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this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2026
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Asklemmy
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Blue LEDs. We had red and green since the '60s, but blue took until the '90s to figure out and the guy who did so got a Nobel prize for it because that finally meant we could use them for white lights and full-color displays.
relevant veritasium
And yet i am this close to wanting him jailed
Well not him, I guess, just the designers of all those devices that have a blue laser like led in it shining in my eyes at 4 AM in the morning. Fuck all those digital clocks, TVs, etc.
It's also opened the door to some very interesting synthetic chemistry applications that use blue light, it's changed the field of photochemistry
I remember when the only color laser pointer was red. Now you have all the colors of the rainbow.
And damn powerful. So powerful you get almost every time wayyy more than allowed/advertised.
so that's the guy I can blame for blinding LED vehicle headlights?
No, blame the guys who put them in the blinding LED headlights.
You can blame The Weeknd
No, that would be the assholes who lift their trucks, or perhaps your optometrist. Properly aimed LEDs don't blind for shit. They blind me less than oldschool projectorless halogens even.
"properly aimed" LEDs blind the shit out of me on a daily basis, because roads are not flat and smooth and always at the same elevation as the surroundings
Nah, you're the one who has special eyes or have never driven against Teslas and such. The color temperature on modern cars LEDs already makes it feel much brighter on other's eyes, and then the actual lumens are usually more than triple the lumens compared to halogens.
Thing is, modern headlights have very sharp cutoffs on the low beams and low beams are to be aimed down with a 1% decline. Old school ( I mean pre-projector) halogens often don't have any cutoff and just shine everywhere. A properly aimed modern light doesn't blind you significantly.
Multibeam LEDs are even cooler, the other car can have high beams on and still not blind you.