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Tech In Plain Sight: Incandescent Bulbs
(hackaday.com)
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this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2024
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I'll tell my completely unprofessional and subjective opinion, as someone with migraines and preferring moderately illuminated (like sum of moonlight and general city light pollution multiplied by two) spaces.
A room with old light bulbs on is a lot more bearable for me than a room with LEDs on.
I suspect this is about spectral characteristics (softer and more dispersed orange light, if that makes sense), which can be mimicked by modern technologies, it's just that we again live in a time when nobody cares about subtle things affecting quality of life.
EDIT: didn't erase unconnected thoughts further.
But - everybody cares about getting a new unusable touchscreen phone every year or so. BTW, why touchscreens? Because you have to choose things or scroll things or zoom in&out things, sometimes enter small amounts of text. It's literally designed to be of limited use for anything important with other things equal, and that's intentional, because when a device becomes more useful than that, users start having opinions and demands and one can't have that "predictable progress" with new "flagship phones" and other such stupidity, this is also the reason for industry as a whole going bad`. A touchscreen does not make a device more usable in some other situations.
UI and UX are good when they are predictable and bad when they are not. Even a child or a completely non-tech person will do things more efficiently with a physical keyboard. They've just been gaslighted into thinking differently.
Buy led lightbulbs with lower light temperature, they are quite similar to old bulbs.
Also illumination has a lot to do with the luminaries more than the bulbs themselves.
The unrelated bit about touchscreens: i like the one in my notebook, combined with keyboard use.
Btw: illuminate a wall and you get that soft and dispersed light.
"Combined" is fine.
If you mean light dispersed from the wall, then yes. If you mean semitransparent something illuminated from the inside, hell no.
Almost every LED in my house is the filament style. You would love those. Great company I linked. I wrote them for advice and got a long, technical and accurate reply.
I prefer physical keyboards, too, as do many others. It turns out those of us who spend a lot of time composing text are outnumbered by those who do more content consumption, though, so the surface area is given to touchscreens, and profit-driven manufacturers seldom bother with keyboard models any more.
As for light quality, yep, incandescent bulbs were generally more pleasant. But not so much better as to justify the pollution now that we have 8 billion people on this planet.
I'm not sure. I think this can be attributed to gaslighting too. We can see companies trying desperately to push one and the same paradigm, with phones it has succeeded, while elsewhere it hasn't to varying degrees despite a lot of effort. If it was about preference and competition, there would be no need to push anything, and if pushing something has succeeded, then this is not solely a result of preference and competition.
Maybe with a less oligopolized market of, ahem, everything, vulnerable to network effect, we could say it's a result of preference and competition.
Device manufacturers are on kinda secondary roles in that.
Well, those monochrome displays of old generally weren't made blue, for example. They were made green and amber. The difference for economic purposes wasn't significant, but for health it was.
I don't remember how exactly LEDs work, but I think making those with spectrum a bit better for human health is a good idea, no? Feels stupid that I have one blue LED lamp, the rest being neutral, and I have seen such, but I don't often see LED lamps of warmer colors. It's as if fashion were that blue light means modern, cold light means strong, and so on. And that warm lights are something old, decaying, like those old books with yellow pages, or like your memories of childhood. Or maybe something infernal, from the time when we didn't have what they consider basic tech comfort today.
I think it's fashion. Or more, a promise of some bright future, a city on the hill, for which it is necessary to do things the "modern" way. Humans are irrational, they don't emotionally feel that one color is just as modern as the other. But when the "modern", promised way requires to reject some comfort, that means also rejecting one's own common sense. Which means rejecting one's own preferences and demands and wishes from tech, which are very different from corporate policies even for the majority. And that means giving oneself to MS, Google, Apple, Meta etc.
OK, I might be overthinking it. Just treating our time the way medievalists treat Middle Ages.