There's was 2 or 3 where i had no idea, guessed and was a way off.
There's was 1 where i did a hail Mary and got it. It was interesting how some even towards the end were really obvious and others were really subtle - I'd say I did better with purple tones and worst with the blue / greys.
I got a 0.0035. I'm on a Dell U2724D monitor which is supposed to have decent color accuracy and I cranked up the brightness and contrast to a maximum so I'm sure that helped a somewhat. I also noticed squinting and closing my eyes for a bit sometimes helped when I felt stuck.
"Genuinely remarkable. You sailed past the theoretical human limit like it owed you money. I'd accuse you of cheating but I don't actually know how you'd cheat at this."
0.0043, but to be honest, I could probably do better if I changed my monitor's settings. But I have it setup with low brightness for night time lights off viewing that won't wake me up.
I'm color blind, and not even a little bit, but I scored 0.0084. I've noticed before that my perception of contrast is slightly better (than that of the people I ever compared it with; admitteldly, that's only a handful, but they weren't colorblind).
It depends on something about your screen at least. I first did it on a low quality monitor and it made the line between the two obvious even if I couldn't tell the colors apart. The "hard mode" one was impossible on that screen however.
> The magic number to remember is the "Just Noticeable Difference" (JND). For dE00, JND is around 2.0. Below that, people struggle to tell two colours apart. Below 1.0, basically no one can.
Except for a tetrachromat. Specifically, a strong tetrachromat that has both four colour channels in the brain and a different frequency on the fourth cone.
Who are, admittedly, hella rare. Apparently there are less than a few dozen confirmed world-wide.
> admittedly, hella rare. Apparently there are less than a few dozen confirmed world-wide
What's actually hella rare is tests for tetrachromacy. Given the total number of people who have ever taken such a test, I think it's reasonable to assume there are significantly more than a few dozen actual tetrachromats out there.
Is that so? Our color perception is weird. It's one dimension split in three overlapping sectors. Adding a fourth sector may add information that makes it easier to distinguish colors.
Something I think about often is an oliver sacks book about an ethnic group that has a particularly high rate of true monochromacy. And the people with no color perception at all are particularly adept at spotting certain plants based on some characteristic of their leaves that is obscured by color. So even removing information can change perception in surprising ways.
OTOH sacks seems to have fabricated a lot of shit over the years so who knows if this is even real. Another thing I think about a lot now.
We do have four sectors, 3 color perception and then the brightness perception that is used in the dark. In mid darkness you get a mix of all of those, although the fourth is not really perceived as a color so it can be a bit hard to use.
And the eye cones not are sharp filter, they overlap ranges with mid-low sensibility. That must be nought to someone with Tetrachromacy to percibe something different on a RGB screen.
> More precisely, she had an additional cone type L′, intermediate between M and L in its responsivity, and showed 3 dimensional (M, L′, and L components) color discrimination for wavelengths 546–670 nm (to which the fourth type, S, is insensitive).
Source: Wikipedia
This is an amazing deep dive into color difference measurements and how sensitive the math is. The idea that we really need to save characters - bytes - in CSS when we have so many web sites chewing through 49 MB with the enshitification of the web is hard to reconcile.
Ahhh, NASA numbers! My favourite, particularly in SVG files, and more recently in colours.
What is a NASA number?
Allegedly, within NASA, there is only a need for so many decimal places. If I can remember correctly, nine digits would get a spacecraft to land within a metre on the rock formerly known as the planet Pluto. So no need for that, unless you are going to 'occupy Pluto', building a few AI datacentres there.
In the context of SVG, usually it is icons that I encounter, where the artworker has exported something like a search icon, which is a circle and a line. These can be specified in SVG using integers, and single digit integers, if you really want, but let's make it two digits.
However, does the SVG file from the artworker have a viewbox containing a circle and a line? Nope. Instead you get one circle for the outer part of the circle in black and another smaller circle in white. Oh, and a line. The circles will be written as polygons with about two hundred vertices, with all vertices specified with NASA numbers (as I call them), typically six decimal places.
As a consequence, the file, which should be six lines of human readable code balloons to many kilobytes of nonsense. Yes, this can be put through SVGO but that will just remove some decimal places and make the file even less human readable.
As a developer, the simple file is great as the inevitable adjustments can be applied easily, maybe to make the icon bold or to adjust alignment within the viewbox. However, when given artworker files with NASA numbers, I then have to raise a ticket so that I can get the corrected file two weeks later from the guy sat in front of a massive Apple monitor with headphones welded on.
The reason for not using NASA numbers has nothing to do with bloat, as no optimisation will make up for the mountain of javascript the marketing guys have bundled into their Google Tag Manager, it has everything to do with efficient workflows.
Generally the customer does not care about fonts, colours and much else that designers fret over. If we went back to the 216 'web safe' colours of yesteryear (for CSS, not images), would anyone notice? If we could not load custom fonts, would most people notice? They might, but this would not prevent them from surfing the web.
lol, the website reminds me of tropes like the professional cleaner whose house is messy, the chef who eats instant noodles at home, or the haut couture fashion designer who only wears jeans and tees. The colour expert whose website is monochrome.
Maybe he understands the field so much that he prefers to exercise it minimally in his hobby. Or maybe he just can't decide. It also makes perfect sense for a study in colors to be against a neutral background.
(It both is and isn't, depending on the use case, but I'm pretty sure nobody's design needs to make a difference between #123456 and #123457.)
Do CSS minifier really adjust the colors in the CSS files to get better compression rates or to reduce the number of rules in the CSS?
There's was 2 or 3 where i had no idea, guessed and was a way off.
There's was 1 where i did a hail Mary and got it. It was interesting how some even towards the end were really obvious and others were really subtle - I'd say I did better with purple tones and worst with the blue / greys.
I can see what they mean about .02 though. If I weren’t specifically looking for difference that’s where the colors become less noticeable.
"Genuinely remarkable. You sailed past the theoretical human limit like it owed you money. I'd accuse you of cheating but I don't actually know how you'd cheat at this."
I'm on a Vivo X300 pro in a dim room, max brightness. Some of these looked impossible but then suddenly I'd see the line.
https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd/ #WhatsMyJND
I need a better display for sure :)
“Show HN: What's my JND? – a colour guessing game” 54 points | 8 days ago | 62 comments
Except for a tetrachromat. Specifically, a strong tetrachromat that has both four colour channels in the brain and a different frequency on the fourth cone.
Who are, admittedly, hella rare. Apparently there are less than a few dozen confirmed world-wide.
But they do exist.
What's actually hella rare is tests for tetrachromacy. Given the total number of people who have ever taken such a test, I think it's reasonable to assume there are significantly more than a few dozen actual tetrachromats out there.
OTOH sacks seems to have fabricated a lot of shit over the years so who knows if this is even real. Another thing I think about a lot now.
> More precisely, she had an additional cone type L′, intermediate between M and L in its responsivity, and showed 3 dimensional (M, L′, and L components) color discrimination for wavelengths 546–670 nm (to which the fourth type, S, is insensitive). Source: Wikipedia
Do they?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47390945
What is a NASA number?
Allegedly, within NASA, there is only a need for so many decimal places. If I can remember correctly, nine digits would get a spacecraft to land within a metre on the rock formerly known as the planet Pluto. So no need for that, unless you are going to 'occupy Pluto', building a few AI datacentres there.
In the context of SVG, usually it is icons that I encounter, where the artworker has exported something like a search icon, which is a circle and a line. These can be specified in SVG using integers, and single digit integers, if you really want, but let's make it two digits.
However, does the SVG file from the artworker have a viewbox containing a circle and a line? Nope. Instead you get one circle for the outer part of the circle in black and another smaller circle in white. Oh, and a line. The circles will be written as polygons with about two hundred vertices, with all vertices specified with NASA numbers (as I call them), typically six decimal places.
As a consequence, the file, which should be six lines of human readable code balloons to many kilobytes of nonsense. Yes, this can be put through SVGO but that will just remove some decimal places and make the file even less human readable.
As a developer, the simple file is great as the inevitable adjustments can be applied easily, maybe to make the icon bold or to adjust alignment within the viewbox. However, when given artworker files with NASA numbers, I then have to raise a ticket so that I can get the corrected file two weeks later from the guy sat in front of a massive Apple monitor with headphones welded on.
The reason for not using NASA numbers has nothing to do with bloat, as no optimisation will make up for the mountain of javascript the marketing guys have bundled into their Google Tag Manager, it has everything to do with efficient workflows.
Generally the customer does not care about fonts, colours and much else that designers fret over. If we went back to the 216 'web safe' colours of yesteryear (for CSS, not images), would anyone notice? If we could not load custom fonts, would most people notice? They might, but this would not prevent them from surfing the web.
Maybe he understands the field so much that he prefers to exercise it minimally in his hobby. Or maybe he just can't decide. It also makes perfect sense for a study in colors to be against a neutral background.