Your tone and overconfidence is the only techbro thing going on here.
You really think you've read enough on this or that there's even been enough study of the topic for you to know with any certainty at all how someone else's eyes are working for them? Pure hubris.
All the data you can read doesn't mean a damn thing for Hosteur's personal experience. Neither you nor anyone you have read has studied that person's eyes, you actually have zero basis for telling them what is easier to read or how much strain they feel in their eyes.
The science on this has been going back and forth for at least the better part of two decades now. Nothing here has been proven, as is the case in most actual science. Any single study merely supports or doesn't support some view or hypothesis. It takes forever to confidently say we know how the eye is even working in these situations, let alone offer some broad recommendation for what every person ought to do.
Aside from that, you are misusing the concept of a categorical proof. The studies at hand don't even address the problem as a categorical concept space. There are no symbolic categories here, no functions mapping objects onto semantic spaces. You are stealing a term you don't understand from a field of mathematics you don't understand to shoot down a person you don't understand.
Stop being an ass and at least try to understand people before you try to tell them what their reality is and what they ought to be doing before bed.
This topic does seem to rile up techbros a lot lol. Maybe tied with “mechanical keyboards make me more efficient” said by people who barely type 200 words a day.
Aaaand use f.lux (https://justgetflux.com/). Daylight setting black on white may indeed be way too bright at night, but when you turn down amount of light produced - or let through to your eyes - by your monitor and combine it with the night adjustments from f.lux in my experience you are good even reading late.
Of course, in addition I also only use some pretty dim LEDs from some x-mas decorations instead of the bright lamps everybody else seems to use when I walk around the neighborhood at night. I could not live with using those regular lamps any more. I've gotten used to having my rooms pretty dark whenever it's dark outside, light equivalent to maybe half a dozen candles.
Both the ambient light and the monitor have to be adjusted. They can use dark mode all they want, if they leave a regular lamp on it still is very bright.
Living like this I noticed how little light I actually need, by now I deliberately keep older - significantly dimmer than new - of those x-mas LED chains ("warm white" - more yellow by now), use the newer (still brighter) ones early in the evening, and later switch to the old even dimmer ones exclusively. And it still is more than enough, maybe three or four candles equivalent per room.
> > I primarily use dark mode when I am in the dark or in a dimly lit room. Having any light blasted right into my eyes hurts. And ruins my night vision. And also messes with my sleep.
> It’s almost like too tongue in cheek that you write exactly like the techbros the article talks about. Did you even try to read the article?
> [...]
> Anecdotal techbro proclamations that dark mode is easier to read has been categorically proven false. It’s not easier to read and it’s not less strain on your eyes.
I did, and I think this kind of reasoning is not wise or meaningfully scientific. Experiencing physical pain in the response to something when you see it is way more immediate and way more relevant to one's own decisions regarding that stimulus than some study about average effects across a population of people who have different eyes than you in a situation that you can only hope is sufficiently analogous to your actual usage. (Note that GP writes only about their own experience— their comment does not contain a general argument.)
The article in the OP mentions that things may be different for people with various eye conditions. Guess what? Experiencing pain from using light mode is pretty much a defining symptom of such conditions.
> Light sensitivity is a condition in which bright lights hurt your eyes. Another name for this condition is photophobia.
Through genetic testing, my sister has been diagnosed with a degenerative eye disease which is a cause of photophobia. Despite seeing eye doctors (including various specialists) her whole life, and knowing her entire life that bright light is painful for her, it took her decades to get that diagnosis.
According to your reasoning here, self-advocating for her health and accessibility based upon her own experience of her conditions would have been based on unworthy 'anecdotal proclamations' up until a few months ago.
Let's revisit that characterization:
> Anecdotal techbro proclamations that dark mode is easier to read has been categorically proven false. It’s not easier to read and it’s not less strain on your eyes.
It's very easy to find studies later than the date of the OP challenging this view on eye strain with respect to dark mode, including ones that consider the effects of blue light filters, e.g., https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9363189/
Why overcommit like that? How does that advance the credibility of any person or honor the science?
