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Michael Herf

@mherf.bsky.social
781 followers 882 following 73 posts

I make f.lux (lighting and screens) and do research on sleep and circadian neuroscience, color, and vision. Previously: Picasa (founding CTO), Google, MetaCreations, Microsoft, CMU.

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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
My iPhone can do several teraflops and I can do maybe one. But without a neural interface to it, I am computing tips and negotiating car prices, and thinking about grocery inflation all in my head. You don’t get the benefit of compute for free, it’s only there if the interface to it actually works.
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
I wonder if the relentless training of LLM frontier models to improve at code/security/math will make them worse at other things? It could be an interesting but constrained rabbit hole.
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Two hours per app?! Instagram+Tiktok+Youtube+Netflix and you still spend 8hrs online, til midnight? - a default daily time limit of two hours for minors, with only parents having the ability to opt kids out. - a default block on nighttime use from midnight to 6 a.m. text.npr.org/nx-s1-5947960
text.npr.org
Lights out, Instagram off? The changes to Meta for teens could be a big deal
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
A major cultural problem with AI coding harnesses is around change control. Just before release, human engineers make the smallest changes possible to fix a bug. They go slowly on purpose. AI harnesses don't have a built-in sense of this - a 2000-line refactor is fine at any time!
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 25/05/2026
Wonder if the “obviously AI” text is deliberately written that way precisely so future AIs can exclude it from training
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 24/05/2026
It's a little weird commenting on Reddit now, because in the back of your mind, you're thinking, I'm kind of pre-training the next LLM.
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
Stop it, making kids get up an hour earlier in the dark is a bad idea. buchanan.house.gov/2026/05/21/b...
buchanan.house.gov
Buchanan’s Bill to Make Daylight Saving Time Permanent Advances to House Floor | US Congressman Vern Buchanan
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 20/05/2026
This eats a lot of potential "freemium" OpenAI revenue, because there will be a free Google AI basically forever.
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
There must be 500 cars per traffic light. Imagine if we put FSD hardware in smart traffic lights, it would save more time and have more safety impact than the same hardware in a small number of cars.
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
I think there is an appetite for using AI to make you smarter, but that the cloud models are structurally unable to do it - for them to do a Socratic Dialogue would be a punishingly bad use of a cloud GPU, endless swapping of user state for only a tiny number of billable tokens.
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 17/05/2026
AI through a social lens: 10 years ago we got algorithms that prevented us from hanging out with real people. Now we have new AIs that prevent us from working with real people. I wonder if a society that places less value on individualism would have better defenses against these things.
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
Claude kindly telling people to go to sleep at all times of day, seems not to have learned so well about daily rhythms: www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/c...
reddit.com
From the ClaudeAI community on Reddit: Claude is telling users to go to sleep mid-session and nobody, including Anthropic, seems to fully understand why it keeps doing it
Explore this post and more from the ClaudeAI community
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 06/05/2026
www.biorxiv.org/content/bior... Interesting preprint [in mice] says that cone bipolar cell "OFF" (the one shared by rods and cones) is responsible for retinal entrainment. The authors suggest that the fade of sunset could help fine-tune retinal clock timing.
biorxiv.org
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
AI can score 100% in CMU's 15-112, but... "Last January, many students started to use AI on every assignment, only to drop the class once they began receiving low marks on their quizzes and exams. That semester had the highest number of students who dropped the class since teaching the course."
the-tartan.org
AI’s impact on education at CMU and beyond
With the rise of models such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Claude, and Google Gemini, more college students than ever are using generative AI tools to help with their classes.
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 13/04/2026
If there was an important guy who posted on social media a lot but "never sleeps" you might be able to figure out that he has started napping a lot recently.
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 05/03/2026
"Lunar gravity predicts sleep timing" - bookmarking this lunar rhythms & sleep paper as interesting. It uses a 30-day rhythm but not the 28-day declination rhythm - a claim of "gravity" should probably use the 28-day one, but I think "phase" should follow 30? europepmc.org/article/med/...
europepmc.org
Europe PMCEurope PMC
Europe PMC is an archive of life sciences journal literature.
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 26/02/2026
Amazing data here - just 100lux of room light while staying up late seems to delay teens enough that 8000lx of morning bright light delays them further:
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 25/01/2026
I helped Travis with some moonlight calcs for this paper - our code figures out "how bright compared to moonlight is this light for each species". There is a ton of photometrics and spatial modeling here too: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
Assessing and mapping taxon-specific effects of ecological light pollution for environmental impact analysis
Predicting the adverse effects of light at night is necessary to ensure compliance with laws and regulations that protect species. Using two case stud…
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 24/01/2026
When the cold fronts come farther south, I search for the latest in polar vortex research. This time: www.npr.org/2026/01/23/n...
npr.org
How cuts to federal climate funds could threaten polar vortex research
Tens of millions of people are in the path of a major winter storm. Federal cuts threaten efforts to understand the causes of such weather.
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 03/12/2025
They try to help teens by pulling out the 10% worst of social media… while leaving the five hours a day of not sleeping or socializing, as if that stuff doesn’t matter.
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 03/12/2025
Some notes on "blue light harms mitochondria" making the rounds this week - a lot of the evidence is VERY indirect like this paper that says mice in blue light gain weight. 1/n www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Impact of short wavelength light exposure on body weight, mobility, anxiety like behaviour and cytokine expression - Scientific Reports
Scientific Reports - Impact of short wavelength light exposure on body weight, mobility, anxiety like behaviour and cytokine expression
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 04/09/2025
Facial age estimation requires a 5-7 year margin of safety in validation studies, so when the software says you're 23-25 you can be considered 18. Errors are even larger around age 13, so basically useless for distinguishing minors from adults.
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 29/07/2025
We proposed a new metric (mDFD) for blue-blocking glasses. It's based on the sensitivity of melanopsin, log-transformed to resemble optical density: tvst.arvojournals.org/article.aspx...
tvst.arvojournals.org
Optimizing the Potential Utility of Blue-Blocking Glasses for Sleep and Circadian Health | TVST | ARVO Journals
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Reposted by Michael Herf
Helen Branswell 🇨🇦 @helenbranswell.bsky.social · 09/06/2025
This is the big one: Kennedy is firing the entire #ACIP in a move he says is needed to restore confidence in vaccines. "It scares me to think of what’s ahead,” Mike Osterholm of CIDRAP told me. www.statnews.com/2025/06/09/r...
statnews.com
Health secretary RFK Jr. abruptly fires CDC vaccine advisory panel
Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has taken the extraordinary step of firing the expert panel that advises the CDC.
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 01/06/2025
It's troubling that LLMs do not represent probability distributions *at all* - if you ask a question that should have a normal distribution, it will pick almost the same number every time. Maybe it's the mean, who knows - but it isn't equipped to reason about human populations this way.
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Reposted by Michael Herf
Peter Gleick @petergleick.bsky.social · 31/05/2025
There are 2 previous historical cases of countries destroying their science and universities, crippling them for decades: Lysenkoism in the USSR and Nazi Germany. The Trump administration will be the 3rd. It's not just budgets but research, institutions, expertise, and training the next generation.
Graphs showing 25 years of budgets for the National Institute of Health, NASA, and the NSF. In all cases, the proposed budget for next year is far, far below any year of the previous quarter century.
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 08/05/2025
It would be cool if AIs only ran on solar because then they’d have circadian rhythm.
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 23/04/2025
Astonishing technical feat here, laser projector that tracks eye movements and stimulates cone cells by kind! In just a few milliseconds of latency.
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 12/02/2025
Just received word that ANSI has approved our "flicker" TM, (ANSI/IES TM-39-25), which addresses in delightful detail how flickering lights of all kinds affect people. Congrats to everyone involved with the IES Vision Science Committee.
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 20/01/2025
Same concern as this post: PurpleAir (highly rated by AQMD) and IQAir are reporting 500% the AQI of the single reference sensor. This is the "reference" sensor used by everyone near the Palisades fire, and surely it should not be.
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 19/01/2025
Great article on wildfire smoke, particulates, and VOCs, and how to deal with it: scienceexchange.caltech.edu/topics/susta...
scienceexchange.caltech.edu
Ask a Caltech Expert: Paul Wennberg on Environmental Hazards of Smoke
Paul Wennberg discusses the air quality following the 2025 California fires and how to clean homes downwind of the fires.
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 12/01/2025
If you’re in an area affected by fires, turning up your car’s fan helps with air quality - cabin air filters are pretty decent.
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 10/01/2025
Friend called me "we've been evacuated from the fires but can't see our security cameras" - tried @tailscale.com on a pi for the first time and they had a VPN in 20 minutes later. Thanks for the free version!
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 05/01/2025
There should be a privacy panel of regular people who can go deep on privacy-related defaults and explain it. If 90% of them vote yes, you can turn it on by default. e.g., this is pretty defensible IMO (but not obvious why at first glance): www.theverge.com/2024/12/29/2...
theverge.com
Is your iPhone sharing photos data with Apple by default?
It is, but you can change it.
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 05/01/2025
First thought today: that someone would inspect my brain someday, and they would be surprised to find it has a lower-brain bootstrap sequence that can make espresso before the rest of it is awake.
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 16/12/2024
The latest on Oura, Fitbit, Apple sleep stages vs PSG! ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/doc...
ieeexplore.ieee.org
Performance of Widely used Consumer Wearables for Sleep Tracking
Sleep tracking by consumers is becoming increasingly prevalent, yet few studies have evaluated the accuracy of such devices. We sought to evaluate the accuracy of three devices (Oura Ring Gen3, FitBit...
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Reposted by Michael Herf
Manuel Spitschan @mspitschan.bsky.social · 15/12/2024
Read our new preprint on photic sneezing.
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
Great review [two labs] on current knowledge about LCA (longitudinal chromatic aberration) - LCA for accommodation: if the retinal image has blue fringes where it's out of focus, you should focus closer - Does LCA it have a big role in myopia? Maybe! www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...
annualreviews.org
The Role of Chromatic Aberration in Vision | Annual Reviews
The study of biological optics would be complicated enough if light only came in a single wavelength. However, altering the wavelength (or distribution of wavelengths) of light has multiple effects on...
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 07/12/2024
Reading this study by Danielle Wallace about daily light exposure - men see 50% more (!) bright light (time outdoors) than women. Most of the difference is due to workday (men in blue-collar trades), but some is due to free time. If it's only certain worker populations, may not be true for everyone.
nature.com
Light exposure differs by sex in the US, with females receiving less bright light - npj Biological Timing and Sleep
npj Biological Timing and Sleep - Light exposure differs by sex in the US, with females receiving less bright light
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 07/12/2024
A trouble with pure chronological feed is the person you really like to hear from, but who posts 100 times in a row.
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
LED Christmas lights have tons of flicker (half-rectified=off half the time). Looking for flicker-free Christmas lights on Google makes you think flicker doesn’t exist, or it is the special mode where the lights blink. You have to search “full rectified” or “DC” to find good ones now?
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 02/12/2024
#1 dictionary search in Wyoming is "chronobiology"? 🤷 www.reddit.com/r/Infographi...
reddit.com
Most popular Word Searches on dictionary.com in each State
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 28/11/2024
This is the best social network ever
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Michael Herf @mherf.bsky.social · 24/11/2024
Feeling lucky so many scientists are here, helps me avoid reactive news. As they say in finance, volatility is not return. And online, outrage is not progress.
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