[aethrum]

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?

[taeric]

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]

> 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]

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]

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]

Concur that most displays are set 25-50% too bright by default.

[tartoran]

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]

Can you elaborate on “no way back”?

[denkmoon]

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.

[pseudalopex]

Your assumption was false.[1]

[1] https://health.clevelandclinic.org/do-glasses-make-your-eyes...

[maccard]

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

[ifwinterco]

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

[tartoran]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[MBCook]

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]

> 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]

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]

> they've done a grand job of royally fucking up the colors of whatever's on screen.

Pretty sure that's the point?

[schiffern]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[tuetuopay]

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.

[himata4113]

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.

[HumblyTossed]

It's not. I managed optical labs (the one hour kind) while getting my BSCpE. One thing I always used for my personal glasses for studying (the ones with an additional +.50 diopter for helping my reading - but that is another post), is about a 5% solid brown tint on the lenses to make the paper just a little less white.

[amelius]

Are you sure you are not also changing total luminance?

[refulgentis]

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]

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

[metalliqaz]

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

[thenewnewguy]

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).

[jack_pp]

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]

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.

[crazygringo]

> 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.

[jack_pp]

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.

[nandomrumber]

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.

[BobaFloutist]

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]

That’s how it should be but the poster is literally calling the individual experiences of others “superstition” based on the population at large.

[wat10000]

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]

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

[geoduck14]

>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]

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]

It's not about how it looks aesthetically, you can feel your eye muscles release tension when you go from light to dark mode.

[theshackleford]

> 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.

[0x1ch]

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]

Benefit: saves battery on OLED and goes easier on the OLEDs themselves

[IAmBroom]

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.

[thatcat]

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]

Regardless of "health benefits", the phrase "you can feel" seems pretty relevant when it comes to what someone finds comfortable.

[nandomrumber]

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

[bob1029]

> 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]

> 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.

[refulgentis]

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.

[wtetzner]

> It is not something that helps anything at all physically.

That's a pretty strong claim to make.

[refulgentis]

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]

so whats the takeaway? just turn down the brightness off your monitors? the blue light option of my benq monitor doesnt help?

[refulgentis]

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.

[RupertSalt]

username checks out

[refulgentis]

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.

[KaiserPro]

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.

[cpburns2009]

Blue light filtering lenses come at a premium. You don't accidentally get them.

[RupertSalt]

Let me explain how many times I went back-and-forth with the opticians about "is this coating/feature optional?"

[cpburns2009]

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.

[KaiserPro]

I wasn't paying for them, so it was very much accidental.

[mikkupikku]

You should go back and demand they be replaced. Such a mistake isn't something you should tolerate.

[KaiserPro]

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.

[pavel_lishin]

Someone ran up to you and put them on your face?

[robinsonb5]

If you wait long enough cataracts will give you that for free.

[nsxwolf]

I love Night Shift.