>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?
After doing that, I have found that the "temperature" of the screen doesn't really matter to me that heavily.
+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
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.
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.
The weird thing is it seems to get noticeably worse or better depending on how much time I spend outside
[1] https://health.clevelandclinic.org/do-glasses-make-your-eyes...
Don't trust everything your doctor says verbatim, they often oversimplify and their information can be out of date.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.
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.
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.
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.
Pretty sure that's the point?
One trick is to schedule this as a bedtime reminder to put down the phone for the night (phone fasting).
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...
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.
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.
Safe to say it works for making your eyes less tired at least.
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).
You are going to HATE to find out about night-mode in the browser
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.
Not invalid; suspicious.
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
feel in this case is a muscle contraction not psychological as you're suggesting
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Surely you didn't actually believe that unless you JUST landed here from space after being away for 60 years.
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.
That's a pretty strong claim to make.
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.
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.
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.