Comment by herf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by herf | Hacker News Reader

Hi everyone--developer of f.lux here.

I wanted to say that we stopped thinking of f.lux as a way to match a room about 8 years ago. We have been consumed with the idea that if the human circadian system is controlled by light, and if nobody knows what the numbers are in real life, then it is vitally important that we figure it out.

Our main effort since then has been about people and understanding how they react to light over time, and how technology can fix it. f.lux is intended to be a seed that will explain how all of our lighting can work better. It's a big project that extends beyond screens, and we think software is central to fixing the problem.

People who wake up at the same time need different timing and amounts of light, and it's not really about matching the color of a screen to a room. We've learned that almost every room is already too dim (during the day) or too bright (at night). And the trouble is that most people can't figure this out by looking around - they need some tools to help out.

This system that controls sleep and alertness is nonvisual, which means that everyone's intuition about what looks good might be pretty far off from what it does to your body. This certainly is borne out by the last 100 years of electric lighting.

Electric lighting has shifted sleep schedules by >4 hours, and people are not sleeping nearly as much as a result. We think this is connected to ADHD, cancer, type 2 diabetes, obesity, mood disorders, and many other serious problems.

So while it is true that other people have turned screens orange like f.lux did in 2009, the truth is we didn't do nearly enough back then. Our goal is to understand the biology and make something that actually works for a wide variety of people.

We have tried to address this question ("people, not screens") in little pieces, e.g., why we are making big changes to f.lux's schedule default settings on our "big update" page:

https://justgetflux.com/news/pages/v4/bigupdate/

But it is hard to talk about outcomes when nobody at all expects you to be thinking about them. Snake oil is not what we're about.

We have a lot of work to do -- apparently including a lot of writing and explaining, and I appreciate your support.

Do you have any suggestions for using flux as someone with a non 24 hour schedule? Right now changing the wake time is so buried that I'll often push it forward several hours, then come back in a week to do it again.

Is there an easier way to handle this? Perhaps some way to tell flux "I just woke up" and have it figure things out? Hook into a sleep tracker like on fitness trackers or Sleep as Android?

Seriously thank you so much for this project and all the effort that's gone in so far. I've been using it since about a month after first release and I cannot imagine using a computer without it.

> I wanted to say that we stopped thinking of f.lux as a way to match a room about 8 years ago.

That's funny. All I want is having nice, soft colours when I'm up all night.

We wondered this too - we surveyed people who were installing f.lux for the first time about what they cared about - "eyestrain vs. sleep". 90% of people said better sleep, 60% said eyestrain. So both are important.

But imagine you get a job that requires you to be up at 8AM (and you want to take it). Do you have control of that part of your biology or does it have control of you?

The theory is that your environment is one of the major things controlling your biological timing, and the indoor spaces at least are ones we built so we should understand what it takes to change them.

> Do you have control of that part of your biology or does it have control of you?

I've personally found that I have a pretty heavy degree of control over it via the orexin† pathway: if I force myself to wake up and eat immediately for a few days at 8AM, then my body will associate 8AM with eating and shift everything else around (when I get hungry; when I get tired at night; etc.) to ensure I'll be wide awake at 8AM to "catch that meal" (that in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness was probably a rabbit or something.)

† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orexin

Oddly I find the redder light causes quite noticeable increases in eyestrain to me.

Cool that you're on HN, and your mission sounds fantastic.

One thing I've never figured out though, what's f.lux's business model? You two seem to be investing considerable resources into all of this for years on end, is it all charity?

In any case, thanks!

It is kind of an extended research project... but I would say that it's looking complicated enough that we think all lighting will need some software to absorb that complexity in the future. So we are already doing a lot with measurement and other ways to sustain it.

Does this mean flux is a passion project only? No business model or revenue stream for it? Or are you trying to keep quiet on it. I know you have had great success before so that makes me wonder even more.

Interesting. You've got me wondering whether it would be feasible and useful to hook up all lights in the room and adjust their brightness and colour temperature as the day progresses.

Already implemented with Phillips hue as well as xiaomi yee lights. Probably with others as well, they're the only ones in certain about though.

Not heard of yee and will investigate, thanks! I really dislike hue. Their lights are pretty inefficient (compared to dumb leds) and rely on zigbee and a wifi bridge. Would much rather have something like this using PoE lights. But I suppose this is a good start.

A little off topic at this point, but just as a note: there yeelights are cloud enabled by default. You need to enable developer mode to control them directly. You'll still need some kind of bridge though. It doesn't need to be the original: A raspberry pi is sufficient

Home Assistant has a built-in Flux feature. I use it to control Ikea Trådfri lights.

What’s the best way to get flux or a flux like experience on mobile: is it a rooted android with the flux app?

Ios night shift isn’t nearly as good, and jailbreaking ios is much harder than formerly.

Isn't it natively supported at this point? I switched through several ROMs and all had it. It's just not enabled by default.

I don’t know if it’s quite the same blue shift. It certainly isn’t on ios.

I've always used redshift on android. It's in the playstore.

I use Twilight on a regular android. Works fine for what I want, not sure if it has all the features that f.lux has: I just use it to have my screen red-er.

Do you have evidence to support that circadian biology is controlled by light? I was under the impression that light was only one part of this puzzle.

I tried a lot of different things over years, and when I mastered light my sleep problems were solved (hard scenario for me at the time - work from home, remote developers who worked at nighttime, no committments to force me to wake up at any given time of day.)

I suspect eating times are involved as well..

Light has been understood to be the dominant zeitgeber for a long time now, in humans and the vast majority of other organisms, and this has not changed. Entrainment is also affected by temperature, eating, etc., but that does not in any way diminish the importance of light.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23604485

E.g. meal timing might help you deal with jet lag, but remember that the primary problem in jet lag is the phase-shift of light in the first place.

There's been a lot (but not enough) research in this area. There are other factors such as exercise and temperature (so-called zeitgebers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeitgeber), but light is an extremely strong one for most people.

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