the whitest book I have is the wiring regs and they are notably less white than my wife's artists paper. Most of my books are a kind of murky brown not too dissimilar in mental feel to the HN background.

layer8 9mo ago
That’s why display brightness should be set such that it is similar to how a book page would look in comparable ambient lighting. “White” isn’t a specific brightness level.
- Normal_gaussian 9mo ago
  You are aware that many of us use our displays for more than just reading text? And often multiple things at a time?

doodlesdev 9mo ago

> I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black. That's because paper used to print books isn't always white. Most of the books I've read this year and last year had a somewhat yellow-ish tint to them (they were newly printed). I know I'm not the only person bothered by pure white paper in books. I absolutely agree about setting brightness correctly, though. It's very usual for me to instantly reduce brightness whenever I have to use someone's computer. No idea how people use their screens so bright.

crote 9mo ago
> That's because paper used to print books isn't always white. Isn't it basically rule #1 of UX design to never use pure white / pure black?
- doodlesdev 9mo ago
  Yes, that's what's being discussed here. I'm disagreeing with the people who are defending using pure white as a background in light mode. Pure black is more understandable, because it helps with battery life on mobile and notebooks, although I believe it shouldn't be the default dark mode.

topspin 9mo ago

> I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black. I've never seen a book actually radiate its own light. Perhaps if there had been 600+ sq. inch self illuminating books, we might have invented dark mode long ago. During the early days of CRTs, dark mode was the norm. VT50/100/220, 3270 etc. were almost always dark with illuminated characters, and even when not, they were only ~12-14" diagonal, and there was only one. Most PC/DOS machines were the same. The moment raster displays appeared, everything went "light mode," but they still weren't very large. Then, displays got huge and multiplied, easily able to overwhelm human eyes with excessive power. The ~30-year detour into Apple/Microsoft's paper-mimicry is ending due to basic ergonomics. No need for your tut-tutting.

layer8 9mo ago
Books reflect ambient light. Monitor brightness should be set to a similar light level. You can hold a book next to the display and adjust accordingly.
- ronjakoi 9mo ago
  That's an unreasonable ask. I'm not gonna fiddle with the brightness of my monitor throughout the day, thanks
  - Alejandro9R 9mo ago
    I mean, if you have a modern digital display you might be able to change the brightness through the DDC/CI protocol and a simple app or extension, available in every much every OS. With a keyboard shortcut or two clicks you change it. Fiddle with monitor settings is painful, but that protocol is a godsend. Even one of my cheapest 13 years old monitor supports it.
  - layer8 9mo ago
    If you control your ambient lighting or use automatic adjustment, you don’t have to.

taneq 9mo ago

> I don’t see people complaining “I hate listening to most music because my headphones are always at 90% volume Volume and loudness are different things (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war) and pervasive loudness is absolutely a thing. Just turning down the volume doesn’t fix dynamic range compression.

Normal_gaussian 9mo ago
We also apply multiple kinds of normalisation to audio tracks to have them play at the appropriate level for their use case; so that the user doesn't have to adjust the volume when the TV switches from showing a war film, a panel show, a news program, a music channel, and a nature documentary - each is played with appropriate settings pre-baked relative to the others.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

Kerrick 9mo ago

> I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black. Plenty of books are printed non-bleached paper, which is more of a cream color, to reduce the contrast and reflectivity of the background.

152334H 9mo ago

> I’ve never met a person saying they hate books and wish they were white on black. Wow. This is the most insightful statement I've read today. It's finally clicked [U+2014] why I prefer e-ink to hardback, in spite of the alluring texture of plup across fingers. It's because it should've been white-on-black, not black-on-white. It makes so much intuitive sense.

illiac786 9mo ago

Autobrightness only works for screens which are against a wall. Your eyes care about what is behind the screen, not in front of it, and that’s one thing autobrightness never took into account. I used to jailbreak my iPhone 4s to get some dark mode.

barrell 9mo ago

I’m personally a high fan of light mode, and rarely use dark mode. That being said, the comparison with paper isn’t very apt. LCDs produce their own light, and OLEDS exacerbate the difference by only emitting light for the background, and none for the text. It’s very different from using ambient reflected light. If you take a non backlight e-ink display and put it next to a light mode OLED with the same brightness as the environment, the difference is (slight pun intended) night and day. There’s no configuration possible on my phone to make it more legible than a book it sits next to in low light conditions. Also after years of having light mode only Phrasing, I recently added a dark mode. Not to look cool in dark mode, but because it’s often the first thing I use in the morning and last think I use at night. After a year of minim-brightness still-squinting at the screen, it was truly remarkable the physical difference a #000 background made in the dark with an OLED screen.

godelski 9mo ago

I'm writing this comment at night, on my phone with its absolute lowest brightness; it is still too bright. Maybe, just maybe, people aren't "holding it wrong" Unlike screens produced light. To make them the same brightness as ambient would make them unreadable in my current situation. Yet a black background is much more pleasant. Why? Because the light being produced is less. You're right that the contrast matters. Black background and white text gets us closer to ambient light level while providing contrast. You simply cannot do same with black text on white background. I mean go to a dark room, put down the phone and ask yourself what the natural background is. It's black. That's the ambient level

piskov 9mo ago
Treat yourself to a new phone: they go as low as 1 nit nowdays. Either you lower your display brightness or up your room lights — goal is the same: equal ambient and display brightness
- godelski 9mo ago
  My phone already goes down to 1 nit. 1 nit is still too bright
notafox 9mo ago
Night Filter app is great Night Filter is an easy-to-use screen filter app for your Android device. Adjust brightness and colour, set up schedules, and reduce eye strain for comfortable night-time reading. [1] [1] https://nightfilter.app/ https://nightfilter.app/

port11 9mo ago

There’s plenty of research about the fatigue and damage caused by displays, with brightness being a factor. Most displays I’ve used, at the lowest brightness, will still be fatiguing. The human eye has never been exposed to this much direct light at close quarters, lots of it being in the blue+ parts of the spectrum. Needing light themes to offset display reflections seems like a very good case of form over function. Nano-texture Apple displays largely address that, but then they’re much more expensive. The idiocy of fashion-driven design… Aside from the LG Ultrafine, I’ve never owned an external monitor with auto-brightness. Example meta reviews: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12886-024-03721-1 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12886-024-03721-1 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9434525/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9434525/

pshirshov 9mo ago

Books reflect light, not emit it.