I don't feel bad, I just wanted to make it clear that I wasn't trying to claim some kind of priority.
But this isn't really just a question of "bright lighting", which of course occurs outdoors all the time, anywhere someone is doing arc welding, in any steel mill, etc. It's a more complex proposition: "Possibly seasonal affective disorder is due in significant part to the fact that indoor lighting is almost always orders of magnitude dimmer than sunlight. Possibly indoor lighting is so dim in part because providing sunlight-class lighting with Edison's incandescent lights would be punishingly expensive and require data-center-style massive air conditioning. However, modern high-efficiency LEDs and even fluorescent tubes bring sunlight-class lighting within practical reach of everyday people."
Still, this is hardly a brilliantly original idea on my part, so it's not surprising that the same idea occurred to Eliezer. I was pleased to see that he tried it for his wife's SAD and that it worked.
It’s not that crazy of an idea especially in winter when SAD is worst and any extra power you waste in your house heats it so it isn’t really wasted.
One of my favorite places on earth is my marijuana grow and the incredible amount of beautiful light they grow under. I’ve contemplated a scaled down version in my house. I could grow plants all over the place under the lighting like being outside, no matter what the season.
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.
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 if it's not consumed will lead to electrical damage. So people actually get paid to waste power. Ever seen a sports stadium with all the lights blazing late at night even though noone is there? They are one of the groups who take advantage of negative power prices. There are also places where there are literally resistors placed along the ground to sink excess electricity (as heat) into the earth during these times.
When you say "eventually they will make it cheap" that seems likely to be a misconception also. Power production is not like manufacturing. Although innovation can lead to increases in efficiency and therefore reduced cost, inefficiency is not the limiting factor on power cost.
"commercially available LED light sources (for horticultural or other applications) can be considered human safe when designed, installed and used in accordance with the applicable standards, regulations and manufacturer’s instruction"
I'm wondering if there are any thermal management issues to anticipate, especially if you wanna build a safe commercial product. It's quite known that the limit to LED brightness rapidly becomes heat management, either of the power supply or the LED itself.
In LED lighting space, insufficient heat dissipation is commonly used for planned obsolescence. LED lifetime directly depends on temperature, and most light sources are way too powerful for their heat dissipation capabilities.
There are in fact LED bulbs that aren't overdriven to a deliberate and premature thermal death, but you can only buy them in Dubai: https://youtu.be/klaJqofCsu4
Lightbulbs have a long and very successful history of artificially driving lightbulb lifetimes down though a cartel system: https://youtu.be/j5v8D-alAKE
If you're building your own LED fixtures, you can probably underdrive the LEDs and run them at a radically cooler and slightly more efficient operating point, at a higher upfront cost: you need more LEDs for the same output.
Those sub $1000 options from daylite don't look very bright, despite the reviews they have very few images that show what they look like in a room and the ones they do have look like a regular LED panel stuck on the wall. I doubt this comes anywhere close to simulating real daylight. It looks like they're just supposed to be a fake window that gives off a little light. Maybe their fake skylights are better, I can't find anything other than a single image. Not even an option to buy one.
Interesting to see someone else working on the problem of bright indoor lighting. I've been searching for a good solution to the "indoor light not bright enough" problem for some time, and here's some stuff I've tried:
-IKEA NOT ($10 floor lamp) lights with a bunch of light bulb splitters and at least two giant high-CRI twister CFL bulbs for photo studios from Amazon. These are truly massive and look like a normal CFL light bulb, but are about a foot long. Two of them consume 130W at the wall, and put out a rather large amount of light. Managed to get about 1000 lux at the desk this way. Unfortunately you can only get them in 5000K and 6500K. The daylight color may bother some people at night. Furthermore, they are undimmable.
-Track lighting with six IKEA TRADFRI tunable white bulbs on it, in an L shape following my desk. IKEA bulbs supposedly reach 90 CRI, and these can be color tuned (arbitrarily if you use the hub and the HomeKit app, not just 3 levels) and dimmed. At 1000lm, they are the brightest tunable white bulbs on the market commonly imo (most are 800). The range of color tuning is rather low, 2700-4000K. This is because the bulb never turns off the warm channel I think. Furthermore, at 4000K, the light is slightly greenish.
Some notes:
-I definitely find dimmable and/or color tunable bulbs to be useful, because at night, extremely bright or white light isn't extremely helpful for sleep.
-I found that high room brightness might make it difficult to see a computer screen that isn't turned up all the way.
-I found that if the lights were mounted overhead-ish, and were really individually bright, they would cause annoying glare under some circumstances
Some more hardware developmenty stuff I looked into:
-LED strips. High CRI tunable white LED strips are available on AliExpress, along with the LED channels to run them. Actually getting a constant current supply and appropriate power rigged up is an exercise left for the reader. Unfortunately, LED strips use resistors for constant current, so waste a little bit of power there.
-Building a custom LED plate for the Tradfri lights that used Lumileds chips capable of 95 CRI. I built and tested one, and still have the files if someone should want to try. It doesn't expand the tuning range much at all.
-Designing my own LED bulbs. This is a project in progress. I found some LED chips on DigiKey from Bridgelux (V6 Thrive array) and some giant BR40 bulbs at a local store for 3 bucks each that still have a massive heat sink on them to modify. The heat sink gets up to 60C with 18W input to the LEDs at 25C ambient. The LED chips are capable of outputting 98 CRI and come much closer to approximating sunlight than anything else I've found by wavelength/spectrum.
This is pitched as (1) a treatment for SAD and (2) something people would like.
And that's great, but I want to consider something else -- one of the best theories of civilization-caused myopia is that it's caused by insufficient exposure to sunlight. And the table in the post is certainly circumstantial evidence supporting that theory:
> Direct sunlight shines 100k lux
> Full daylight (indirect) is more than 10k lux
> Indoor office lighting is typically 500
That's a big difference. What if illuminating the indoors at 10,000 lux prevented people from developing myopia?
There seems to have been a fair amount of research into this based on the COVID lockdowns around the world. One such study:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33443542/
You may be interested in the following video, where a quadruple board certified doc reviews relevant literature regarding sun exposure (and the critical wavelengths involved) and various facets of health: https://youtu.be/5YV_iKnzDRg
The fellow from the YouTube channel DIY Perks has several projects dealing with this, including an amazing parallel-ray "sun", and other projects recycling old TV and laptop screens into fake windows.
I struggle to believe that this is the case. Many offices are massive single rooms in buildings with large floor plates and often meeting rooms may end up placed around the edge. So in practice I think big open offices (and the desire to have everyone close in one room) tend to lead towards not getting much natural light, but of course if you put smaller offices or cubicles in that space they’d get even less light.
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 I was to build it again - and especially for a place like living room - , I would build it so as to also simulate sunset. That is to say, that it will automatically lower the brightness and shift to a warmer spectrum in the evening. Otherwise, this thing messes with your biorhythm and gets you out of sync with normal daylight hours very quickly.
Since you seem to be a heavy user, and if you don’t mind me asking: Has your eye sight deteriorated in those eight years, and how is your sleep quality?
No problems with eyesight. No glasses or anything. I see the light as basically replacing the brightness I would be getting if I wasn’t sitting inside my office instead of outdoors.
And sleep: I don’t have any trouble sleeping, no. But as I mentioned, using a such a bright light in the evening will fuck with your day/night rhythm. If I’m not diligent to turn off those lights at sunset, I’ll easily be working up until two or three in the morning. If that happens, the problem isn’t that I wouldn’t be able to sleep (I will) or that I would sleep badly (I won’t). It’s just that it shifts my rhythm out of sync with everybody else.
Yep -- I love this video. The detail he went into on this is remarkable; it taught me a few things about the limits of pretend sunlight as a photographer, and why some pretences work and others don't.
Yuji does indeed make the good stuff, just really in a consumer-friendly form factor unless you count the low-power bulbs.
For your sunset approximation, you could add some warmer ones and fade over; they also have some dual-color strips with two different color temperatures evenly spread to allow for seamless mixing.
Exactly. You’d probably need fewer of the warm colored strips, because at the time of day when you will want to use them you’ll also want less light anyway.
It's Yudkowsky from LessWrong, he is actually a quite insightful thinker, but his disciples claim stuff like this all the time. LessWrong is an extreme echo chamber.
For me the breaking point was Roko's Basilisk, a self-proclaimed "most-dangerous idea of our time".
Are you honestly claiming that the author believes that Yudkowsky was literally the first person in history to suggest making lights brighter?
Also, you should read anything Yudkowsky himself has written about Roko’s basilisk. He’s never claimed that it could work, or that it’s dangerous at all.
(“Why did he ban it then?” Because he wanted to prevent it from inspiring an infohazard brainstorming session that could produce a real danger, and he apparently hadn’t heard about the Streisand effect.)
Sort of. He believes that if people try to come up with infohazards and then immediately spread them, there’s a nonzero chance that they succeed. It’s unlikely, but still not something to encourage.
(This is not the same thing as “being certain that a minor modification of Roko’s basilisk would produce an evil time-travelling AI,” to be clear.)
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."
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.
> 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.
I don't think Yudkowsky is making that claim anywhere?
>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 who is making claims
It's honestly really not that clear what you're trying to discuss, certainly you haven't been making a clear statement like that. I don't think anyone is making claims of being in possession of such an infohazard for one thing, and if there were I don't think anyone would be saying you should be deferential towards someone who claimed to have one, sight unseen.
I think you're arguing with a bit of a straw man? Like no one is being all "let's be deferential towards Yudkowsky because he has the idea equivalent of a nuke". He doesn't, to the best of my knowledge, claim to have the idea equivalent of a nuke.
I assumed you were claiming that info-hazards don't exist because otherwise what exactly are you claiming?
Anyway, if that was your point, granted. Let's not be differential towards people who claim to have info-hazards, unless they can go into a room and make someone laugh themselves to death or something.
>>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.
It's not a waste if the product the PoW generates is valued as equal to or greater than the cost of generating the PoW, and the market ensures that is the case, as miners cannot operating at a loss.
Where it can be socially harmful is when energy consumers don't pay for the cost of the negative externalities that the energy they purchase created in its generation, but that applies to all energy usage, not just that used in generating PoW.
You should know that costly signalling strategies are widely employed in nature because costly signals are reliable:
Money laundering is useful but that doesn't mean it's good. A Ponzi scheme can generate wealth but it can't generate value. Wealth without value is maybe not wasteful, but it is harmful.
> Where it can be socially harmful is when energy consumers don't pay for the cost of the negative externalities that the energy they purchase created in its generation, but that applies to all energy usage, not just that used in generating PoW.
Bitcoin alone uses as much power as a medium-sized nation. The increased power usage has caused old fossil-fuel power plants to come back online.
1. There is no evidence that cryptocurrency is widely used to launder money
2. Money laundering can improve economic efficiency when the crimes that generate the illicit revenue are socially beneficial, as is the case when people in China escape the Communist government's capital controls, or when people in Venezuela escape their Communist government's steep inflation tax via mandates to use the state's fiat currency.
Even in ostensibly free societies, socially harmful laws that repress the right to voluntarily interact, like price controls on N95 masks that prolonged a shortage in them for months, or heavy taxation to pay the pensions of a bloated and over-paid public sector kleptocracy, can be socially beneficial to undermine.
So your deduction that money laundering or other forms of escape from institutional rules, is socially harmful, is overly simplistic. In some cases it is harmful, and in some cases it's beneficial.
3. Cryptocurrencies are by definition not ponzi schemes. You could argue they're speculative bubbles, but that is itself speculation.
>>Bitcoin alone uses as much power as a medium-sized nation.
Because it generates billions of dollars of currency a year, and its production is costly in energy and affordable in labor. The energy consumption of labor-intensive industries obfuscates the real energy requirements of those industries, by effectively outsourcing the energy consumption to the workers.
It generates zero dollars. Every dollar in all cryptocurrency markets comes directly from someone buying in. Claiming otherwise is basically a blatant lie.
It's not generating dollars. It's generating a digital asset that is worth something. Of course the value of any commodity is based on what people are willing to buy it for, so your observation in no way discredits the point, that Bitcoin mining is generating something that objectively, based on what the market is paying, has value.
Now you've just generalised the statement until it becomes a truism. So you are now essentially claiming the statement is garbage because it is devoid of useful meaning.
>Elevator pitch: Bring enough light to simulate daylight into your home and office.
>This idea has been shared in Less Wrong circles for a couple years. Yudkowsky wrote Inadequate Equilibria in 2017 where he and his wife invented the idea
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?
I don't know who any of these people are, but that is exactly what the article says, so why should we not believe that that's what the author believes?
Because it’s far more likely that the author chose slightly wrong words that ended up conflating a specific invention with being the first human “to invent the idea” that “hey, brighter lights would be closer to obviously brighter daylight” only 5 years ago. I’d wager that the author realizes that more than half of adults today had that insight sometime prior to 2017.
Some people read websites the way they would read a math proof. One tiny error and the whole thing comes down. A more charitable reading is often perfectly appropriate.
The LessWrong community is known for self-citations all over the place and heavy use of jargon created by themselves, and words redefined as terms-of-art. In light of this, if a member claims that one of their prominent figures "invented" something, you better take the claim at face value.
On the flip side, interpreting everything you read through your own lenses of experience and bias instead of assuming that the author meant what they wrote seems fraught with pitfalls.
Use of the word "invention" is usually a red flag. I've certainly done a number of things I never had knowledge of any prior art on, but I never said I "invented" those things.
If I wanted to, I'd probably go and research prior art first before making use of the word.
Also, I'd say that the article author is not referring just to brighter light as the invention, but rather as the use of extremely bright light indoors for different psychological effects.
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.
If humans spend same proportion of income on lumens, and you get more lumens per watt, then you will use less wattage per the same proportion of income. Ergo LEDs are more efficient.
Not all those watts are going into lighting. If spending is fixed on lighting but total expenditure is up that means energy is being bought for things other than lighting. Kirchoff's law applied to the grid in toto.
Adds up considering the proliferation of computing devices, particularly cryptomining.
In hindsight, I should not have included the comment about Roko's Basilisk. It was really nothing more than a personal observation that had nothing to do with the topic at hand. As a result, this thread attracted a lot of people who have very strong opinions on an off-topic matter, and for that I'm sorry. It muddled an already tense discussion on whether any sane person should take the claim of inventing brightly lit homes in 2017 literally or not. For what it's worth, I would have deleted the Basilisk portion if people hadn't already responded to it.
Yudkowsky says he and his wife did it in 2014, so it sounds as if it was actually pretty much at the same time as said prior art.
(Also, they were specifically doing it as a treatment for SAD; I don't think Yudkowsky claims novelty for anything other than the idea that SAD might be effectively treated by having very bright indoor lighting all the time rather than e.g. a lightbox that you sit next to for half an hour a day.)
The Paris hotel in Las Vegas has had this for at least 20 years. When you're inside at 3am it feels like daytime. I think the idea is to keep you awake and gambling at all times.
In 1984, to get the amount of light put out by ~250-300 watts of LEDs in 2022 would have required the incandescent light array to come perilously close to the limit of what it is safe to pull from a single outlet continuously in the US, which is 1500 watts. (You can transiently pull 1800 from a standard wall outlet, which is used by hair dryers, but you're not supposed to pull it continuously for hours at a time.) It also would have functioned as a full-on space heater (that was on continuously, not on a thermostat as needed), and very careful attention would need to be paid to cooling this massive array.
So, I'm gonna read between some lines here, but: I imagine earlier efforts would then by necessity have produced less light, because it's actually a lot easier to deal with ~400-500 watts of incandescent light than 1500 watts of incandescent light. 400-500 I think you could just about get away with putting a diffusion screen in front of them and making sure the enclosure has a lot of passive air flow. At 1500, if you're going to enclose this into a reasonably-sized product you're going to need active cooling with fans.
And there is a little noticed and rarely talked about weakness I've seen in several science fields where I've dug into a history of papers, which is that once one investigator picks the parameters of an investigation, it tends to "stick". If the first scientist investigating "Light therapy for SAD" and picked a 500 watt incandescent setup, it is extremely likely that many further papers will try to match their lumens setup, in the interests of trying to keep the papers informing each other. The entire therapy may live and die on the contingent conditions the first couple of researchers happened to pick, even after the entire lighting landscape has changed and it's practical to blast 5 times the light per watt and have time-varying light temperature now, which would have been even more difficult in 1984. (Conceivable, with some sort of rotating filter screen in front of it, but now you're cutting in to your light output even more, unlike modern LEDs which give you more options in dealing with this.)
By the 01980s you could have easily been using fluorescents, which went mainstream a quarter century earlier, so I think your stickiness hypothesis is the more likely problem. This had been puzzling me! Thank you for providing the likely solution!
The entire market of SAD lights was fluorescents pre-LEDs, they can be made just as "full spectrum" as LEDs are (by which I mean neither is capable of true full spectrum, just an approximation with appropriate phosphors).
Yeah, I assumed you were saying that the physiatrist was insisting on the use of incandescents for that reason. I don't know why someone would interpret you as saying that LEDs were superior to fluorescents, since obviously neither one produces full-spectrum light!
I was going to suggest diy perks but thought you were going to link his artificial sun video [1]. I’ve been wanting to build one but not sure where I could fit since it requires a bit more space then a bright led build would.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6bqBsHSwPgw
Jesus Christ. I hadn't actually seen this one. Wow!
You could say he's going overboard in this one, with that fish tank sky simulator thing. But then: How much do we spend on airfare and lodging just to wake up to this kind of light? What an amazing improvement in quality of life this can be.
I really think it could boost a persons mood on a dark day his looks so incredible I would love to try it and even just brighten up one room. But I think if a guy were to make these as fake skylights you would really have a business.
Just don't keep working into the night under them, because whoa boy - talk about sleep disruption. Those nice bright lights make it surprisingly easy to work until 6am and not even realize it.
I have mine hooked up to a remote so I can turn them all off at once. Either propped in the corners of the room or bounced off the ceiling. They are much too bright to have them shining directly.
There are many aquarium lighting companies that make these types of fixtures, because this intensity of lighting is exactly what people want to (and do) simulate over their aquariums (though generally at spectrums that are bluer than daylight)!
I think in terms of cost what the OP is not realizing is that when you are talking about hundreds of watts of LEDs, that is a lot of heat that is very concentrated. It takes a thoughtful design and active cooling to ensure the fixture is safe and the LEDs are kept at the proper temperates to maximize their life and performance. You don't really need to worry about active cooling when you have a few low wattage LED bulbs spread throughout a room. But cram a ton of them together in a small area and you absolutely do.
As you can see, heat management is a prime feature of these lights, and the quality in general is absolutely amazing (it’s priced accordingly, though).
If you really want 100k lux in indoor spaces, it will cost rather a lot of electricity. It works out to 2300 kWh per day to light the average US home to sunlight brightness for 8 hours per day. So 75x the current typical electricity use!
If everyone wanted that, I don't think the nation could even produce that much power.
I think bright room lighting is a very promising avenue for SAD and circadian rhythm issues.
Last year, for my house plants, I suspended a pair of 100w full spectrum grow lights in my living room. Throughout the winter I've been using my kitchen table as a workspace and I swear this is the first time in my life that I've completely avoided SAD and my circadian rhythm has been sufficiently advanced that I'm now a morning person. In my configuration the lights are suspended behind me, the glare from having them in direct eyesight is problematic.
Has been absolutely wonderful and can definitely recommend giving it a try, the "quantum board" full spectrum lamps are getting really affordable.
I've installed eight of these[1] CRI 98+, 5000K, 752 lm strips for a total of ~6000 lm, and during the day I use them in addition to about 3000 lm from two light bulbs, one of which is a nice CRI 90 2700K. I'm very happy with the quality of the light from the strips, though I probably should've gone for a few more. Another pair directly over the computer desk would be nice.
I generally find them uncomfortable when night starts to fall, at which point I just leave the dimmer yellow lights on.
I wish they'd talked about running costs as well as the price of parts in the 'costs' section. It's the electricity bill that puts me off. Unless it can be... solar powered?
"Full-spectrum LEDs seem to output about 75 lumens per watt, so if our panel is 20k lumens then we should expect our panel to draw 266 watts. This seems reasonable to me. If you leave it on 8 hours a day, you’re going to use 25 cents per day in electricity (at $.12 per kWh)."
Having grown up in Korea and lived in America, Canada, and the UK, one thing I consistently noticed about all those Western homes is how dark they are.
Most homes where I come from have a large, flat lamp in the center of the ceiling of each room that evenly illuminates the entire room. Large spaces may have more than one such lamp. In the past, this was accomplished with a bunch of fluorescent tubes arranged to look like a single large lamp. These days, it's all LED. People also put lamps on the bedside table, above the dining table, and other places they want to accentuate, but it's always in addition to, not instead of, the large ceiling lamp.
Most of the American/Western homes I've been to don't have a single bright light in the living room or any bedroom, relying more often on several low-temperature lamps scattered around the space. It looks really nice, it's perfect for watching movies, and it may have been more energy-efficient in the past. But it's just so damn dark, especially if the room doesn't face the sun.
Yeah Americans seem to associate 'bright white light' with commercial or institutional spaces and dimmer yellow light with 'home' but it's not a universal view, the aesthetic is cultural
One thing they are missing is collimation. You might want the light rays to be parallel, to simulate the far away sun and to get sharp shadows. I tried to come up with a solution to do this in a flat package, but optics is not my strong suit.
Generally, you always have a trade-off here: If you want to get rid of the harsh point-like light sources, you have to add a diffuser, and then you get indirect light. But too diffused, and you get the feeling of sitting in a studio or in a bright cave. I think having a window or a skylight with parallel, non-diffused light and letting the reflections on the walls diffuse it is probably the most natural-looking solution.
Yeah but he uses a huge parabolic mirror, which he places in the next room. He mentions fresnel lenses, but they are expensive, have color fringes, and depending on the focal length the whole light will also not be very flat.
The holy grail would be something that has the size of a picture frame, and you can slap below the ceiling, to fake a roof window.
If you combine a good fresnel lens with some clever mechanics or a micro mirror array light source, I wonder if you could even make the angle move over the day? Using fresnel lenses, you could also split it up into multiple cells, to make cooling easier. But I guess in the end there is a reason why the commercial system costs $30.000 and takes more than a foot of thickness.
If you have Hue lights, make sure to upgrade to the new generation that just came out. It's much brighter. The color ones were sold out, but I found it worthwhile to upgrade even though I can't make them blue anymore.
Otherwise, Cree is one of the best home bulb brands.
Funny thing about Hue, instead of brighter, I wish they'd go dimmer. If I want more light, I can always get more bulbs. But currently the lowest brightness (at least for the standard white tones bulbs I have) is too bright to work for evening / night scenes.
Cree is a good choice. The 'smart' versions of their bulbs are also convenient for if you want to set it to 'daylight' 5000k during the day---it looks better (IMHO) in a room that gets some natural light during the day---and change it to a warmer temp at night.
Metal-halide HID lamps are best for this purpose. They have the best colour rendition of all lighting and they come in different sizes and colour temperatures.
My pick for a bright daylight would be about 6000K colour temp and I’d just throw some fittings in a room then walk outside at mid day to determine how many watts Id need to satisfy.
Bonus of these is you can get coloured lamps with more awesomer colours than LEDs.BLV is one manufacturer.
Second bonus is if you use a grow lamp in your setup, it’ll also help reduce the effects of SAD. They use the same fittings.
Oh, and remember diffusion is the key for comfortable indoor use.
This has been applied for decades. Those 'ceiling windows' in art galleries are often false windows with bright daylight lamps beneath it.
By the way, the sun produces ~50.000 lux on earth's surface. That's 100 times more than in a wall illuminated office.
To reach that brightness, you would need tens of kilowatts of LED lightning for medium and larger sized rooms. That's totally infeasible. Also, imagine the heat building up. It will literally be like a greenhouse in your room.
So in reality, no one actually aims for the brightness of the sun. But just something fairly bright at a high ('cool') color temperature. That produces the same sensation.
He's of the concave theorists, which take the flat Earth society one step further, and believe the Earth is concave.
And surely for them, you can see the horror of such large amounts of light being funneled, being reflected back and forth, over and over. So no, most assuredly, he does not look at the Earth!
Perhaps in theory, considering that when you look at someone's face outside on a sunny day, it is brighter than that. OTOH, staring directly into a lightbulb isn't pleasant, so I suppose there's more to this.
Either way, I think the best way to deal with bright light isn't a brighter screen. It's an unlit screen, like e-ink or something.
Many people (including myself) find such brightness levels uncomfortable, and wear sunglasses.
Sunlight is free, but electric light is not. This is why light in my apartment is very bright but not nearly as bright as the streets on a sunny summer day.
Depends on distance. They make e27 screw in LED bulbs that will put out over 5,000 lux but you would need to hold the bulb pretty close to your face to get the full value of it.
You might like an ecologic option. Think of a
fiber optic cable or mirror tube that can be placed from a roof to any room in the house.
Could not find a good english translation, but similar to this one:
https://www.lichtkamin.de/
Definitely the problem to solve. I thought about splitting this up into hundreds of optical fiber filaments. These could fit in wall elements or next to other pipe elements.
I love the idea of this mirror that sits outside, and moves with the sun, to reflect more sunlight in through your window: https://solenica.com/
Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of confidence in it... the company has been looking at building this product since about 2013 (same founder created a similar product on indiegogo called "Lucy") and neither product seems to be on the market yet (uncertain if the indiegogo product shipped).
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
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 2020-11-16: For my home, I ended up switching from the corncob bulb to three 7-way splitters and 21 100W equivalent 5000K Cree bulbs from Home Depot.
I'm from India. Lighting in my middle class house, since forever, has been poor. I never consciously felt it when I was still studying. Just that the rooms were dark and I would prefer to play/study outside, or in the front room, where the door was always open, allowing a lot of sunlight.
I realized the lighting factor a few years back. Now, My own home has two lights in every room and whenever I am studying/reading/cooking, I always have them both on.
The difference is stark. Perhaps I am clutching my pearls when I say this, but I feel my quality of life has improved with better lighting.
I also got my walls painted with very light colors, and the ambient light is just amazing.
For led lighting, 20W (ceiling fittings) for every 100 sf in rooms with light walls provides a lot of illumination in my experience. Can double that for kitchens etc.
An interesting question regarding lighting's effect on studying + retaining material + focus ;
Does the entire space need to be well lit - or the object of your focus (which can require the entire scene (such as a lab etc) - but when it comes to reading and computing. If you have a spot on your book or your computer that was of the sun-like quality, (obviously without glare on screens), would that suffice to aid in focus and retention.
I assume that a well lite complete space serves a more biological soothing and depression help.
So it would be interesting to know if there are differing applications of sun-like light based on the goals.
At late actual night, a sun-like spotlight on your focus might be good. When you're up and active, then light the whole space...
293 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 256 ms ] threadBut this isn't really just a question of "bright lighting", which of course occurs outdoors all the time, anywhere someone is doing arc welding, in any steel mill, etc. It's a more complex proposition: "Possibly seasonal affective disorder is due in significant part to the fact that indoor lighting is almost always orders of magnitude dimmer than sunlight. Possibly indoor lighting is so dim in part because providing sunlight-class lighting with Edison's incandescent lights would be punishingly expensive and require data-center-style massive air conditioning. However, modern high-efficiency LEDs and even fluorescent tubes bring sunlight-class lighting within practical reach of everyday people."
Still, this is hardly a brilliantly original idea on my part, so it's not surprising that the same idea occurred to Eliezer. I was pleased to see that he tried it for his wife's SAD and that it worked.
One of my favorite places on earth is my marijuana grow and the incredible amount of beautiful light they grow under. I’ve contemplated a scaled down version in my house. I could grow plants all over the place under the lighting like being outside, no matter what the season.
That was my pitch for nuclear power.
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 if it's not consumed will lead to electrical damage. So people actually get paid to waste power. Ever seen a sports stadium with all the lights blazing late at night even though noone is there? They are one of the groups who take advantage of negative power prices. There are also places where there are literally resistors placed along the ground to sink excess electricity (as heat) into the earth during these times.
When you say "eventually they will make it cheap" that seems likely to be a misconception also. Power production is not like manufacturing. Although innovation can lead to increases in efficiency and therefore reduced cost, inefficiency is not the limiting factor on power cost.
Perhaps I should stop trying to talk on hacker news at all.
"commercially available LED light sources (for horticultural or other applications) can be considered human safe when designed, installed and used in accordance with the applicable standards, regulations and manufacturer’s instruction"
https://www.valoya.com/the-effect-of-led-grow-lights-on-huma...
Lightbulbs have a long and very successful history of artificially driving lightbulb lifetimes down though a cartel system: https://youtu.be/j5v8D-alAKE
If you're building your own LED fixtures, you can probably underdrive the LEDs and run them at a radically cooler and slightly more efficient operating point, at a higher upfront cost: you need more LEDs for the same output.
Here's some more:
https://www.superbrightleds.com/moreinfo/decorative-ceiling-....
https://www.amazon.com/Artika-Residential-Ultra-Thin-Dimmabl...
That $30k Coelux thing they mention is quite a bit more than “some bright bulbs”. Their lighting casts sharp shadows. If you look into it, you see a bright sky with an image of the sun (https://www.cepro.com/news/coelux_the_40000_fake_skylight_ev...)
I think rich people will easily pay that for such a thing.
-IKEA NOT ($10 floor lamp) lights with a bunch of light bulb splitters and at least two giant high-CRI twister CFL bulbs for photo studios from Amazon. These are truly massive and look like a normal CFL light bulb, but are about a foot long. Two of them consume 130W at the wall, and put out a rather large amount of light. Managed to get about 1000 lux at the desk this way. Unfortunately you can only get them in 5000K and 6500K. The daylight color may bother some people at night. Furthermore, they are undimmable.
-Track lighting with six IKEA TRADFRI tunable white bulbs on it, in an L shape following my desk. IKEA bulbs supposedly reach 90 CRI, and these can be color tuned (arbitrarily if you use the hub and the HomeKit app, not just 3 levels) and dimmed. At 1000lm, they are the brightest tunable white bulbs on the market commonly imo (most are 800). The range of color tuning is rather low, 2700-4000K. This is because the bulb never turns off the warm channel I think. Furthermore, at 4000K, the light is slightly greenish.
Some notes:
-I definitely find dimmable and/or color tunable bulbs to be useful, because at night, extremely bright or white light isn't extremely helpful for sleep.
-I found that high room brightness might make it difficult to see a computer screen that isn't turned up all the way.
-I found that if the lights were mounted overhead-ish, and were really individually bright, they would cause annoying glare under some circumstances
Some more hardware developmenty stuff I looked into:
-LED strips. High CRI tunable white LED strips are available on AliExpress, along with the LED channels to run them. Actually getting a constant current supply and appropriate power rigged up is an exercise left for the reader. Unfortunately, LED strips use resistors for constant current, so waste a little bit of power there.
-Building a custom LED plate for the Tradfri lights that used Lumileds chips capable of 95 CRI. I built and tested one, and still have the files if someone should want to try. It doesn't expand the tuning range much at all.
-Designing my own LED bulbs. This is a project in progress. I found some LED chips on DigiKey from Bridgelux (V6 Thrive array) and some giant BR40 bulbs at a local store for 3 bucks each that still have a massive heat sink on them to modify. The heat sink gets up to 60C with 18W input to the LEDs at 25C ambient. The LED chips are capable of outputting 98 CRI and come much closer to approximating sunlight than anything else I've found by wavelength/spectrum.
Hopefully someone finds something here useful.
And that's great, but I want to consider something else -- one of the best theories of civilization-caused myopia is that it's caused by insufficient exposure to sunlight. And the table in the post is certainly circumstantial evidence supporting that theory:
> Direct sunlight shines 100k lux
> Full daylight (indirect) is more than 10k lux
> Indoor office lighting is typically 500
That's a big difference. What if illuminating the indoors at 10,000 lux prevented people from developing myopia?
The review paper that ties many different findings from different fields (optics, endocrinology, circadian rhythms...) together with an audacious spoonful of hypothesizing is this: http://melatonin-research.net/index.php/MR/article/view/19/2...
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOJU8YJjFwGN0hMRewz2_u2Ie...
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 I was to build it again - and especially for a place like living room - , I would build it so as to also simulate sunset. That is to say, that it will automatically lower the brightness and shift to a warmer spectrum in the evening. Otherwise, this thing messes with your biorhythm and gets you out of sync with normal daylight hours very quickly.
[1] https://youtu.be/jLia59KfkSw
And sleep: I don’t have any trouble sleeping, no. But as I mentioned, using a such a bright light in the evening will fuck with your day/night rhythm. If I’m not diligent to turn off those lights at sunset, I’ll easily be working up until two or three in the morning. If that happens, the problem isn’t that I wouldn’t be able to sleep (I will) or that I would sleep badly (I won’t). It’s just that it shifts my rhythm out of sync with everybody else.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBV-1VNWscA
For your sunset approximation, you could add some warmer ones and fade over; they also have some dual-color strips with two different color temperatures evenly spread to allow for seamless mixing.
(I'm using a 20W/m 5m strip of BC-series 1900K for my living room, along with a 10W 4000K bulb hanging from the ceiling.)
> Been using one of those in my office for the last eight years or so. I use a server PSU for power.
And as you mention, articles on it have been circulating for even longer.
For me the breaking point was Roko's Basilisk, a self-proclaimed "most-dangerous idea of our time".
Also, you should read anything Yudkowsky himself has written about Roko’s basilisk. He’s never claimed that it could work, or that it’s dangerous at all.
(“Why did he ban it then?” Because he wanted to prevent it from inspiring an infohazard brainstorming session that could produce a real danger, and he apparently hadn’t heard about the Streisand effect.)
(This is not the same thing as “being certain that a minor modification of Roko’s basilisk would produce an evil time-travelling AI,” to be clear.)
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.
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.
>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 who is making claims
It's honestly really not that clear what you're trying to discuss, certainly you haven't been making a clear statement like that. I don't think anyone is making claims of being in possession of such an infohazard for one thing, and if there were I don't think anyone would be saying you should be deferential towards someone who claimed to have one, sight unseen.
I think you're arguing with a bit of a straw man? Like no one is being all "let's be deferential towards Yudkowsky because he has the idea equivalent of a nuke". He doesn't, to the best of my knowledge, claim to have the idea equivalent of a nuke.
I assumed you were claiming that info-hazards don't exist because otherwise what exactly are you claiming?
Anyway, if that was your point, granted. Let's not be differential towards people who claim to have info-hazards, unless they can go into a room and make someone laugh themselves to death or something.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBWr1KtnRcI
Well, he isn't willing to reveal how he convinced his opponents to let the AI out of the box.
It's not a waste if the product the PoW generates is valued as equal to or greater than the cost of generating the PoW, and the market ensures that is the case, as miners cannot operating at a loss.
Where it can be socially harmful is when energy consumers don't pay for the cost of the negative externalities that the energy they purchase created in its generation, but that applies to all energy usage, not just that used in generating PoW.
You should know that costly signalling strategies are widely employed in nature because costly signals are reliable:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handicap_principle
> Where it can be socially harmful is when energy consumers don't pay for the cost of the negative externalities that the energy they purchase created in its generation, but that applies to all energy usage, not just that used in generating PoW.
Bitcoin alone uses as much power as a medium-sized nation. The increased power usage has caused old fossil-fuel power plants to come back online.
2. Money laundering can improve economic efficiency when the crimes that generate the illicit revenue are socially beneficial, as is the case when people in China escape the Communist government's capital controls, or when people in Venezuela escape their Communist government's steep inflation tax via mandates to use the state's fiat currency.
Even in ostensibly free societies, socially harmful laws that repress the right to voluntarily interact, like price controls on N95 masks that prolonged a shortage in them for months, or heavy taxation to pay the pensions of a bloated and over-paid public sector kleptocracy, can be socially beneficial to undermine.
So your deduction that money laundering or other forms of escape from institutional rules, is socially harmful, is overly simplistic. In some cases it is harmful, and in some cases it's beneficial.
3. Cryptocurrencies are by definition not ponzi schemes. You could argue they're speculative bubbles, but that is itself speculation.
>>Bitcoin alone uses as much power as a medium-sized nation.
Because it generates billions of dollars of currency a year, and its production is costly in energy and affordable in labor. The energy consumption of labor-intensive industries obfuscates the real energy requirements of those industries, by effectively outsourcing the energy consumption to the workers.
>Elevator pitch: Bring enough light to simulate daylight into your home and office.
>This idea has been shared in Less Wrong circles for a couple years. Yudkowsky wrote Inadequate Equilibria in 2017 where he and his wife invented the idea
As I don't bring up the rest of the article's points, I am neither supporting nor refuting them with that particular comment.
Math (or actually, logic) is a bit more resilient than you make it out to be.
If I wanted to, I'd probably go and research prior art first before making use of the word.
Also, I'd say that the article author is not referring just to brighter light as the invention, but rather as the use of extremely bright light indoors for different psychological effects.
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.
If humans spend same proportion of income on lumens, and you get more lumens per watt, then you will use less wattage per the same proportion of income. Ergo LEDs are more efficient.
Adds up considering the proliferation of computing devices, particularly cryptomining.
(Also, they were specifically doing it as a treatment for SAD; I don't think Yudkowsky claims novelty for anything other than the idea that SAD might be effectively treated by having very bright indoor lighting all the time rather than e.g. a lightbox that you sit next to for half an hour a day.)
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abst...
So, I'm gonna read between some lines here, but: I imagine earlier efforts would then by necessity have produced less light, because it's actually a lot easier to deal with ~400-500 watts of incandescent light than 1500 watts of incandescent light. 400-500 I think you could just about get away with putting a diffusion screen in front of them and making sure the enclosure has a lot of passive air flow. At 1500, if you're going to enclose this into a reasonably-sized product you're going to need active cooling with fans.
And there is a little noticed and rarely talked about weakness I've seen in several science fields where I've dug into a history of papers, which is that once one investigator picks the parameters of an investigation, it tends to "stick". If the first scientist investigating "Light therapy for SAD" and picked a 500 watt incandescent setup, it is extremely likely that many further papers will try to match their lumens setup, in the interests of trying to keep the papers informing each other. The entire therapy may live and die on the contingent conditions the first couple of researchers happened to pick, even after the entire lighting landscape has changed and it's practical to blast 5 times the light per watt and have time-varying light temperature now, which would have been even more difficult in 1984. (Conceivable, with some sort of rotating filter screen in front of it, but now you're cutting in to your light output even more, unlike modern LEDs which give you more options in dealing with this.)
You could say he's going overboard in this one, with that fish tank sky simulator thing. But then: How much do we spend on airfare and lodging just to wake up to this kind of light? What an amazing improvement in quality of life this can be.
Thanks for sharing this one!
$20 each, https://www.harborfreight.com/5000-lumen-4-ft-led-hanging-sh... 5k lumens, 60w
I also came to post the DIY perks video about simulated sunlight, the effect of parallel rays really changes the geometric mood of the room.
Just don't keep working into the night under them, because whoa boy - talk about sleep disruption. Those nice bright lights make it surprisingly easy to work until 6am and not even realize it.
I think in terms of cost what the OP is not realizing is that when you are talking about hundreds of watts of LEDs, that is a lot of heat that is very concentrated. It takes a thoughtful design and active cooling to ensure the fixture is safe and the LEDs are kept at the proper temperates to maximize their life and performance. You don't really need to worry about active cooling when you have a few low wattage LED bulbs spread throughout a room. But cram a ton of them together in a small area and you absolutely do.
As you can see, heat management is a prime feature of these lights, and the quality in general is absolutely amazing (it’s priced accordingly, though).
If everyone wanted that, I don't think the nation could even produce that much power.
Last year, for my house plants, I suspended a pair of 100w full spectrum grow lights in my living room. Throughout the winter I've been using my kitchen table as a workspace and I swear this is the first time in my life that I've completely avoided SAD and my circadian rhythm has been sufficiently advanced that I'm now a morning person. In my configuration the lights are suspended behind me, the glare from having them in direct eyesight is problematic.
Has been absolutely wonderful and can definitely recommend giving it a try, the "quantum board" full spectrum lamps are getting really affordable.
I generally find them uncomfortable when night starts to fall, at which point I just leave the dimmer yellow lights on.
[1] https://www.ledrise.eu/led-strips-modules/led-strips/multiba...
"Full-spectrum LEDs seem to output about 75 lumens per watt, so if our panel is 20k lumens then we should expect our panel to draw 266 watts. This seems reasonable to me. If you leave it on 8 hours a day, you’re going to use 25 cents per day in electricity (at $.12 per kWh)."
Almost anything can be solar powered.
Most homes where I come from have a large, flat lamp in the center of the ceiling of each room that evenly illuminates the entire room. Large spaces may have more than one such lamp. In the past, this was accomplished with a bunch of fluorescent tubes arranged to look like a single large lamp. These days, it's all LED. People also put lamps on the bedside table, above the dining table, and other places they want to accentuate, but it's always in addition to, not instead of, the large ceiling lamp.
Most of the American/Western homes I've been to don't have a single bright light in the living room or any bedroom, relying more often on several low-temperature lamps scattered around the space. It looks really nice, it's perfect for watching movies, and it may have been more energy-efficient in the past. But it's just so damn dark, especially if the room doesn't face the sun.
Generally, you always have a trade-off here: If you want to get rid of the harsh point-like light sources, you have to add a diffuser, and then you get indirect light. But too diffused, and you get the feeling of sitting in a studio or in a bright cave. I think having a window or a skylight with parallel, non-diffused light and letting the reflections on the walls diffuse it is probably the most natural-looking solution.
The holy grail would be something that has the size of a picture frame, and you can slap below the ceiling, to fake a roof window.
If you combine a good fresnel lens with some clever mechanics or a micro mirror array light source, I wonder if you could even make the angle move over the day? Using fresnel lenses, you could also split it up into multiple cells, to make cooling easier. But I guess in the end there is a reason why the commercial system costs $30.000 and takes more than a foot of thickness.
Otherwise, Cree is one of the best home bulb brands.
My pick for a bright daylight would be about 6000K colour temp and I’d just throw some fittings in a room then walk outside at mid day to determine how many watts Id need to satisfy.
Bonus of these is you can get coloured lamps with more awesomer colours than LEDs.BLV is one manufacturer.
Second bonus is if you use a grow lamp in your setup, it’ll also help reduce the effects of SAD. They use the same fittings.
Oh, and remember diffusion is the key for comfortable indoor use.
By the way, the sun produces ~50.000 lux on earth's surface. That's 100 times more than in a wall illuminated office. To reach that brightness, you would need tens of kilowatts of LED lightning for medium and larger sized rooms. That's totally infeasible. Also, imagine the heat building up. It will literally be like a greenhouse in your room. So in reality, no one actually aims for the brightness of the sun. But just something fairly bright at a high ('cool') color temperature. That produces the same sensation.
And surely for them, you can see the horror of such large amounts of light being funneled, being reflected back and forth, over and over. So no, most assuredly, he does not look at the Earth!
Either way, I think the best way to deal with bright light isn't a brighter screen. It's an unlit screen, like e-ink or something.
The eyes adapt to brighter backlights but you end up not being able to see your desk.
One major annoyance is that eye floaters become a lot more prominent the smaller your pupils are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminous_efficiency_function
Sunlight is free, but electric light is not. This is why light in my apartment is very bright but not nearly as bright as the streets on a sunny summer day.
You could achieve that with 750W of LEDs. Of course, that is still quite a lot of power.
Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of confidence in it... the company has been looking at building this product since about 2013 (same founder created a similar product on indiegogo called "Lucy") and neither product seems to be on the market yet (uncertain if the indiegogo product shipped).
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 2020-11-16: For my home, I ended up switching from the corncob bulb to three 7-way splitters and 21 100W equivalent 5000K Cree bulbs from Home Depot.
https://www.wave.com
I realized the lighting factor a few years back. Now, My own home has two lights in every room and whenever I am studying/reading/cooking, I always have them both on.
The difference is stark. Perhaps I am clutching my pearls when I say this, but I feel my quality of life has improved with better lighting.
I also got my walls painted with very light colors, and the ambient light is just amazing.
Good lighting is a blessing.
For led lighting, 20W (ceiling fittings) for every 100 sf in rooms with light walls provides a lot of illumination in my experience. Can double that for kitchens etc.
Does the entire space need to be well lit - or the object of your focus (which can require the entire scene (such as a lab etc) - but when it comes to reading and computing. If you have a spot on your book or your computer that was of the sun-like quality, (obviously without glare on screens), would that suffice to aid in focus and retention.
I assume that a well lite complete space serves a more biological soothing and depression help.
So it would be interesting to know if there are differing applications of sun-like light based on the goals.
At late actual night, a sun-like spotlight on your focus might be good. When you're up and active, then light the whole space...