[HN Gopher] Blue light filters don't work - controlling total lu...
___________________________________________________________________
Blue light filters don't work - controlling total luminance is a
better bet
Author : pminimax
Score : 222 points
Date : 2026-02-20 18:14 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.neuroai.science)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.neuroai.science)
| snet0 wrote:
| But have you considered that it _feels_ better?
| stronglikedan wrote:
| so do placebos
| kurthr wrote:
| I agree for sleep. I prefer them because they focus better
| for me.
|
| Blue creates a halo around letters that is distracting with
| my declining vision.
|
| Also, Blue fluorescent OLED are ~50% less efficient than R/G
| phosphorescent OLED so you can reduce screen power
| consumption of a full white page by almost 30% using such a
| filter. That in turn might be 30% of active device power
| consumption (for a total of almost 10% in battery life during
| active operation). Ignoring that they also tend to burn out
| more quickly, since tandem blue has become fairly mainstream.
|
| Many more reasons for these "filters", if you don't mind the
| white balance shift and reduced color gamut.
| snet0 wrote:
| So what? If I could take a sugar pill that guaranteed I feel
| comfier looking at my screen, nobody can tell me it "doesn't
| work". I'm not trying to optimise my life, I'm trying to have
| my eyes feel better.
| Barbing wrote:
| Placebo and "manifesting"--the latter sounds mockable but
| pretty much the same thing, harmless if helpful so hey!
| nickthegreek wrote:
| The placebo effect is a real, measurable mind-body
| response where belief & expectation can change your
| symptoms or how you feel. However, it does not directly
| alter external reality. Manifesting claims your thoughts
| or intentions can cause _outside events_ to happen, which
| has zero evidence to support it.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| If somebody is "manifesting" themselves a sleep aid, I
| think they'd just call it meditation and everybody would
| more or less accept that it probably works for that
| individual. Maybe you'd have a few people with severe
| autism who start arguing on online forums about the
| scientific evidence behind meditation, but that's just
| them being them.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Not really. Most of the cultural notion about the remarkable
| effects of placebos came from flawed studies in the 1950s. As
| far as I can tell, the modern consensus is that there's no
| clinically significant placebo effect _except_ for conditions
| that can only be measured by a subject self-reporting their
| own perception (like pain and fatigue).
| allthetime wrote:
| and? placebo is often effective.
| debo_ wrote:
| > Everybody wants better sleep
|
| Bro, as someone who had brutal insomnia for a couple of years and
| now sleeps "normally" for whatever that means, I can tell you
| that I don't think about my sleep quality at all. I'm happy to be
| sleeping.
|
| If you too sleep "ok" for whatever that means, maybe stop
| worrying about optimizing it and go do something else less
| insane.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| What did you do to tackle your insomnia?
| smt88 wrote:
| Primary, idiopathic insomnia doesn't really exist. It's
| almost always anxiety, although a few other mental and
| physical conditions can also cause it. But more likely
| anxiety.
| debo_ wrote:
| That was my experience as well.
| m3047 wrote:
| Disturbed sleep / inability to settle / anxiety can have
| physical causes although these are poorly recognized /
| diagnosed by regular allopathic medicine where I live.
|
| Anecdata: 1) A good friend whose anxiety was largely
| alleviated (and sleep improved) by recognizing and treating
| their iron deficiency. 2) I have to (can't take the Western
| drug which was prescribed any more, and the Western doctors
| can't seem to bang the rocks together) take herbs for my
| hypertension but as opposed to the side effects I was
| experiencing from the drug I joke that all of the "side
| effects" from the herbs are good, they're targeting
| imbalances which were not recognized / treated previously and
| lo and behold I settle and sleep better... which helps reduce
| the blood pressure.
| debo_ wrote:
| Which herbs do you take?
| m3047 wrote:
| I would discuss this with you in some detail privately,
| with bona fides. You should consult with an herbalist.
| The herbalist I see doesn't mix themes / traditions. The
| one we've chosen, together, to work with is TCM. Inside
| of TCM there are "strategies" or themes. We tried a few,
| the gou teng + tian ma theme seems to work, minor changes
| happen seasonally. Underneath that are herbs addressing
| inflammation (ability to settle / get comfortable),
| immune system (allergies) balancing (post nasal drip /
| congestion / anxiety), circulatory health (e.g. cold
| feet), and tonifying some of the major metabolic /
| detoxifying organs (sweating / digestion). I have a
| renewed commitment to exercise and making sure I eat the
| right things for my body.
|
| In the beginning I got hit with something and was
| misdiagnosed, and almost died; hypertension didn't fit
| the narrative so was initially ignored. By the way, when
| you don't sleep for three months it fucks you up. No
| attempt was ever made to even acknowledge that there
| might be a root cause for the hypertension. The
| hypertension drugs worked until they didn't, and they
| started gaslighting me about it. Bear in mind, in the
| context of the theme better sleep will help with
| hypertension (demonstrably true!).
|
| You need to cultivate awareness as well as evidence-based
| skepticism for this to work. One of the herbs I take
| interacts with the beta blocker I still take, and if you
| weren't paying attention it could kill you (nobody told
| me, or the herbalist, about it). Some of the herbs are
| pricey, but none are over $80/pound. All in, it costs me
| about $100 / month, and two hours of my time every three
| days (to boil herbs). Quite frankly, if the pills work
| then just do that; but don't treat it as a "solve", get
| to work and identify some of the root causes and what can
| be done about it... before they stop working or start
| making you sick.
| debo_ wrote:
| I spoke about it in this video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnNPRqLVtaM
| nine_k wrote:
| Waking up tired and with the brain full of fog is nearly as fun
| as not sleeping and ending up tired, with the brain full of
| fog. Truth be told, most cases of "poor sleep quality" are not
| as brutal though.
| kqr wrote:
| The charitable reading of "better sleep" is "sleep habits that
| allow for a healthy amount of sleep". A lot of people have
| habits that give them insufficient sleep.
| jerlam wrote:
| Yeah, "get better sleep" is usually followed with "by buying
| this thing". No one makes any money if you go to sleep
| earlier.
| debo_ wrote:
| My experience is being surrounded by people who sleep eight
| hours a night and then check their ring data or whatever
| nonsense to convince themselves that they could do better.
| koalacola wrote:
| Is this your article OP?
| aethrum wrote:
| They absolutely help my eyes not be so strained. If its placebo,
| its a working placebo.
|
| >Are people actually using Night Shift? >Aggravatingly, yes.
|
| What is the authors problem lol? It feels a lot better on
| eyeballs to use warm light things. Why does he care?
| thenewnewguy wrote:
| I'm not an MD or expert in this field enough to know if OP is
| right or wrong, but I think it's fairly reasonable to be
| irritated people are claiming software has a health benefit
| based on vibes/feels.
|
| I thought we as a society had moved on from superstition to
| evidence-based medicine, but in this very post there are plenty
| of replies countering OP's scientific analysis and data with
| anecdotes (which is disappointing regardless of if TFA is
| correct or incorrect).
| geoduck14 wrote:
| >I think it's fairly reasonable to be irritated people are
| pushing software based on vibes/feels.
|
| You are going to HATE to find out about night-mode in the
| browser
| thenewnewguy wrote:
| To be fair, I should have said something like "claiming
| software has a health benefit based on vibes/feels". I
| personally prefer the look of night/dark mode (or whatever
| you call it) in apps and the browser, but I'm not going to
| claim it makes me healthier or improves my sleep or
| whatever.
|
| If you just like how something looks, that's fine, but
| there's a difference between "I like how X looks"
| (subjective opinion) than "X helps me sleep better"
| (difficult to prove but objectively true or false).
|
| Edit: Changed this in my original message as it seems
| multiple people got confused by my prior poor wording.
| thatcat wrote:
| It's not about how it looks aesthetically, you can feel
| your eye muscles release tension when you go from light
| to dark mode.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| As someone more trained in science than software, the
| phrase "you can feel..." is suspicious, _even if_ it 's
| my own feelings.
|
| Not invalid; suspicious.
| nandomrumber wrote:
| As a complete psychopath:
|
| If I put your hand in a vice _and_ do the vice up to the
| point where you start saying you _can feel_ the
| pressure...
|
| Yes, of course I'm going to be _suspicious_.
|
| Gaslighting doesn't exist, you made that up because
| you're _fucking crazy_.
|
| /s
| thatcat wrote:
| A phrase like I'm more trained in science is an appeal to
| authority, which is pretty suspicious, as is not trusting
| your own observations. How do you trust the data you
| collect?
|
| feel in this case is a muscle contraction not
| psychological as you're suggesting
| wtetzner wrote:
| Regardless of "health benefits", the phrase "you can
| feel" seems pretty relevant when it comes to what someone
| finds comfortable.
| 0x1ch wrote:
| End of the day, dark mode would've been totally ignored
| if there wasn't a perceivable benefit, placebo or not.
| People want to make everything difficult, I guess.
| tcfhgj wrote:
| Benefit: saves battery on OLED and goes easier on the
| OLEDs themselves
| theshackleford wrote:
| > you can feel your eye muscles release tension when you
| go from light to dark mode
|
| For those like me, i'd like to add, this is not
| universally true. For some, dark mode will provide a
| significant reduction in comfort and increase in your
| fatigue and other symptoms.
|
| Quite a few years back now, I started having significant
| problems with my eyesight that for the longest time I
| failed to match up to the switch to significant dark mode
| usage.
|
| Turns out for many (though perhaps not all) with
| astigmatism, dark mode can induce issues that will wipe
| any potential positive impacts normal people experience.
| In my case, it gave me horrific blurryness/double vision
| that I thought was my eyes developing some new problem.
|
| I'd tell the eye doctors "it seems to start fine then get
| worse as the day goes on!"
|
| No, in fact what was actually happening, was in the
| afternoon my machines were scheduled to start shifting to
| dark mode. At which point the issues would start and my
| eyes would feel "heavy." It would fatigue my eyes so
| heavily that even not looking at displays would be
| affected.
|
| I can not believe it took so long to connect the two, but
| I never even considered dark mode because it was so
| heavily pushed (along with reductions in brightness) as
| the answer to general monitor usage fatigue that I never
| remotely considered it may do the opposite, which to be
| fair, is on me.
|
| Point is...if you have astigmatism, verify for yourself
| before rolling over to the full commit. Hopefully you are
| fine, but if not, you'll know why.
| jack_pp wrote:
| Is it superstition to deduce that I get gassy after eating
| beans? I need a scientific study to tell me this? Same for if
| a screen hurts my eyes (not long term, like truly my eyes
| hurt) when using bright white colors at night.
| thenewnewguy wrote:
| Yes, actually, if someone has direct scientific evidence
| contrary to the claim (I doubt such evidence exists for
| your first example as to the best of my knowledge the
| relationship between beans and gastrointestinal changes is
| well understood).
|
| Your eyes could hurt for a variety of reasons - brightness,
| too long screen time, being dry for external reasons, etc.
| Most humans are poor at identifying the cause of one-off
| events: you may think it's because you turned on a blue-
| light filter, but it actually could be because you used
| your phone for an hour less.
|
| That's why we have science to actually isolate variables
| and prove (or at least gather strong evidence for) things
| about the world, and why doctors don't (or at least
| shouldn't) make health-related recommendations based on
| vibes.
| jack_pp wrote:
| It's pretty clear, even on monitor, night and day
| difference at a push of a button. I'm not arguing if this
| helps you sleep better but it is pretty arrogant of you
| to tell me I can't figure out from my own experience if
| something is comfortable or not.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| Nobody really cares if it's comfortable or not _for you_
| , the debate at hand is whether it's measurably more
| comfortable for _the population at large_.
| cgriswald wrote:
| That's how it _should_ be but the poster is literally
| calling the individual experiences of others
| "superstition" based on _the population at large_.
| nandomrumber wrote:
| It's about the equivalent of someone claiming my saying I
| find woollen clothing directly touching my skin to be
| irritating / itchy requires double blind randomised
| controlled studies to determine whether this is true at
| the population level.
|
| There are eight billion of us, we can't _all be
| different_ , there must be at least some categories we
| can't be sorted in to, maybe those who find woollen
| clothing itchy and those who don't, and those who find
| blue-light reduction more comfortable and those who
| don't.
|
| One of my pet theories is that this hyper fixation on The
| Ultimate Truth via The Scientific Method is what happens
| when a society mints PhDs at an absurd rate. We went up
| with _a lot_ of people who learn more and more about less
| and less, and a set of people who idolise those people
| and their output.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _if someone has direct scientific evidence contrary to
| the claim_
|
| Except they don't. This is evidence about _one_ potential
| mechanism. Not evidence saying there are _no other_
| potential mechanisms.
|
| This is actually a very common mistake in popular science
| writing, to confuse the two.
| wat10000 wrote:
| If your eyes routinely hurt when doing something, and
| then they stop routinely hurting after you make a change,
| that's pretty good reason to believe that there's a
| causal effect there.
|
| Sometimes the causality is clear enough that you don't
| need sophisticated science to figure it out. Did you know
| that the only randomized controlled trial on the
| effectiveness of parachutes at preventing injury and
| death when jumping out of an airplane found that there is
| no effect? Given that, do you believe there really is no
| effect?
| philwelch wrote:
| I have direct scientific evidence contrary to the claim
| that parachutes improve the safety of jumping out of
| airplanes.
|
| https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094
| bob1029 wrote:
| > I think it's fairly reasonable to be irritated people are
| pushing software based on vibes/feels.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_industry
| taco_emoji wrote:
| > I thought we as a society had moved on from superstition to
| evidence-based medicine
|
| Surely you didn't actually believe that unless you JUST
| landed here from space after being away for 60 years.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| because if you read the article its about blue light filters
| _to aid sleep_ not ease of reading.
|
| The the grift wheel on this particular bandwagon is strong. To
| the point where my fucking glasses have a blue filter on them,
| which fucks up my ability to do colour work becuase everything
| is orange.
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| If you wait long enough cataracts will give you that for
| free.
| cpburns2009 wrote:
| Blue light filtering lenses come at a premium. You don't
| accidentally get them.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| I wasn't paying for them, so it was very much accidental.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Someone ran up to you and put them on your face?
| mikkupikku wrote:
| You should go back and demand they be replaced. Such a
| mistake isn't something you should tolerate.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| I don't go to that optician anymore.
|
| The list of mistakes were as follows:
|
| 1) it corrected my eye with a slight astigmatism, but
| over corrected my other eye, so the agregate was pretty
| much the same
|
| 2) the aformentioned blue filter, which is part of the
| anti-glare coating.
|
| 3) my non-astigmatic eye was incorrectly marked with a
| prescription
|
| 4) I don't actually need glasses because I can see to the
| bottom of the eye chart without them. Its just as I'm now
| older, my vision is not as good as they used to be.
|
| 5) these were designed for "close work" but actually
| don't really help me focus closer to me.
|
| However, arguing that, as a non-proffesional with only a
| passing understanding of optics (non-biological) with a
| large multinational company doesn't seem like a good use
| of time.
| RupertSalt wrote:
| Let me explain how many times I went back-and-forth with
| the opticians about "is this coating/feature optional?"
| cpburns2009 wrote:
| My optician's office charges an extra $100 for blue light
| filtering. They at least make it clear it's optional but
| recommended for frequent screen use.
| tartoran wrote:
| I confirm that this helps me as well. Quite often I don't have
| any fancy filter, I'm permanently setting display/monitor to
| low temperature and my eyes/vision couldn't be happier. I don't
| even need darkmode, regular mode works just fine for me as long
| as blue light is toned down. Granted, I'm not doing any color
| correction or anything color sensitive work.
|
| I used to have terrible headaches about 20 years ago when I
| started spending a lot of time in front of the screen. I went
| to an optometrist who tested my eyes and told me I could get
| low prescriptions (.5) but warned me that there's no way back
| and that many people are fine with my current vision, choosing
| not to get a prescription. Luckily I figured out that it was
| blue light that was bothering me and once I turned it down I
| haven't had any problems since. I'm in my mid 40s and my vision
| has naturally deteriorated a bit but I am still fine with no
| prescriptions.
|
| And I don't believe this to be placebo. Every time I stare at a
| regular screen for longer than 5 minutes I get eye strain. At
| the same time I suspect this doesn't help everyone, but at
| least to me this is a great solution that still works.
| cellularmitosis wrote:
| Can you elaborate on "no way back"?
| denkmoon wrote:
| Not OP, but when I got glasses as an adult and while they
| really improved the sharpness of my vision I could feel my
| unassisted vision getting worse, so I stopped using them
| and get by with slightly unfocused but unassisted vision. I
| assume if I wore them full time my unassisted vision would
| degrade to the point where I then need the glasses full
| time.
| ifwinterco wrote:
| I've got half a diopter (ish) of astigmatism in my right
| eye and it can be slightly annoying but interesting to
| know that using glasses would risk making it worse.
|
| The weird thing is it seems to get noticeably worse or
| better depending on how much time I spend outside
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Your assumption was false.[1]
|
| [1] https://health.clevelandclinic.org/do-glasses-make-
| your-eyes...
| maccard wrote:
| I got glasses 2 years ago for a very minor prescription.
| Your eyesight sucked before you've just forgotten how
| badly. I had an eye test very recently for Contacts and
| my prescription is the same 2 years later
| tartoran wrote:
| I meant that once you decide to wear prescription optics
| you can't go back to not wearing them, of course excluding
| eye surgery. In my case I could stick to good enough vision
| and luckily 20 years later Im still not wearing glasses. My
| main point was that I was getting eye strain from blue
| light and once I reduced it the problem dissapeared.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| This isn't true? Myopia develops rapidly in youth then
| stabilizes in adulthood. It gets a worse with age, not
| corrective lenses. Then sometime after 40 you flip to
| presbyopia when your lenses lose flexibility.
| tartoran wrote:
| I don't have severe myopia and I'm fine with no glasses
| for now. The optometrist detected .5 correction needed
| but advised me to not go for it for the reason I
| mentioned. I think they are more qualified to give this
| advice than some rando on the internet. If they were a
| mercenary they'd tell me to go for it, that optometry
| practice was part of an eye glasses store and I'm sure
| they'd gain from my business there. And here I am 20
| years later not wearing glasses yet. As I'm getting older
| my vision is getting slightly worse, I'll probably get to
| wear them at some point but that's beside the point.
| ak217 wrote:
| There is plenty of information about this in trusted
| sources, the way you're describing this is incorrect.
| Overcorrection and badly designed simplistic optics can
| make myopia worse in childhood when the eye is growing.
| Your eye is no longer growing.
|
| Don't trust everything your doctor says verbatim, they
| often oversimplify and their information can be out of
| date. Give your doctor the benefit of the doubt but check
| it against other sources and use it to build a mental
| model.
| amelius wrote:
| Are you sure you are not also changing total luminance?
| refulgentis wrote:
| They are, just, don't realize it. Anything off white will be
| < luminance than white. People replying they _need_ it need
| to be turning their monitor brightness down.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Best thing to do is use a scripting app that can make
| hotkeys for controlling monitor brightness. You can
| directly control the actual backlight of the monitor and
| lower it in the evening and at night. Same as pressing the
| physical button. Great when you have multiple displays
| himata4113 wrote:
| I actually cannot use my monitor without nightshift, any white
| page just makes my eyes water, painful even. I had it off for a
| day when I switched to linux and immediately my eyes started
| drying out.
|
| Safe to say it works for making your eyes less tired at least.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I love Night Shift.
| taeric wrote:
| I find it somewhat pleasant, but by far the best thing I did to
| help my eye strain was greatly lower the brightness. Basically,
| I was told to make it so that my phone's camera could see
| something on the screen and my desk at the same time without
| washing out.
|
| After doing that, I have found that the "temperature" of the
| screen doesn't really matter to me that heavily.
| kpw94 wrote:
| > Basically, I was told to make it so that my phone's camera
| could see something on the screen and my desk at the same
| time without washing out
|
| +1. The low-tech version of this I've heard and I've been
| doing is:
|
| Hold a printed white paper sheet right next to your monitor,
| and adjust the amount of brightness in monitor so the monitor
| matches that sheet.
|
| This of course requires good overall room lightning where the
| printed paper would be pleasant to read in first place,
| whether it's daytime or evening/night
| taeric wrote:
| I think this was what I was told the first time. The
| advantage of taking a picture with my phone's camera is it
| kind of made it obvious just how much brighter the screen
| was then the paper.
|
| Which, fair that it may be obvious to others to just scan
| their eyes from screen to paper. I've been surprised with
| how much people will just accept the time their eyes have
| to adjust to a super bright screen. Almost like it doesn't
| register with them.
| Marsymars wrote:
| There's some overlap with bias lighting here - good overall
| room lighting works if you've got good daylight, but it's
| much easier to get bright bias lighting at night than to
| light up the entire room.
| DANmode wrote:
| Concur that most displays are set 25-50% too bright by
| default.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| My Windows 10 PC glitches out most days where the 3rd monitor
| doesn't properly apply the Night Light setting. So I turn it
| off and on to fix it. The full blue brightness is awful and
| definitely harsh on my nighttime eyes. I'm not sure I could
| believe it's placebo
| refulgentis wrote:
| It is a placebo, it is an aesthetic thing. It is not something
| that helps anything at all physically.
|
| This was always well known. It didn't matter 5 years ago, 10
| years ago, when OS added it. Easier to let it go than argue.
|
| But with HDR, it matters _enormously_ people are well educated
| on this. Monitors are approximately light bulbs, and we 've
| gone from staring into a 25W light bulb to a 200W one. (source:
| color scientist, built Google's color space)
|
| > What is the authors problem lol? It feels a lot better on
| eyeballs to use warm light things. Why does he care?
|
| I think it's better to avoid stuff like this. Been here 16
| years and a flippant "whats his problem" "lol" and "why does he
| care" is 99th percentile disrespectful. It's not about what
| you're arguing, its just such a fundamental violation of what I
| perceive as the core tenant of HN, "come with curiosity." You
| are clearly curious, just, expressing it poorly.
| RupertSalt wrote:
| username checks out
| refulgentis wrote:
| Hahaha in my 37 years I don't think anyones mentioned
| looking it up, cheers. I chose it when I was 8 by flipping
| open my mom's 2000 page tome of a Merriam Websters, closing
| my eyes, and putting my finger on the page.
| wtetzner wrote:
| > It is not something that helps anything at all physically.
|
| That's a pretty strong claim to make.
| refulgentis wrote:
| It's not a strong claim. It's a settled one. The literature
| on blue light filters and screen-emitted blue light at
| display intensities is clear and has been for years, even
| if approaching it from first principles isn't convincing,
| or the first principles aren't known.
|
| The thing about color science is that everyone has eyes, so
| everyone assumes they already have the full picture. One
| can experience warm light feeling "nicer," and the jump to
| "this is physically helping me" feels so self-evident that
| anyone saying otherwise must be the one making a strong
| claim. But "I prefer the aesthetic" and "this is
| physiologically beneficial" are two completely different
| statements, and only one of them survives controlled study.
|
| I don't care if people use night shift. I'm not trying to
| take anyone's warm tint away. But we are now in an era
| where consumer displays are pushing luminance levels that
| are physically, measurably significant - not "I feel like
| it's bright" significant, but "this is a fundamentally
| different amount of light entering your eye" significant.
| Getting the basics right matters now in a way it didn't
| when we were all staring into dim LCDs and the worst case
| was people shifting white balance so the color temperature
| was incandescent, not D65.
| moodyScarf wrote:
| so whats the takeaway? just turn down the brightness off
| your monitors? the blue light option of my benq monitor
| doesnt help?
| refulgentis wrote:
| Correct - more or less, I love BenQs but haven't had one
| in a few years. Dunno what _exactly_ _their_ blue light
| filter does. A software-based nightlight is usually going
| to turn whites offwhite, i.e. the yellowing you see _is_
| effectively darkening / lowering brightness. Its just,
| its accidentally fixing it and the fix is much less than
| it would be by directly lowering brightness.
| schiffern wrote:
| Aggravatingly, you can't set Night Shift to actually be on
| 24/7. It always has a "seam" where it fades off and then turns
| back on.
|
| One trick is to schedule this as a bedtime reminder to put down
| the phone for the night (phone fasting).
| InMice wrote:
| I kind of despise that part about nightshift, since i almost
| always like to keep it at medium anytime indoors and during
| winter. But in the later evening I want it max, and when i
| got to bed i want it even more. And ive always despised flux
| for that too. It's even worse since a lot of times i sleep in
| two phases each night and it doesnt allow to change the
| length of night time. So dumb.
|
| In a way it's mildly frustrating, but also slightly insane to
| me that some of these things are so limiting in control. I
| cant just be given a simple on/off toggle? There is a project
| manager(s), paid millions collectively that sit in a room and
| decide "No, you cannot keep nightshift on, it will turn off
| at 7 AM every morning." Like... WTF.
|
| Stuff like this just keeps on getting worse and worse - and
| more and more common.
|
| Ive created shortcuts to jump directly to night settings and
| a shortcut to enable color filters. Still...
| nandomrumber wrote:
| Can't f.lux be controlled from the command line? I seem to
| recall it can.
|
| If so, you should be able to cron it to do whatever you
| want.
|
| I was using redshift on Linux for a while and had some
| aliases set to trigger various settings.
| InMice wrote:
| Ive never been aware of that and when I look it's just
| forum posts of people asking more than once with no
| reply.
| nandomrumber wrote:
| I can't quite reach a Mac from where I'm sitting at the
| minute, maybe someone can try invoking f.lux from the
| command line.
| MBCook wrote:
| Is the author arguing anything about eye strain? The word
| "strain" doesn't even appear on the page.
|
| I think they're purely talking about the idea that cutting back
| on blue light will help you sleep better. Nothing else.
|
| Why would the author care? Honestly it does seem like one of
| those junk science things that popped up a couple years ago
| that all of a sudden was everywhere. I literally remember
| comments here on hacker news from people saying Apple was
| killing people because they were blocking F.lux and didn't have
| night shift yet. Yes they were the most hyperbolic, but they
| were there.
|
| I kind of like Night Shift too, for similar reasons. But I
| don't think it ever did anything for my sleep. Nor did I ever
| expect it to.
| simoncion wrote:
| > What is the authors problem lol?
|
| I'm not the author, but every time I've seen Night Shift (and
| things like it) being used, they've done a grand job of royally
| fucking up the colors of whatever's on screen.
|
| > It feels a lot better on eyeballs to use warm light things.
|
| That's, like, your opinion, man. The lights in my house are all
| 5000K lights, and I _love_ it.
|
| I expect you'd get _way_ more out of reducing the brightness of
| your screen [0] than fucking with its colors. _So_ many people
| seem to love having searingly-bright screens shining into their
| faces... I don 't get the fascination.
|
| [0] If you've got the monitor's brightness at minimum and it's
| still too bright, then there are software controls to further
| reduce it.
| disillusioned wrote:
| I respect that other people have the right to their opinion,
| but 5000K lights 24/7 is so completely insane to me. How? How
| do you get by with "dentist office mall kiosk" lighting
| blaring every hour of the day?
|
| I have an adaptive Lifx bulb that changes from 5000K during
| the day and then shifts down to 3000K at night, before
| tapering down to 2700K for overnight and it's amazing. 5000K
| in the corner of a dark room is just so disjointed and
| intense and upsetting to me, if I stay at an Airbnb for more
| than a night or two and there are daylight bulbs installed,
| I'll literally buy replacement bulbs and change them out.
| wtetzner wrote:
| > they've done a grand job of royally fucking up the colors
| of whatever's on screen.
|
| Pretty sure that's the point?
| tuetuopay wrote:
| Well he goes on to rant about how it changes the colors
| displayed by the monitor, so a publisher cannot show the
| intended color (cyan in the example).
|
| Except he completely ignores that's actually expected for a
| cyan object to be duller at night: it's the albedo of the
| object and the perceived color will dramatically changed
| between daylight and nightlight. So the screen is more
| _contextually_ correct by toning down cyan, and the colors we
| perceive will match (and reinforce) the circadian rythm: the
| user will recognize cyan.
|
| Of course, doing color-sensitive work should not be done with
| such filters.
| pier25 wrote:
| > _I took a sample of 4 websites /apps (Google, X, Github, and
| VSCode) with the SpyderX colorimeter + a diffuser to average over
| a larger area of the screen, and found reductions in luminance
| ranging from 92% to 98%! That's huge._
|
| What about TikTok or Youtube?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I have my phone in monochrome (i.e. greyscale) mode and just
| subjectively it's much easier to look at especially at night. I
| have it at the lowest brightness and it's still very readable.
| Human eyesight is basically monochrome in low light settings
| anyway.
| culi wrote:
| I have an accessibility shortcut to turn my screen greyscale
| with triple taps but I kept turning it off so I could see the
| clues on sudoku and now I've forgotten I even had this for
| almost a year
|
| Low brightness is great though. I didn't realize most of the
| battery drain on a phone is often just the screen. Lowering the
| brightness to as little as I need has been great for battery
| life
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| I use blue blocking glasses, like Bono but darker and they do
| work. I also use UV LEDs to help me wake up, which also works.
|
| I agree with the premise that night shift and other color warmth
| features are insufficient to have a strong effect, though they do
| help with eye strain which is still a positive.
| harrall wrote:
| I firmly believe this varies between people significantly.
|
| Blue light filters do not work for me because I fall asleep on
| command everyday all the time regardless if WW3 is outside.
|
| BUT it also seems the effect of poor sleep seems to be MUCH worse
| for me than other people. I go from extreme motor coordination to
| dropping cups in a span of 3 days of poor sleep.
|
| There's a chemical called adenosine which accumulates over the
| day that induces sleepiness and there are genetic variations that
| can affect your susceptibility to it. Receptors notice the
| accumulation of adenosine and use it as a signal to "scale down."
|
| I think that I am more sensitive, explaining my ease of sleep but
| also the effect of it when it accumulates due to poor sleep
| (sleep flushes it away). Yeah it's great when I'm in bed but it's
| not great when I want to throw a ball and my brain wants to be
| stingy. It basically means that someone else's "helpful guide to
| sleep" is completely different from my "helpful guide to sleep."
| lowdest wrote:
| >the effect of poor sleep seems to be MUCH worse for me than
| other people. I go from extreme motor coordination to dropping
| cups in a span of 3 days of poor sleep.
|
| Are you sleeping enough? When I was getting too little sleep,
| averaging 5.5 hours per night, this described me well. A single
| sleep interruption could make me lose most of a day of work.
| I'm sleeping better and longer now, and it seems I'm more able
| to tolerate small interruptions.
| harrall wrote:
| Yeah I've gotten 8 hours of sleep almost everyday for 15
| years, ever since I put 2+2 together. In my early 20s, I
| didn't like being bad at sports and I found sleep was my
| single most important factor.
|
| Similar to you, I also noticed that if I miss good sleep for
| several days, it stacks. I treat sleep like a battery. A day
| uses up 20% and good sleep fills it back up, but only like
| 30%. One missed night isn't that bad but I also can't recover
| several nights' worth.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Why is it that a few people seem to get bent out of shape by
| redshift and/or dark modes? If you don't like it, don't use it.
| Whining about scientific evidence is pointless, even if it all
| only comes down to user preferences with no science behind it, so
| what? Let people enjoy things.
| ctbeiser wrote:
| It seems pretty clear in the OP that headline is misleading--they
| do work, just not as well as he would like. I think that a 50%
| cut in light emission is pretty good--and you can stack that with
| the other interventions listed, like auto-dark mode and reducing
| light in your room.
| leni536 wrote:
| Note that it's only 50% if you don't normalise back to absolute
| brightness.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Blue light filters definitely work for me. But it needs to be a
| strong filter (quite a bit stronger than the strongest setting of
| Apple's built-in filter).
| nomel wrote:
| Yes, article title is clickbait. Partial filters don't work,
| but as they suggest, 100% filter of blue light (resulting in no
| blue light present), DO work.
|
| You can get this with Apple's strongest filter, the color
| filter, in Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size >
| Color Filters, rather than night shift. Only red sub-pixels are
| illuminated with it. It can be added to the triple click power
| button accessibility shortcut.
|
| That's what I use. I have a shortcut set to enable it when I
| put my AirPods in at night.
| Groxx wrote:
| So the main claim presented here is that _reducing blue_ reduces
| total "light" (lumens? watts?) by 50% (totally believable), and
| that reduction in light is all that matters for sleep?
|
| That seems reasonable. The pseudoscience wankery that the fad has
| brought bothers me a lot too.
|
| ... but I'm not sure that's much of an argument against blue
| light filters, aside from color complaints. That seems to
| _support_ that it 's Useful and Good and is Achieving Its
| Intended Goal. It's reducing total luminance, _because people
| prefer it over reducing screen brightness overall_. I sure as
| heck do anyway (as night shift modes, they 're a more
| comprehensive option than dark mode), though I think I'll
| experiment with just reducing brightness a bit.
|
| ----
|
| For melatonin in particular, fully agreed. The recent trend of
| "can't even get <5mg in stores, and >10mg is appearing regularly"
| in the USA is mind-boggling to me. AFAICT it's exclusively
| because it's a "supplement" and therefore practically
| unregulated, and these companies don't give a shit about anyone
| they harm, just profit.
|
| Start with something like https://a.co/d/0dISg7oa (0.3mg, this is
| what I personally use) and go up from there, slowly.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| So buy 5mg, and split the tablet in half.
| Groxx wrote:
| that'd give you 2.5mg, which is still _almost 10x more_ than
| what I linked.
|
| it's possible to split and separate them enough of course,
| but beyond "roughly half" it gets rather difficult. I've
| considered getting the liquid ones and a micro-dropper for
| smaller doses (if they'd even be small enough, many
| combinations are not), but 0.3mg pills are rather convenient
| and worth the small amount of money for me.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Oops, missed the decimal position!
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Some research indicates people over 50 (includes me)
| achieve best results at 0.3 microgram dosage, which is
| 1,000 lower(!). Higher dosages reduce the effect.
|
| You might take a quick sec to look into the data. You can
| buy 5mcg on Amazon, although 5 mg is more common (and 10mg,
| and ...).
| Groxx wrote:
| after an initial "... is that a misquote too? sounds
| super low" I decided to hunt around. I haven't seen
| anything on _that_ low of a dose... but doing the math,
| it does seem to make some sense I suppose. a rough check
| of the total amount of melatonin in your blood at night
| implies something like 0.5mcg at peak (peak concentration
| at ~100pg /ml times 5L of blood). lots more is produced
| in a night because it has a short half-life, but yea,
| blood concentration is lower than I remembered.
|
| what I _also_ haven 't seen though is anything covering
| how well it's absorbed through your digestive system.
| 0.3mcg intravenously I can certainly see being effective,
| but orally? sublingually? not sure. but you've definitely
| got me interested in looking more :)
|
| (initial results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melatonin
| _as_a_medication_and_... implies it varies quite a lot,
| but I'm seeing it centering around 15%-ish many places.
| so you might want like 3mcg to hit normal levels? and
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5405617/ is
| implying 1-5mg -> 10x-100x normal concentration peak, so
| that does hit the right ballpark reasonably well... I
| guess I'm going to start experimenting with even smaller
| doses!)
|
| I'm not finding any 5mcg on amazon tbh. Likely in no
| small part because its search is trash nowadays. Mind
| sharing a link?
| dinkelberg wrote:
| Melatonin pills seem to have extremely bad quality control:
|
| "Melatonin content varied from an egregious -83% to +478%
| of labeled melatonin and 70% had melatonin concentration <=
| 10% of what was claimed. Worse yet, the content of
| melatonin between lots of the same product varied by as
| much as 465%.
|
| [...]
|
| The last disturbing finding was more than a quarter of
| melatonin products contained serotonin, some at potentially
| significant doses."
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5263069/
|
| "In products that contained melatonin, the actual quantity
| of melatonin ranged from 74% to 347% of the labeled
| quantity. Twenty-two of 25 products (88%) were inaccurately
| labeled, and only 3 products (12%) contained a quantity of
| melatonin that was within +-10% of the declared quantity.
| [...] Serotonin was not detected in any product."
|
| https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2804077
|
| "Half of the products tested met the label's claim for
| melatonin, which means they fell between 76 and 126 percent
| of the claimed amount. Of the products tested, 20 had
| between 0 and 76 percent of the labeled content, and 35 had
| between 126 and 667 percent."
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2025/06/25/melatoni
| n...
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Melatonin pills seem to have extremely bad quality
| control:
|
| Melatonin is treated as a dietary supplement in the US
| rather than a drug, and this seems to be a widespread
| problem with supplements, given the incredibly lax
| regulatory regime.
| dinkelberg wrote:
| One more relevant study, but on the health effects of
| long term melatonin use:
|
| https://newsroom.heart.org/news/long-term-use-of-
| melatonin-s...
|
| "The main analysis found:
|
| * Among adults with insomnia, those whose electronic
| health records indicated long-term melatonin use (12
| months or more) had about a 90% higher chance of incident
| heart failure over 5 years compared with matched non-
| users (4.6% vs. 2.7%, respectively). * There was a
| similar result (82% higher) when researchers analyzed
| people who had at least 2 melatonin prescriptions filled
| at least 90 days apart. (Melatonin is only available by
| prescription in the United Kingdom.)
|
| A secondary analysis found:
|
| * Participants taking melatonin were nearly 3.5 times as
| likely to be hospitalized for heart failure when compared
| to those not taking melatonin (19.0% vs. 6.6%,
| respectively). * Participants in the melatonin group were
| nearly twice as likely to die from any cause than those
| in the non-melatonin group (7.8% vs. 4.3%, respectively)
| over the 5-year period."
|
| However they were not able to control for severity of the
| insomnia and used dosage, because that data weren't in
| the dataset.
| Groxx wrote:
| I really wish they'd name-and-shame the brands. I don't
| see how hiding it helps encourage better behavior. If
| anything, it seems like they should be publishing legal
| ranges, and rewarding testing labs that catch things
| outside it by fining failures.
| gowld wrote:
| No, in the OP (after an unclear intro that confuseed many
| readers), there is a graph that shows blue wavelength intensity
| is important, but software light filters don't filter a lot of
| it, and the effect is cancelled by increasing overall
| brightness.
| Groxx wrote:
| If software filters are reducing _total_ light by 50% while
| only affecting blue-ish tones, and that 's a total light
| level comparable to _multiple_ brightness steps on a Mac...
| tbh I think it 's reducing it quite a lot. Many I see using
| them (myself included) don't tweak brightness when enabling
| it, and many (all?) systems don't adjust their brightness to
| match the perceived change from a software filter (on my
| Linux machines in particular I have never seen this happen,
| don't know about Macs though).
|
| Half is not a lot, sure, but their ultimate suggestion is to
| do the same ~half change:
|
| > _You can decrease the amount of light coming from your
| screen by more than half simply by dimming the screen by
| several notches._
|
| which is definitely significantly more than I see people
| doing voluntarily in the hundreds of millions.
|
| Do they have any evidence that people are raising system
| brightness to match the 50% loss from the filter? If not, it
| still seems like a rather significant mark in their favor.
| Perhaps not _sufficient_ to meet the goals (they seem to be
| recommending a larger change, but aren 't specific), but I
| see no claim that a lesser decrease in light is _worse_.
|
| ---
|
| Late edit: on second thought... let's go through this more
| rigorously. For both myself and any other readers, because I
| want to make sure I'm following it accurately too.
|
| The main explicit points in this article are, in order:
|
| - night shift does not help with sleep (the main claim)
|
| - blue light is not special, in particular because the
| "[most] sensitive to blue" research is mis-quoted to mean
| "blue is bad", but it's actually sensitive to blue and green
| (seems very well supported)
|
| - night shift reduces blue and green by about half (tested
| themselves)
|
| - half of absolute is not a lot because vision and a lot of
| the related biology is logarithmic (100% agreed)
|
| - halving light affects 25%-50% of melatonin levels (linked
| research)
|
| - many people use Night Shift (100% agreed, and they have
| decent data to back it up)
|
| - dark mode is better than night shift (>90% vs ~50%, implied
| leaning on the linked research earlier. agreed, seems
| straightforward)
|
| - dimming your screen by several steps is the same or better
| than night shift (as it decreases brightness more, same
| reasoning as dark mode. agreed.)
|
| That still sounds rather in favor of Night Shift. It's
| targeting the correct color range (NOT the pseudoscience
| blathering of just blue blue blue), it has a moderate affect
| on melatonin levels at the light level changes it creates,
| and it's used by a huge amount of the population.
|
| Nowhere in there that I can see is anything to back up "Night
| Shift does not work". Only "it seems to be doing things
| right, it just isn't quite enough on its own" and "ARGH it's
| not just blue light STOP PROMOTING FAD PSEUDOSCIENCE". That
| seems... fine? Most things are not silver bullets.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| Well they work in that the color temperature of the light in my
| house is much cooler during the day than at night, and it's nice
| to match it so it doesn't look jarring.
| pclowes wrote:
| You can just do things. Not everything needs a study, you don't
| have to justify yourself to anyone!
|
| Try things, if you like them, do them!
|
| Try not living a neurotic "study" based life, I am trying it and
| its pretty great!
| Barbing wrote:
| (just nothing from Goop)
| tartoran wrote:
| Absolutely and this is something that can be tested rather
| easily. If blue filters aren't immediately helpful to eye
| strain then they probably don't work for you but if they are
| they probably do work for you.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| You can test the negative easily, but the positive is harder.
| Thus: placebos.
| tartoran wrote:
| You're saying that my eyes straining going away from
| reduced blue light is placebo? I can feel it right away and
| it gets worse in minutes, time and time again. As soon as I
| remove blue light the strain is gone. Honestly, I don't
| care what other people have to say, to me it's obvious that
| it helps and I stick to it. Again, I don't think this is
| universal and it may not help you if you don't notice
| immediate improvement.
| cgriswald wrote:
| On the level of the individual a working placebo is a
| success.
| Perizors wrote:
| Every dismissive reply talks about eye strain nada that is by
| far not what the author is taking about.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| I am aware that meta-studies of glucosamine chondroitin show No
| Significant Gains in joint pain. I would never waste my money
| on it.
|
| But my newly adopted dog had hip issues, and I bought a few
| months worth of a diet supplement in the hopes of doing
| something meaningf... dammit, it's glucosamine.
|
| They claimed double-blind studies showed decreases in limping
| in just two months.
|
| Two months, more or less, I stopped seeing him limp by the time
| we left the dog park. He still does sometimes, but it's rare -
| not every damn day, by any means.
|
| We aren't that fricking different biologically from dogs in our
| skeletal attachment system. Maybe it's still a placebo, but it
| seems to defeat that idea. Maybe enough human issues are based
| on things that don't translate to dogs - sitting at a desk all
| day, eating junk food, walking upright... - that it helps them,
| but not enough of us.
|
| Don't know. These GC supplements have convinced me it's worth
| my money, and he loves eating them, so he votes 'yes', too.
| rkomorn wrote:
| I found it interesting that placebo effect is also sort of
| relevant in pet care: it makes owners believe the pet is
| doing better.
|
| Unfortunately, the study that showed this used the same
| medicine my dog had been on, and since it was for epilepsy, I
| can totally believe that whether I thought it worked had no
| connection to its effectiveness.
| root_axis wrote:
| Neurotic is bad by definition, but using studies to inform your
| habits seems like a wise thing to do.
|
| Obviously you shouldn't follow studies blindly, especially
| because many studies are poorly conducted and do not replicate,
| but in general, we know that just following your gut is
| suboptimal and sometimes dangerous in cases when studies give
| us clear information.
| wtetzner wrote:
| Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be easy to understand what
| studies are actually demonstrating, based on how often you
| see people making giant leaps to conclusions that don't
| really follow from study results.
| stuckonempty wrote:
| You can and should! Just don't go justifying that your choices
| are rooted in science when they aren't.
| thrawa8387336 wrote:
| What, you think Newton relied on a study to believe his own
| conclusions?
| UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote:
| Yep. This attitude is utterly pervasive. We may as well just
| give up and start saying "science says...", the way some
| people, especially some people _here_ , seem to misunderstand
| what role studies play, what their limitations are, etc.
|
| Imagine if you have a rare genetic mutation that causes Night
| Shift to be extremely, extremely effective, and you don't even
| try to use it because A Study Didn't Tell You To.
|
| You are indeed allowed to just...try things and see for
| yourself, especially such ostensibly low-risk things like this.
| The literature is not a bible.
| pie_flavor wrote:
| If you aren't aware, your phone's screen can go much dimmer than
| the minimum brightness offered by the slider, if it supports HDR.
| There are apps that use an HDR screen overlay to lower brightness
| all the way down to the dimmest you can perceive. In my own
| experience, 'half' the brightness of 'minimum' brightness is
| plenty dark enough to not disturb sleeping at all if using my
| phone in bed.
| Barbing wrote:
| Also for third-party monitors with MacBooks: BetterDisplay
|
| Can even use an external keyboard's native brightness buttons.
| Can still use f.lux if desired too though Night Shift maybe
| Sherlocked there a bit...
| lisper wrote:
| Night shift seems to have a very strong causal effect on my sleep
| cycles. Up until about ten years ago I was a night owl, rarely
| falling asleep before midnight and rarely waking up before 8.
| Then I started getting serious about light hygiene and using
| night shift and now I'm a serious day person, rarely staying
| awake after 11 and rarely waking up after 7. But the real
| clincher is that when I travel I don't change the time zone on my
| computer (because it screws up my calendar). But my sleep cycle
| continues to track my home time zone for a very long time. I life
| in California, but at the moment I'm in Hawaii. I've been here
| three weeks so far. At home I'd fall asleep around 11 and wake up
| around 7, but here I'm getting sleepy at 9 and waking up at 5.
|
| My wife, on the other hand, is a hard-core night owl even with
| night shift. So apparently there is a lot of individual
| variation.
|
| This article has inspired me to do a control experiment by
| switching night shift off. Check back here in a week or so for
| the results.
| Barbing wrote:
| >inspired me to do a control experiment
|
| Delightful, see ya the 27th!
| gowld wrote:
| > Night shift seems to have a very strong causal effect on my
| sleep cycles.
|
| > light hygiene and using night shift
|
| The OP article is primarily about separating the variables you
| lumped together.
| nandomrumber wrote:
| > _light hygiene_
|
| Awesome, hadn't come across this term before.
|
| You might appreciate the concept of _chronotypes_.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronotype
|
| The DOAC podcast recently hosted Dr. Michael Breus on same.
|
| Apple Podcast link, or conjure your own:
|
| https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-diary-of-a-ceo-wit...
| Perizors wrote:
| Bear in mind that chronotypes, as stated in the wiki, only
| varies about 2-3 hours from each other. This is just to say
| that there is no nocturnal person in terms of biology, we are
| all diurnal mammals after all.
| nandomrumber wrote:
| Yeah, like anything, proponents like the guy in the podcast
| I referenced probably overhype the importance / impact.
| lotu wrote:
| I remember when I found Flux (third party predecessor to night
| shift) sometime in 2013. It worked in a week, I'd been staying
| up until 3am for most of the year and a started going to bed at
| midnight.
| crazygringo wrote:
| These are the kinds of articles that give science a bad name, and
| that make people anti-science.
|
| You might as well try to claim hot tea doesn't help you get to
| sleep, or reading before bed doesn't, or whatever else you do to
| wind down.
|
| I personally don't care if some narrow hypothesis about blue
| light and melanopsin is false. I know that low, warm, amber-
| tinted light in the evening slows me down in a way that low,
| cold, blue-tinted light does not. That's why I use different,
| warmer lamps at night with dimmers, and keep my devices on Night
| Shift _and_ lower brightness. It works for me, and seems to mimic
| the lighting conditions we evolved with -- strong blue light
| around noon, weaker warmer light at sunset, weakest warmest light
| from the fire until we go to sleep. Maybe it doesn 't work for
| everybody. That's fine. But it certainly does for me.
|
| And maybe it's not modulated by melanopsin. Or maybe it's not
| about blue light, but rather the overall correlated color
| temperature (CCT), e.g. 2100K instead of 5700K. Who knows.
|
| But this type of article is bad science writing. It shows why
| _one hypothesis_ as to why a warmer color temperature would
| result in _one other physiological change_ isn 't supported. That
| doesn't mean "blue light filters don't work" as a universal
| statement. It's hubris on the part of the author to assume that
| this _one_ hypothesis is the _only potential mechanism_ by which
| warmer light might help with sleep.
|
| And it's this kind of science writing that turns people off to
| science. I know, through lots of trial and error and
| experimentation, that warm light helps me fall asleep. And here
| comes some "AI researcher and neurotechnologist" trying to tell
| me I'm wrong? He says it's "aggravating" that people are
| "actually using Night Shift". I say it's aggravating when people
| like him make the elemental mistake that showing _one_ biological
| mechanism doesn 't have an effect, means _no other_ mechanisms
| can either.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| > These are the kinds of articles that give science a bad name,
| and that make people anti-science.
|
| No, it is attitude like yours that brings humanity a bad name.
|
| "Blue light effects" have always had highly questionable
| evidence behind it, what has been sold and marketed under the
| guise of it has had _zero_ evidence behind it. But now that you
| are reminded that it is actually bullshit, you react with
| skepticism.
|
| "Feels good to me" is hardly evidence to begin with. It's
| something that is even more flimsy than sociology. I have my
| doubts it should even be called medicine.
|
| You have to remember that a shitton of people day after day
| "show" "evidence" that homeopathy works. Even though it has no
| plausible mechanism of action. So clear mechanism of action is
| about as important as the evidence itself. (see Science-based
| medicine)
|
| I could understand (not justify) skepticism in many cases (such
| as "common wisdom" from 1000 years ago) but this particular
| topic should have raised your skepticism 20 years ago back when
| the craze/marketing stunt was starting, and not now.
| chuckadams wrote:
| Someone says that other psychological factors (which have
| physical effects) help them sleep and they "bring humanity a
| bad name"?
|
| Maybe think on that a little bit.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| No, he said "this gives science a bad name"/"makes people
| anti-science" because some article published something that
| contradicts his anecdote of how well he thinks he sleeps.
| That gives humanity a bad name. And your direct insults do,
| too (which fortunately have been edited out).
| chuckadams wrote:
| The direct insult where I said "touch some fucking
| grass"?
|
| I certainly stand by it now.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Why? You're proud of your insults?
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _" Feels good to me" is hardly evidence to begin with_
|
| Where did I say anything like that? Please don't
| mischaracterize my comment, that's not helpful. It's not that
| it "feels good", it's that it helps at least some people fall
| asleep more easily, and I know this from personal experience.
| And many, many other people have written that it does the
| same for them.
|
| > _" Blue light effects" have always had highly questionable
| evidence behind it... But now that you are reminded that it
| is actually bullshit_
|
| You're right that the evidence _for_ it is questionable. But
| you know what else there 's no conclusive evidence for? That
| hot herbal tea helps you fall asleep. Or soothing music. Or
| bedtime stories. Because the funding usually isn't there to
| perform the kind of large-scale studies required to establish
| these things, because it's just not a priority or even a good
| use of our dollars. And lack of evidence for, is not the same
| as evidence against.
|
| My point is, nothing in this article _does_ establish that it
| is "actually bullshit". That's a _gross_ misreading of the
| science, and that 's what I'm criticizing the article over.
|
| People experiment with things and discover what works and
| what doesn't. Again, nobody's going around complaining that
| there's no scientific evidence lullabyes don't help put you
| to sleep. And neither lullabyes, nor turning your lights down
| to amber, have anything to do with homeopathy. You can't
| possibly suggest they're doing _harm_. People aren 't using
| amber lighting at night _instead of getting their cancer
| treated_.
|
| But for some reason, low amber lighting to help with sleep
| makes you and the article author upset? Why? Why does that
| make you upset, but not hot tea or lullabyes? Or do those
| make you upset too?
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| "feels good to me" and "helps me sleep more easily" are
| about the same thing: flimsy and almost non-quantifiable
| personal experiences. About the same level with "I dream of
| nicer things".
|
| > And many, many other people have written that it does the
| same for them.
|
| So people write for homeopathy. Homepathy actually is the
| precursor for using this type of "evidence" for development
| and study of new "drugs" (hint: this evidence ends up going
| nowhere useful, quickly).
|
| > Or soothing music. Or bedtime stories. Because the
| funding usually isn't there to perform the kind of large-
| scale studies required to establish these things, because
| it's just not a priority or even a good use of our dollars.
|
| Oh, there is. There are way more studies about this than
| you can possibly think of. There are medical journals
| reporting clinical experiences about this daily. You are
| saying this on an article about study about one of these,
| ironically enough.
|
| > And lack of evidence for, is not the same as evidence
| against.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot
|
| > My point is, nothing in this article does establish that
| it is "actually bullshit".
|
| Why not?
|
| > But for some reason, low amber lighting to help with
| sleep makes you and the article author upset? Why? Why does
| that make you upset, but not hot tea or lullabyes? Or do
| those make you upset too?
|
| You are the one who suddenly claims this makes people
| "anti-science", when this particular bullshit is not even
| 20 years old, and it was already known to be suspect 20
| years ago. It is just ridiculous that it is now suddenly
| such a core belief of your persona that even being reminded
| that it is most likely bullshit is going to drive you to
| reject science outright.
|
| As I said, I could at least _understand_ (but not justify)
| much older claims, such as ancient chinese practices or
| whatever. This makes they make me upset indeed (this is
| pseudoscience, after all), but what makes me even more
| upset is the creation of new pseudo-scientific or even
| anti-scientific "popular wisdom" _in this age_.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I think you have not actually understood what I wrote,
| because of this part:
|
| >> _My point is, nothing in this article does establish
| that it is "actually bullshit"._
|
| > _Why not?_
|
| I've already said it multiple times. Allow me to repeat
| myself:
|
| > _make the elemental mistake that showing one biological
| mechanism doesn 't have an effect, means no other
| mechanisms can either._
|
| You've written a lot, but you haven't understood that
| this is the core mistake of the article, and the core
| mistake of what you're trying to argue.
|
| You reply with a reference to Russell's teapot, and that
| would be fine if you were merely trying to make the point
| that the effect of amber light on sleep has not been
| sufficiently proven. But _you 're_ the one literally
| calling it "bullshit", i.e. _dis_ proven. That's wrong.
| There's no high-quality study conclusively demonstrating
| it _doesn 't_ have an effect.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| Certainly you can claim that because not all mechanisms
| have been disproven yet, then there could still be an
| effect. That is why I quote Russell's teapot. Your claims
| are technically not disproven, and may not even be
| possible to disprove, but that doesn't mean that the
| existence of the teapot is (most definitely) bullshit.
| This is what the example of Russell's teapot is trying to
| show.
|
| I also keep continuously putting the example of
| homeopathy because it is exactly the same. Homeopathy has
| plenty of (weak) evidence, but no known mechanism of
| action. All the proposed religious, memory of water, etc.
| have been disproved. Certainly you can argue that
| homeopathy could still be a thing because there could be
| some physical/biological mechanism that has not yet been
| disproved! But this is just nitpicking: homeopathy is
| still bullshit. In the same way that a teapot in space is
| bullshit.
|
| Anything else is a (useless) nitpick.
|
| In any case, even from day #1 it's been known that blue
| light could possibly have a mechanism, but there's always
| been a big stretch from there to claiming that blue light
| filters/night shift have an effect, and the evidence for
| the latter is substantially lacking.
| https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/blue-light/
| crazygringo wrote:
| I'm sorry, but using the idea of Russell's teapot to
| claim anything without rock-solid proof is "bullshit" is
| a deep misunderstanding of the idea. It's wrong, it's
| offensive, and it's not helpful to genuine understanding.
|
| Amber light is not Russell's teapot. There's widespread
| anecdotal reporting that it helps with sleep. It's not
| something nonsensical like a teapot between Earth and
| Mars. And for you to suggest that they're the equivalent
| is, frankly, arguing in bad faith.
|
| The world of knowledge is not divided, black-and-white,
| between things that are scientifically proven and
| "bullshit". Probably the vast majority of practical facts
| we rely on daily are not "proven" with empirical studies.
| That doesn't make them "bullshit". I hope you can
| understand that.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| No, I do not understand why I cannot call homeopathy
| bullshit. There's plenty of widespread positive anecdote
| for it, too!
|
| Why would you think calling one bullshit is "offensive"
| and not the other? You realize that this "gray" scale
| that you claim is as unscientific as it gets, right?
| After all, it worked for me! And I hear that it works for
| my friends! How can homeopathy/blue light
| filters/whatever-ritual-you-like-today not work? How can
| there not be a teapot on the sky?
|
| If the problem is with the word "bullshit", call it
| pseudo-scientific, but it is almost the same thing.
|
| Tomorrow there could be some evidence of an effect shown
| in the opposite direction (e.g. blue light filters
| _harming_ sleep quality*, or performance the day after,
| or whatever) and you would be as skeptical as with claims
| of no effect, if not more. See the recent article of
| white noise in HN and how it was met in the comments.
|
| * Because of people (or worse, software) turning their
| screens' brightness up to compensate, which I already
| read an article about long time ago...
| anonymars wrote:
| > But this type of article is bad science writing. It shows why
| one hypothesis as to why a warmer color temperature would
| result in one other physiological change isn't supported
|
| I don't know if I'd even give them that credit (emphasis mine):
|
| > Halving the luminance, at best (around 20 lux baseline)
| _might get you from 50% to 25% melatonin suppression._
| orbital-decay wrote:
| What if these filters also cure cancer by some mechanism that
| isn't known yet? Who knows, it might be true! After long
| experimentation with warmer lighting my cancer is gone, so it
| definitely worked for me.
|
| What you're saying is not science either. The entire _medical_
| usage of blue light filters hinges on just a few papers. If you
| really can prove those studies inapplicable you can prove that
| there 's no objective reason to use them (I'm not necessarily
| saying the author did that).
|
| Whether these filters feel nice is entirely unrelated question,
| nobody stops you from decorating your living space as you see
| fit.
| wa008 wrote:
| Based on my experience, most health benefits are from personal
| habits over external hardware. But people care health so much,
| it's a great opportunity for merchants to get revenue.
| alejohausner wrote:
| I bought some amber glasses from blublocker.com[1], because they
| link to a research paper that actually measured how much of each
| wavelength their filters allow (as well as other brands). They're
| pretty dark, so you have to crank up the brightness on your
| screen, but I'm confident that I'm not getting ANY blue.
|
| 1: https://www.blublocker.com/blogs/news/what-blue-light-
| blocki...
| kb9alpp wrote:
| Nice. The article also mentions BluTech lenses (BluTech LLC,
| Alpharetta, GA). I've found the marginal utility of bluelight
| blocking solutions are very context specific, indeed. And
| mostly-completely bahokie garbage, sadly, but not when it's
| BluTech and BluBlocker. BluTech/BluBlocker for the screen-
| induced fatigue is the correct solution. I always get BluTech
| HI Indoor AR pucks for my prescription lenses. And just switch
| to prescription sunglasses when I go outside.
| stuckonempty wrote:
| Those glasses state that they are the only pair that "blocked
| 100% of harmful blue light in the 400-450 range"
|
| But melanopsin contained in the cells that regulate circadian
| rhythms have an absorption spectrum extends to slightly beyond
| 540 nm (see the OP's post). As the author says, "It's not
| sensitive to blue, it's sensitive to cyan (and blue and
| green)."
|
| Those glasses probably do what they say in terms of wavelengths
| they filter, but they are only partially filtering out light
| relevant for circadian rhythm regulation and sleep.
| cptskippy wrote:
| I have Night Light perpetually on with all of my devices because
| I find it softens everything and makes viewing displays less
| harsh, less garish, less vivid, and less intense. I don't need
| eye searing HDR constantly cooking my retinas.
| yathern wrote:
| > Unless your strategy is to create a photo-lab-like screen in
| pure black and red, or wear deep-red-tinted glasses, it's
| unlikely that a pure colorshift strategy will cut out that big of
| a chunk of the spectrum.
|
| I absolutely think this is the right approach. The glasses which
| do 'blue light filtering' which barely change your perception are
| clearly placebo, but a very strong redshift I think is obviously
| a different creature.
| EA-3167 wrote:
| Absolutely, although dark orange seems to work well enough. If
| you can put them on and still tell the difference between most
| colors, they aren't working. I use my pair for one purpose:
| reading in bed with a backlit e-reader. I can't imagine trying
| to do much else with them on, they have plastic wings to block
| light from the side and they're not light.
|
| But they work.
| hinkley wrote:
| I have a red flashlight I use at night to read books. It's
| weird after an hour I don't really see it as red anymore, just
| dim off white.
| zcw100 wrote:
| I replaced all the light switches in my house with smart dimmers
| and have the lights dim in the evening. It happens in steps so
| it's noticeable and it's like a clock ticking down. I don't know
| if there's anything scientific about it but it's pleasant, like
| the house is going to sleep so maybe I should too.
| nandomrumber wrote:
| I like to use the yellow anti-insect lights for the external
| lighting around my house as they tend to attract way fewer
| flying insects and fewer spiders as a result.
|
| I also like them in lamps inside for illumination during the
| evening, with the added benefit of not requiring more IoT
| devices.
| Marsymars wrote:
| This is especially nice if you use bulbs that get warmer as
| they dim. (See the Kruithof curve.)
| TACIXAT wrote:
| I have had success with an extremely aggressive red filter. My
| unchecked sleep schedule has me going to bed around 4 am,
| consistent over decades. I don't consume caffeine or any other
| stimulant. In the last 4 months I switched my lights to LED bulbs
| to turn red at 6pm and use QRedshift on Linux (Mint) with the
| temperature set to 1000k at 6pm. I have consistently been falling
| asleep around midnight. What is remarkable to me is that I am
| actually feeling tired at night.
| jrm4 wrote:
| It's funny, I'm _so comfortable_ calling this guy an idiot purely
| based on the fact that I 've taken up Bob Ross style painting in
| like the last 2 years.
|
| Teaches you to pay attention to "objective" colors. And at night,
| guess what, the colors get more red and less blue. I don't have
| to pull out as much blue paint for the night scenes.
|
| It would be utterly naive to not thing that there's -- perhaps
| purely "psychological" (not sure if that's the exact concept but
| hey) effect by making the "white" on your screen, look like like
| the "white" you will definitely see in real life, which is going
| to be orange-r.
| iainctduncan wrote:
| Regardless of the sleep effect (or lack of) they absolutely do
| work for reducing eye strain for migraineurs.
|
| It's noticeable to me all the time, but if I'm borderline
| migraining, or recovering from a migraine, the difference between
| shifted and not is something I can feel instantly. Shifting all
| the way over enables me to eek out some work after a migraine
| without it flaring back up again.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I really don't care if they "work" or not. I find it incredibly
| cozy to have a warmer, calmer screen in the evening.
| reenorap wrote:
| The entire blue light madness is based on a poor study where N
| was around 8. And the difference in sleep was something like 15
| mins. The entire study was based on crap but somehow the entire
| world has run rampant on the idea that blue light has this
| profound effect. It just goes to show that bad science is easily
| propagated, even when there's even more sources of information.
| Marsymars wrote:
| I don't know enough to defend the study, but I don't think 15
| minutes of sleep is insignificant. If I'm consistently woken up
| 15 minutes before my normal wake time it's going to have a
| negative effect on me.
| baud9600 wrote:
| I added the "Noir" extension to mobile Safari, now I
| automatically get dark mode on all websites including Hacker
| News.
| hinkley wrote:
| I'm surprised by how may don't have a dark mode though. I
| decided to do it for my blog despite not really using it
| myself, and ended up sticking with it on. Still getting blasted
| in the face by eggshell white everywhere I click.
| the_pwner224 wrote:
| "Dark Reader" does the same thing on desktop
| Firefox/Chrome/etc. (& mobile Firefox, maybe also available on
| mobile Safari?).
| baud9600 wrote:
| Mobile Safari only does this for sites that implement dark
| themes (and when you have dark mode enabled in iOS). But many
| sites don't have these themes. The Noir extension seems to
| fix the problem for now. There is a reader mode that can go
| dark but it's manual, per article
| the_pwner224 wrote:
| I see. Not a Safari user myself. On Firefox & Chrome Dark
| Reader can force its own dark theme even if the site
| doesn't provide one. Like Noir does on mobile Safari.
| james_marks wrote:
| I have a triple-click shortcut in iOS to use the accessibility
| features to go below the min dim settings.
|
| Otherwise even dark mode is way too bright in a dark room.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I found the basic premise of this blog post to be incredibly
| flawed. The author seems very sure of himself that blue light
| filters don't work, but making arguments related to cell types
| and emissions spectra and circadian rhythms is not the way to
| make a conclusive argument in a topic like this. Science is
| _littered_ with recommendations about things that "plausibly"
| made sense, but that turned out to be flawed or just absolutely
| wrong when actually put to a real, scientific test. One example
| most people are familiar with: the recommendation against eating
| eggs in the 90s was based on the fact that eggs have a lot of
| cholesterol, and we knew high LDL levels in blood were associated
| with a greater risk of vascular and heart problems. So,
| "logically", it seemed that limiting dietary cholesterol would
| reduce heart disease. Except when scientists actually tested
| those recommendations, they turned out to be largely wrong - when
| you eat a lot of cholesterol, for most people their body's
| natural production of cholesterol goes down, so unless you're in
| the small subset of people who are particularly sensitive to
| dietary cholesterol, eating eggs is fine.
|
| Making recommendations based solely on a theoretical mechanism of
| action is bad science. The only way to actually test this is with
| a study that looks at different types of light restriction and
| its effect on sleep. Obviously it's kind of impossible to do a
| blinded study for blue light filters, but you could get close by
| testing various permutations of light changes (e.g. total
| luminescence, eliminating only very specific wavelengths, etc.)
|
| As another commenter said, it may be a placebo effect, but if it
| is, who cares? All I care about is that I get a better night
| sleep, and as someone (unusual among programmers I know) who
| really doesn't like dark mode, a screen reddener greatly helps me
| at bedtime.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| His argument seems to be that the night modes don't remove much
| blue. My initial assumption was that it was about physical
| filters. Yellow or amber 99%+ safety lenses are a thing and
| several of my coworkers wear them. Looking through them at
| those painfully bright blue leds makes them appear to be off.
| Yes everything looks strange, but they work. Likewise a
| different coworker manually removes all blue in the monitor
| settings themselves independent of the brightness setting. That
| also works. The author's assertion should be qualified amd
| narrowed a bit.
| UlisesAC4 wrote:
| I can absolutely confirm that night mode works wonders. Since
| ten years ago I discovered them I no longer have dry eye like
| problems.
| stuckonempty wrote:
| This is great it works for you but hopefully you realize
| the weakness of anecdotal evidence when it comes to
| declaring something is universally effective.
|
| Your n of 1 argument is the equivalent of "my grandpa
| smoked until he was 95 so smoking clearly can't be bad for
| your health".
| red75prime wrote:
| It's more like, "Some people have something going on that
| ameliorates the cardiovascular and cancer problems caused
| by smoking."
| whateverboat wrote:
| I love redshift as well. I actually keep it 24x7, and my
| eyes don't get tired at all even after 12 hours of
| programming. Nowadays, turning off redshift feels like an
| attack on the eyes.
|
| And no, reducing brightness on monitors doesn't have the
| same effect. I recently upgraded my monitors to 600nits
| brightness from 350nits and there has been no change in
| comfort level with redshift but without the redshift, the
| old monitors (and the new) stil feel very hostile to
| eyes.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| You're right, it's not valid to make any broader
| conclusions from an anecdote. But it's about just as
| valid as the author making conclusions based solely on
| physical "this is what I should expect to happen"
| hypotheses.
|
| More importantly, as an individual, the only thing that
| counts is when the n of 1 is _you_. As another commenter
| said, you don 't need to live your life by studies. It's
| not like there is much expense or risk in trying a screen
| reddener, so try it out, and if it works for you, great -
| it's bizarre that the author thinks it is "aggravating"
| that a lot of people use things that they say work for
| them.
| stuckonempty wrote:
| Did you read the article? He points out "It's possible that
| Night Shift does something, but the biggest study I could find
| of Night Shift mode (still a pretty small study) found little
| effect on sleep, so if there's an effect, it must be tiny." He
| links the exact type of observational study you asked for
|
| Regardless the maximum possible effect will be constrained by
| the biology of the cells responsible for responding to blue
| light. Maybe knowledge of the biology is incomplete or flawed
| but to not use it to inform what's possible seems foolish.
|
| So what if it's a placebo effect? Well some people are spending
| money and time investing in blue light filtering glasses and
| other solutions. It's potentially snake oil and it could keep
| them from pursuing better solutions that would actually help
| them sleep
| Griffinsauce wrote:
| That sentence does not give me a lot of confidence. The
| conclusion does not follow the initial statement at all.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| If the author goes "I couldn't find enough high quality
| studies on the topic I'm discussing", then the conclusion
| should be that we need more studies, not to come to
| unwarranted conclusions in the absence of actual data.
|
| > Well some people are spending money and time investing in
| blue light filtering glasses and other solutions.
|
| Ironically, we actually _do_ have a number of good studies on
| the effects of blue light filtering _glasses_ (easily
| findable with a Google search) and they do demonstrably
| reduce onset of sleep time. Where more research is needed is
| on software-only filters for screens.
| guelo wrote:
| But you could make your same argument for the pro blue light
| filter side.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Sure, and I'd write the same thing if we were talking about a
| blog post that said everyone should use blue light filters
| because of some plausible physical mechanism.
| energy123 wrote:
| Blue light blockers are a scam that was created when some
| circadian rhythm research went viral (in a highly
| misrepresented way) online a few years ago. It's a stunt to
| make some quick cash from unwitting buyers.
| storus wrote:
| My Gunnars give me immediate eye relief after a day of work
| looking at a display. Are you sure it's a scam?
| disillusioned wrote:
| To the extent that there's some sort of clinical
| statistically significant lift over, say, however you might
| control for a placebo here, who knows? To the extent that
| it's working for you in a meaningful way, placebo or not...
| does it even matter? If they're working for you, they're
| tautologically not a scam, except insofar as you find
| yourself missing out on benefits promised that aren't being
| realized, or you feel that the price you've paid is
| disproportionate to the benefit because some much cheaper
| option exists in some sense.
|
| Put another way, placebo or not, if there's an effect, and
| it's a positive one for you, it really doesn't matter. It's
| working.
| 7bit wrote:
| The same could be said about homeopathy, but homeopathy
| is a scam.
|
| The problem is, how do you define "if there's an effect"?
| A placebo can not have an effect, yet, it has.
| samtheDamned wrote:
| The whole point of placebo is that it has an effect
| though, just not one based on a real change.
| storus wrote:
| That won't work for immediate relief; placebo is studied
| statistically as a cumulative change over a period of
| time. Not when I put Gunnars over my sore eyes from
| computing too much and get immediate relief. Frankly, I
| find this discussion a bit insane, a bunch of people
| trying to persuade me "it's all in my head" because they
| align with the opposite opinion, not with reality.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| "It's a stunt to make some quick cash from unwitting buyers."
|
| I've used a number of blue light filters, and I've never paid
| for them.
| accidentallfact wrote:
| Even the premise of the idea is wrong, as evenings are either
| blue from the blue sky, or white from the clouds. It takes
| exceptional circumstances to have a reddish evening, and even
| then it's just around the sunset.
|
| I guess that it may help people with undercorrected myopia due
| to the chromatic aberration, but, I don't know.
| gurkenkram wrote:
| It is indeed about the sunset and especially the last phases
| of it. It's also why red light is recommended for night
| feeding when breastfeeding.
|
| Works for me, both reducing the blue light and worked for my
| baby, too, using only deep orange and red light of a cheap
| LED color change lamp. Apparently works for many, since red
| nursing lights are suddenly sold everywhere.
| Symmetry wrote:
| The sunset and also fires. Humans have been making fires
| for a million years and in addition to allowing us to
| evolve much smaller guts they've also had time exert
| pressure on our behavior.
| philwelch wrote:
| I thought red light was recommended for nighttime because
| it doesn't interfere with natural night vision.
| bawolff wrote:
| When the sun goes down the amount of blue light goes down.
| Are you disputing that? Respectfully this feels like a crazy
| claim.
| DoctorOetker wrote:
| Well technically during the twilight right after the sun
| has disappeared below the horizon, or just before the sun
| appears from under the horizon (when there is no direct
| line of sight to the sun), the sky is strictly blue-er: the
| reason the sun and the neighboring angles in the sky
| appears "yellow/orange" is because green and especially red
| scattered less through the atmosphere, while a good portion
| of blue light scatters much more easily on our atmosphere,
| allowing non-line-of-sight blue illumination on land where
| the sun has not yet risen or where the sun has already set.
|
| All of humanity has been a witness to these observations
| and yet we blindly assume blue light filters must have such
| and such an effect.
|
| But even if it did: suppose a modern concrete-cave-dweller
| has an out of phase shifted day/night pattern with respect
| to solar rhythm, having blue light as the last form of
| light actually seems more natural!
| bawolff wrote:
| Regardless, the intensity of blue (for that matter, all)
| light is going to be much lower after the sun sets.
| mock-possum wrote:
| Plus there's a lot of protein eggs, so they're filling, and
| have to eat less to feel full, resulting in less food consumed
| and therefore less opportunity to intake further sources of
| cholesterol
| daneel_w wrote:
| In summary blue light filters actually do work, through the
| indirect action of reducing overall light output, but the author
| has a larger axe to grind about the "technical details" (it's
| worth reading the article). The warmer color temperature reduces
| strain on my eyes, which I find both soothing and invaluable.
| MBCook wrote:
| The author showed that Apple's implementation only cuts two
| colors by roughly 50%. And given we perceived light non-
| linearly aren't they right that that really doesn't make much
| of a difference?
|
| If someone put up an article saying "Turning down your
| headphones 1% will help stop hearing loss!" most people are
| going to ignore it. OK yeah technically it will, but not to any
| meaningful amount.
| daneel_w wrote:
| So which do you think it really is? Cutting two wavelengths'
| outputs in half, or reducing them by a mere 1% as per your
| trifling comparison?
| scythe wrote:
| The argument about luminance ranges is wrong. I measure the
| brightness of monitors regularly as part of my job, and typical
| maximum luminance values are in the range of 100-500 lux. That
| puts you right in the steep range of the visual response
| (especially if you are turning it down and near a max of 100),
| _which is natural_ -- maximizing the slope of the neuronal
| response to light means that more information will be available
| to the brain. In fact a _good_ monitor will be tuned according to
| the _just-noticeable difference_ which aims precisely to maximize
| the information available according to this _characteristic
| curve_. See e.g. the DICOM standard:
|
| https://dicom.nema.org/medical/dicom/current/output/chtml/pa...
|
| The author's basic problem is that he knows too much about the
| brain and not enough about monitors.
|
| The author goes on to argue that you should be turning your
| brightness down, but most people already are turning their
| brightness down; the blue light filter is more comfortable. He
| does make a reasonable case that you should be reducing green
| light similarly, but people prefer the incandescent effect of the
| flux filter to a straightforward color filter -- indeed a primary
| design goal of these filters has been _to be pleasant to look at_
| which is why people use them.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| I get frustrated with my dim and red shift app that is the
| default on my android phone for neither being very red nor very
| dim...but it's the type of app where every scammy body will put a
| red shift app whoch sucks up your location, contacts, etc, so I
| haven't changed.
| buggymcbugfix wrote:
| > That's all great, but there are websites that still don't have
| dark modes.
|
| Such as that very website? ;)
| zdc1 wrote:
| I recall studies showing that reading in poor lighting conditions
| is a cause of myopia in children. So I'm questioning whether we
| want to be reducing luminance on our devices at all.
|
| I like my (warm-coloured) lights and screens set to max
| brightness. I find it's easier to read and lets me work with more
| distance from the screen.
|
| But what about easier sleep? Could we exercise more? Leave
| screens out of the bedroom? I have no idea.
| zargon wrote:
| Significant outdoor exposure is essentially the only relevant
| factor for preventing myopia. I would be interested in seeing
| any studies that showed any meaningful relevance of low light
| reading, while controlling for time spent outdoors.
| avadodin wrote:
| Main factor is genetics.
|
| I was gaming on a blurry CRT and reading on a dim light while
| hardly ever going outside during my teens and I only have
| light myopia on one eye.
|
| I don't know if it has ever been studied, but I suspect eye
| socket morphology from my own family anecdata.
|
| large eyes + small socket = squashed eyes.
|
| It could be different genetic factors for different
| populations too.
| zargon wrote:
| I agree that genetics can protect you from developing
| myopia. For people who are genetically susceptible, outdoor
| exposure is critically important. Most people won't know
| which group their children are in.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Best thing to actually do is use as dim a screen as possible
| closer to sleep. You can do this with external monitors using DDC
| and actually directly control the physical backlight of multiple
| monitors.
|
| Also properly color calibrate your monitors
| icar wrote:
| I actually get head ache after a long session in front of my
| computer, but putting anti blue light glasses it goes away or
| never happens.
| lloeki wrote:
| > Is half a lot?
|
| > No. Human light perception works on a log scale, allowing us to
| maintain useful vision over 6 orders of magnitude of luminance,
| from the sun at noon to moonless nights, whereas halving is .3
| orders of magnitude. In relative terms, halving light is a tiny
| blip of the dynamic range of vision.
|
| Kind of missing the point that:
|
| a) a display emits spectacularly less light than the sun, even on
| very overcast days
|
| b) said "blue light" reduction is presumably intended to happen
| _at night_ where 1) any comparison with the ability to maintain
| unsaturated vision in plain sun on a clear day is largely
| irrelevant and 2) backlight itself is typically lower than in
| daylight (not for OLED which does PWM)
|
| So given that the amount of artificial light to not screw up with
| sleep is about equal to "none at all" I'll take a cut in half of
| what essentially constitutes a flashlight aimed straight at my
| retinas any day.
|
| > Here are four things that can help. [...] Use dark mode [...]
| found reductions in luminance ranging from 92% to 98%! That's
| huge.
|
| From my anecdotal experience dark mode and other low contrast
| themes are mostly used by people who set their brightness too
| high, and conversely people switching to dark mode immediately
| crank brightness up.
|
| Countless discussions I had:
|
| "my battery holds poorly"
|
| "using dark mode?"
|
| "yes"
|
| "try light mode"
|
| "but my eyes!"
|
| "turn brightness down"
|
| "done. wow I just reclaimed 1-2h of battery"
| metalman wrote:
| my phone has a buried setting for ultra dim, which does help,
| except outside, where it makes the phone unuseable, and then it's
| impossible to do the 5 taps and scroll to find it, fuck android
| going to a linux phone
| duttish wrote:
| This is just my own anecdotal experience but I usually get tired
| around 2130-22 but a few times I've turned off the red filter for
| various reasons (photo editing etc) and suddenly I'm still there
| at 0030-01.
|
| I'm not saying it's like this for everyone, but it seems to work
| very well for me at least.
| pvtmert wrote:
| Interesting take for me is that melatonin (over-)usage can be
| severely harmful for the individuals. ... over-
| the-counter melatonin supplements can contain anywhere between 10
| to 30 times as much melatonin as is optimal to maintain circadian
| hygiene. If you have ever taken melatonin and got immediately
| knocked out cold, had weird dreams and woke up in the middle of
| the night sweaty or shivering, you likely took too much--which,
| to be clear, is not your fault, it's the default in the US and
| Canada. The mega-doses in stores serve as hypnotics (punches you
| to sleep), but wreck sleep architecture. The right dose is ~0.3
| mg, which is hard to find in pharmacies but can be found online.
| xmodem wrote:
| > Unless your strategy is to create a photo-lab-like screen in
| pure black and red, or wear deep-red-tinted glasses, it's
| unlikely that a pure colorshift strategy will cut out that big of
| a chunk of the spectrum.
|
| The writer is dismissing this out of hand but to me this sounds
| like a great idea.
| pvtmert wrote:
| My overall take (elephant in the room): Blue light filters don't
| work, it depends on what you do & how you do it.
|
| For example, most people keep watching/scrolling Instagram Reels
| and TikTok videos. They keep stimulating the brain constantly,
| not just at electrical level but also in emotional/chemical level
| too.
|
| I have seen people who are _addicted_ and cannot get rid of the
| addiction. This is not only the dopamine-boost, it has deeper
| connections of neuro-chemical stimuli. Just observe around you;
| people pick up their phone to directly open Insta /TikTok, start
| scrolling right away every 5-10 seconds. (watching stories
| included too)
|
| This is to some extent that when you mention even the possibility
| of such addiction and abnormal behavior, one gets outright
| resistance and denial of addiction itself. Much like substance
| abuse...
|
| My point is, majority of the population watches/scrolls these,
| needing 10g of melatonin to fall asleep.
|
| Obviously if I get engaged in an interesting stuff continuously,
| the existence of blue light does not matter that much. It matters
| if/when I am reading a novel which is in a mediocre chapter where
| nothing _that_ interesting going on. The existence of blue-light
| or lack thereof may tip the scale at that point.
| rcore wrote:
| > That's all great, but there are websites that still don't have
| dark modes. It doesn't make any sense in 2026 that Gmail doesn't
| have a dark mode. If the activity you're doing most at night is
| reading email, you might consider an alternative email client.
|
| This reads funny on a website that does not respect your device's
| dark mode. Guess I'll look for an alternative blog.
| jedberg wrote:
| >It doesn't make any sense in 2026 that Gmail doesn't have a dark
| mode
|
| I've been using dark mode on gmail for years, not sure what OP is
| talking about here.
|
| But also, my sleep quality got much better when I turned on
| f.lux. And it got better still when I added a second light to my
| bathroom that can do a 1800K super-warm light (that's also very
| dim).
|
| And as an added pro-tip, I use f.lux during the day to cut my
| color temp to 5900K (instead of the default 6500K) and it made a
| huge difference for how long I could work without getting tired
| eyes.
| snowhale wrote:
| the real variable is probably what you're doing before bed, not
| the wavelength. scrolling social media keeps the brain actively
| processing new stimuli -- notifications, comparisons, emotional
| content. reading on a kindle with blue light filter probably
| sleeps better than watching youtube with it on. the luminance
| thing the author mentions points in this direction too.
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