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Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

lincolnquirk.com

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Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

#141

Post by ghosty141 »

blunte wrote: post #140

For a year I had my home office setup with LED strip lights all the way around the room. They were mounted on a narrow shelf encircling three walls. Color temp was about 6000K. I loved it, for a while. It felt like a fresh bright day. However, after some months of 12 hours a day of working in this environment, I started having pain in my eyes, almost as if they were being squeezed. This discomfort persisted for a mon…

"blue light is harmful" is a highly debated topic. Iirc there is no consensus yet and some studies indicate that it's not a health risk.

Apart from that, having a screen that is too bright can certainly cause problems. Especially if the contrast is very stark to the surrounding environment.

I personally use a light theme when it's very bright outside/inside and a dark theme when it's dark + my monitor brightness at home is set to ~70% which is plenty.

Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

#142

Post by wongarsu »

blunte wrote: post #140

For a year I had my home office setup with LED strip lights all the way around the room. They were mounted on a narrow shelf encircling three walls. Color temp was about 6000K. I loved it, for a while. It felt like a fresh bright day. However, after some months of 12 hours a day of working in this environment, I started having pain in my eyes, almost as if they were being squeezed. This discomfort persisted for a mon…

Some lamps output a better spectrum than others. While the distribution of wavelengths output by something glowing with black-body radiation (like the sun or an incandescent lamp) is very smooth and reminds of a normal distribution, CFLs are famous for having terrible light (it's mostly spikes of specific frequencies in blue, green and red, and the relative height of those can be tuned to get a desired color temperature). White LEDs are much better than that: they are actually blue LED with a phosphor coating that absorbs the light and reemits white light. The light from the phosphor has a good, smooth spectrum, but depending on LED quality a good portion of the blue light can shine through, giving it much more output in the blue wavelengths (even at low color temperatures, for the purposes of color temperature you can just shifting the rest more into the red, or by cheating and adding some red LEDs into the mix).

LEDs that minimize that issue are widely available due to demand from photographers, video makers, etc, but they cost a good bit more.

Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

#143

Post by mazak »

faeyanpiraat wrote: post #15
kragen wrote: post #2

I made some notes about this in 02013 https://dercuano.github.io/notes/10klux-led.html and 02017 https://dercuano.github.io/notes/illumination-cost.html which may be of interest to anyone trying this, but Eliezer and Raemon tried the experiment and published their notes before I published Dercuano in 02019.

Why put leading zeroes in years?

There's also an alternative approach to put a leading 1 called Holocene Calendar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar

Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

#144

Post by teknopaul »

pelario wrote: post #126
thewakalix wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I read the same article. Do you believe, based on a single word, that the author believes that literally zero people in the entire course of human history have ever suggested “brighter lights” until Yudkowsky came along?

No one in the parent posts has said anything about "literally zero people". The OP made a claim ("invented in 2017"), and this very claim is being criticized. I found perplexing that you interpret the very same words in almost opposite ways.

I cant find it again but I read an article about how brightness goes up with technology and human spend roughly the same proportion of income on light. Kind of disproving the led efficiency is good for the environment argument. Not revolutionary, better to break that pattern.

Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

#145

Post by traverseda »

Udo wrote: post #116
thewakalix wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Ideas can be harmful” is gibberish?

The amount of self-importance on display is what makes it sound like gibberish. A: "I have the most ground-breaking idea ever!" B: "Okay, let's hear it?" A: "No, it's too dangerous, it may well destroy the world, but trust me it's brilliant and completely novel." It's a religion at that point.

How about bitcoin? It's not so much an idea as a piece of software, but being predicted on wasting energy it's going to do a lot of harm. That's an example of this class of game-theory based ideas.

I believe that there are other ideas like that, things that set up spirals that are a lot worse than just "destroy energy to make money". Obviously they're not going to be universally compelling, an idea that's dangerous like that in one context might be perfectly safe in another. It depends on the target audience.

Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

#146

Post by chooban »

Nition wrote: post #40

I saw an attempt at a similar thing posted on Hacker News in the past. Rather than use many standard lightbulbs, he used one massive 30,000 lumen "corn cob" bulb: https://www.benkuhn.net/lux Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21660718 However, there is now an update on the blog where he seems to have independently switched to the "lumenator" system as described in the links on today's post: > Update…

Both Ben and Lincoln work at Wave (as do I), so I suspect they may well have been comparing notes.

https://www.wave.com

Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

#147

Post by joshspankit »

underwater wrote: post #45
leobg wrote: post #12

DIY Perks [1] has a good tutorial on how to make a super bright LED panel from LED strips. Quite easily, actually. Been using one of those in my office for the last eight years or so. I use a server PSU for power. I was surprised to see how bright it is when I once went outside while it was on. Not only was my window the brightest in the entire street by far. But it actually illuminated the trees around my window. If…

He also created a version that simulates sunlight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bqBsHSwPgw

Came here to mention both DIY Perks videos, as well as to say that the ability to change colour temp is practically vital.

Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

#148

Post by asteroidbelt »

seanhunter wrote: post #56
asteroidbelt wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power waste is not an issue even in summer. Power production is driven by demand. Turn on more lights, and electricity companies will produce more electricity, and eventually they will make it cheap. Turn off the lights, and they'll do nothing because there's no demand. That was my pitch for nuclear power.

It's much more complex than that because power supply is not perfectly elastic. Power companies have to commit ahead of time to a certain level of production. In that sense power production is driven by projected demand. Power waste is an issue - at times where there is oversupply, wholesale power prices can actually go negative and at that point there is an excess of power in the network which cannot be stored and i…

I would reply, but since those angry warriors downvoted my very reasonable comment, I should not.

Perhaps I should stop trying to talk on hacker news at all.

Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

#149

Post by hackernewds »

JoelJacobson wrote: post #118
Nextgrid wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the pricing for these? Looks interesting.

Back in 2021-10-06 when I bought mines, they were crazy expensive! I paid 89239 SEK (~9349 USD) +25% VAT = 111549 SEK (~11685 USD) per unit. Not sure about the VAT rate if buying from US. Hopefully they have reduced the prices since then, not sure.

how long do these last? you seem to have made a huge capital investment here

Re: Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)

#150

Post by Udo »

traverseda wrote: post #145
Udo wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of self-importance on display is what makes it sound like gibberish. A: "I have the most ground-breaking idea ever!" B: "Okay, let's hear it?" A: "No, it's too dangerous, it may well destroy the world, but trust me it's brilliant and completely novel." It's a religion at that point.

How about bitcoin? It's not so much an idea as a piece of software, but being predicted on wasting energy it's going to do a lot of harm. That's an example of this class of game-theory based ideas. I believe that there are other ideas like that, things that set up spirals that are a lot worse than just "destroy energy to make money". Obviously they're not going to be universally compelling, an idea that's dangerous l…

> That's an example of this class of game-theory based ideas.

That's a good point on its own, but it's not a response. At no time did I or anyone here in this thread assert that "info hazards" do not exist. What is being discussed is whether it's worthwhile to be deferential to a person/community who is making claims of being in possession of an exceptionally catastrophic piece of information that by its nature would preclude public scrutiny on ethical grounds.

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