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Comment by silisili | Hacker News Reader

I turned my brightness way down, mainly because the floaters I got in my mid 30s started really annoying me. I use dark mode where I can.

Lastly, I just don't code for long stretches anymore. I usually get up to walk around every 60 or 90 minutes, for my knees and my eyes.

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Turning brightness down is not recommended. You will experience more vision problems if you do it for long. Decreasing brightness decreases your field of vision, makes it harder for your eyes to focus and will worsen your nearsightedness or increase risk of getting it.

For more context, my eyes became much healthier after I increased the brightness of my monitor to 60% (250nits) since last 4 months. Before then I used to regularly use it at 10% (40nits). My power numbers were getting worse and I even had high IOP, which has improved now.

I've suspected this. Do you have any references?

What I wrote was based on my own observations. I tried looking up

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6201904/ This talks about IOP changes on using smart phones. And it increases more when done in low light.

I saw a lot of links for myopia in children and links to light exposure https://www.aao.org/editors-choice/sunlight-exposure-reduces... https://iovs.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2705915 These articles are talking about overall exposure - spending time outdoors and find it to be of statistical importance.

https://webvision.med.utah.edu/book/part-viii-psychophysics-... See the section on illumination

"For recognition tasks, visual acuity is greatly affected by the level of background luminance. (Graph)

One theory put forward by Hecht is that within the rod population and within the cone population, there are differing sensitivities which are distributed randomly. Therefore, at high luminance, all cells are active for a high level of visual acuity. At low luminances, only cells sensitive to that level of luminances are active and because they are distributed randomly, the retinal mosaic is coarser thus a lower level of visual acuity is achieved (Graham, 1965).

Another possible explanation is that under limited quantal availability, quantal capture is more probable in the para-central and peripheral retinal due to greater spatial summation. Since photoreceptors density in this area is low, resolution is poorer. As light levels increase, quantal capture occurs more successfully at the central retinal (macula and fovea). A higher level of visual acuity is achieved due to the high photoreceptor density. "

I am not sure what all of these terms mean but I guess some good sources for you to check out. Do share if you find something interesting.

My case exactly! Also mid 30's and I also have floaters unfortunately and according to my trustful ophtalmologist, there is little to be done about it.

It is not that I have a problem per se, but this condition made me realize that my eyesight won't get any better and since I depend on it for a living, well.

Same! It's one of those things nobody tells you about apparently. I remember being on a plane and looking out the window and seeing them everywhere all of a sudden, and naturally thinking something was majorly wrong. Rushed to the eye doc when I got home, he just did a few checks, shrugged, and said it's normal.

I had this realization while in snowy mountains. All is white and suddenly I thought that I had a lock of hair in my line of sight.

Do you think the floaters were caused/related by your time watching the screen or something else?

The eye doc said it was just some pieces of the inner eye drying with age, and normal.

I don't believe they were screen related, I just hated seeing them. I either got used to them after a couple years, or maybe the pieces have settled out of sight, as they don't bother me much anymore.

>The eye doc said it was just some pieces of the inner eye drying with age, and normal.

Same thing happened to me around my late 20s and my doctor said the same thing (so n=2 now).

I think mine were. I strained my eyes really bad over days of work, and then one day before going to sleep rubbed them. When I opened the eyes, I seen a brown clot in the middle of vision which after a month of treatment with eyedrops fell apart into lots of floaters / worms. 2 years later most of them dissolved, but some remain and vision is blurred a bit. It also turned out that most people I asked have floaters too, but if there aren't many, they're filtered out by brain. If you aren't looking for them specifically, they aren't visible. They are hard to unsee though once you seen them, so better not to try. )

Thanks @afidrya, what kind of treatment did you get?

Maybe it helps with mine.

Eyedrops name of which I don't remember, but I can try find if needed as they're commonly prescribed in Russia for this condition. I wouldn't recommend them though as turning a single clot into long wormy things was scary and annoying. I seen similar complaints from others who were prescribed these eyedrops. I'm not sure if they helped with dissolving the floaters, as I had smaller recurrence recently and not used any eyedrops and it's still slowly going away. Btw, if floaters are in the center, try moving the eyes up and down 10 times in succession - most of them should stick outside of vision.

I had bad floaters for a while, but either they healed or I learned to subconsciously ignore them.

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