• > All cameras after [2008] were different: The hardware team tied the LED to a hardware signal from the sensor: If the (I believe) vertical sync was active, the LED would light up. There is NO firmware control to disable/enable the LED. The actual firmware is indeed flashable, but the part is not a generic part and there are mechanisms in place to verify the image being flashed. […]

  > So, no, I don’t believe that malware could be installed to enable the camera without lighting the LED. My concern would be a situation where a frame is captured so the LED is lit only for a very brief period of time.

  https://daringfireball.net/2019/02/on_covering_webcams

   

• Let's say you're looking at your hometown on Google Maps. Zoom in close enough to see the buildings and you won't be able to see the region surrounding your town, which can tell you important things. Maybe your town sits next to a body of water. Zoom in too close and you won't be able to tell if the shoreline is along a river, a lake, or an ocean. You need to know which level is appropriate to your decision. (This idea was well illustrated in this classic video from Charles and Ray Eames.)

• Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well 

    ^{By: Douglas Stone, Sheila Heen | 348 pages | Published: 2014 | Popular Shelves: non-fiction,}
• That’s because receiving feedback sits at the junction of two conflicting human desires. We do want to learn and grow. And we also want to be accepted just as we are right now. Thanks for the Feedback is the first book to address this tension head on. It explains why getting feedback is so crucial yet so challenging, and offers a powerful framework to help us take on life’s blizzard of off-hand comments, annual evaluations, and unsolicited advice with curiosity and grace.

• I suspect it tests your monitor and monitor calibration as much as your color perception. In particular, sRGB displays have a pretty severely limited green gamut. If you have a wide-gamut display, the test is probably gonna appear different.

  But another problem is with displaying the colors essentially full-window, which is going to be nearly-full-screen for many users. When we're staring at a screen with a particular tint, our eyes quickly do "auto white balance" that skews the results. It's the mechanism behind a bunch of optical illusions.

  To address that last problem, I think the color display area should be much smaller, or you should be shown all hues at once and asked to position a cut-off point.

   

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• > The most interesting thing for me is that while cyan (#00ffff) is nominally halfway between blue and green, most people's thresholds, averaged over monitor calibrations, imply that cyan is classified as blue.

  Perceptually (that is, in CIE-LCh color space, for example), the hue component of #00ffff is a lot cloer to #00ff00 than it is to #0000ff. But the website doesn't ask which color is closer, it asks if it's "green" or "blue". And how we use those words has more to do with culture than with perception. We also call the color of a clear afternoon sky "blue", even though that is perceptually extremely far away from #0000ff.
• Ambient light will also affect the result.

  Not necessarily because the ambient light would affect the screen shows (it's emissive, not reflective) but because the brain also does "auto white/colour balance".

  For a fun experiment, get your hand on some heavily yellow-tinted party glasses, go outside on a clear day with a bright blue sky.

  When you put them on everything will be stark yellow tinged (and the blue sky will be completely off, like green or pink, can't recall which) but after a little while going on your business, perception adjusts and only a much less dramatic yellowish veil is in effect. You'd look at the sky and see almost-blue.

  The kicker is when you remove the glasses: the sky will suddenly be of a glorious pink! (or green, can't recall) Only moments later it'll adjust back to be blue.

  A certain wavelength may be absolute blue of a certain kind, but the perceptual system is all relative: "wait, I know this sky should be blue because that's what I've always seen, so let's compensate".

  The same kind of effect - although less dramatic - can be achieved with lights that can be adjusted from say 2400K to 6500K and having as reference an object that is known "pure white", like a A4/letter sheet of paper.

  This effect, in turn, adjusts how "absolutely displayed" colours are identified by way of biasing the whole perceptive system. AIUI that's the rationale behind Apple's True Tone thingy, aiming to compensate for that.

•  > Ambient light will also affect the result. 

   Also deliberate software blue light filters. Mine is always on, both on the desktop and on the phone. Many people may forget that they are even using one.

   

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• Another interesting note is that this also works in incognito mode, which could very well be utilized to fingerprint users across different sessions.

• Except that there are a few problems with this view of technology. For a start: there is almost no evidence to say that screens are bad for us – even much-maligned social media. On the contrary, it looks as though, up to a certain limit, the use of social media correlates with wellbeing, and that some is better for us than none. And where there are negative correlations, such as that between social media and depression, or the amount of time we sit at a computer each day and our sense of our overall wellbeing, they are almost vanishingly weak. According to the best research, social media use correlates with depression to the same degree as eating potatoes does – which is to say, not very much at all.