They claim to know a lot but then none of them build proper Cf Lumen or F.Lux style tooling (i.e. super easy default instead of requiring tons of setup) for turning ALL blue light off (red shifting) IN THE DEFAULT OS as the primary way to use your device at night. None of that wussy shifting the color temperature brown shit that doesn't meaningfully reduce blue light hazard.
I can literally preserve my whole night vision and have zero eye strain in pitch black conditions by red shifting my computer screen. No one supports this because we are stupid.
The laser pointer community of all groups understands this stuff well. They recommend green lasers because they use the lowest power for the highest visibility at night. Blue lasers are easy to get super powerful, but unlike a lower powered green one, which usually will only temporarily blind you if you make a mistake - a powerful blue laser will straight up destroy your eyes forever. Permanent blindness.
I don't really get that impression. To the contrary: How dangerous blue light is supposed to be is commonly repeated, with many products for filtering it out, like glasses, and software in all devices that does the red shifting. Android has it by default, Linux does, macOS - is Windows missing? Or is there something in the implementation of those measures that you object to?
But note that the wikipedia article you link states clearly that the eye strain attributed to blue light has no scientific evidence. That's also what I found out last time I looked into it - all those very strong statements about how dangerous blue light emission is supposed to be has no equivalent scientific studies that prove them. I think there was also a prominent article about that here on HN.
I think the effect might be completely made up, as it is something that is easy to believe and to subjectively feel that it works, by a placebo effect basically.
It's insanity to be told that your claim is basically psudoscience or fake when night vision preservation, the mechanism of prevented eye-strain, is a well confirmed and relied upon part of our biology. Go talk to astronomers. I'm aware of Wikipedia claiming what you say it does. That's an incitement of Wikipedia and the big blue light crowd.
Further, actual studies of filteirng blue light needed the right display tech. Before OLED, I couldn't actually "turn off the non red pixels", and thus never fully eliminated blue light from my display. Most of the "science" around blue light is trash. Yes, I say this as someone who actively published at top AI conferences and is intimately familiar with peer review.
I'm going to keep on preserving my night vision and browsing the internet for hours with zero issues at night while being told that my red shifted phone is placebo. You try turning your OLED phone on at full brightness in the middle of the night with and without the red-shift and tell me which hurts your eyes more...
There is no big blue light crowd. There has always only been the "blue light is bad" position, which was completely ignored by the industry (with display colour defaults especially) until that turned around completely, after the success of f.lux broke a barrier I think.
Please notice two things: 1. It's not even about whether blue light might be harder on the eyes in general, but whether it matters on the brightness levels consumer devices are usually used (so astronomers are completely irrelevant to that discussion, and so is a modern phone at night at full brightness) and what the actual effects are in practice 2. It's an astonishing position to take, to at the one hand realize there is no scientific basis for the claim, but still act 100% convinced. Especially for an academic.
It's also not obvious why "night vision preservation" might be relevant. We are not talking about looking at things during the dark, but at (more or less brighly) illuminated objects.
I don't have skin in this game and likely won't respond further. I even have a weak red light shift active while writing this (I feel like it might help with the sleep rhythm a bit). But I am absolutely saying that claims like this need scientific evidence and that it is foolish to believe in such things only because it's currently a popular claim, to take that position that absolutely. This is not the correct way of thinking, and there is no need to not leave space for doubt.
There are old studies on the hazard of blue light. I found a few of them on https://scholar.google.com - I suspect they’re hard to find if you don’t know about specific keywords to include in your query.
The blue light problem has to do with how high energy blue photons interact with specific substances found in minute quantities in our eyes, leading to inflammation.
> They claim to know a lot but then none of them build proper Cf Lumen or F.Lux style tooling (i.e. super easy default instead of requiring tons of setup) for turning ALL blue light off (red shifting) IN THE DEFAULT OS as the primary way to use your device at night.
Probably not what you are aiming for but for Linux this is a somewhat solved problems. The default DM, Gnome, has built-in color shift with a time schedule AFAIK. For Wayland and xorg there are also numerous other solutions that do a display-level redshift, I can recommend wl-sunset for Wayland.
> The laser pointer community of all groups understands this stuff well
This has been my major frustration also. Different enthusiast communities all discover these things independently and talk about them in their own domain language. Night photography and astral photography talks about red shifting as well.
I can literally preserve my whole night vision and have zero eye strain in pitch black conditions by red shifting my computer screen. No one supports this because we are stupid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_effects_of_high-ene...
The laser pointer community of all groups understands this stuff well. They recommend green lasers because they use the lowest power for the highest visibility at night. Blue lasers are easy to get super powerful, but unlike a lower powered green one, which usually will only temporarily blind you if you make a mistake - a powerful blue laser will straight up destroy your eyes forever. Permanent blindness.