I opened the webpage, settled myself down, and clicked "Start". A lovely bong resonated through my headphones, and I relaxed.
Immediately, one of the foster kitten sidled past me with a half-butchered gecko, still weakly struggling. I leapt up, grabbed a nearby broom, and gave chase. What followed was an episode of Tom & Jerry, but with more swearing. As I managed to part the cat from the gecko and punt the gecko outside, a calm bong brought me to my senses.
Ah! Well the kittens didn't get up to any nonsense while I scrolled, they just sat, cleaning the poop that they had kicked up the wall off their legs... so 10/10, great success! Thank you! Now I just need to scroll endlessly...
(Sardine is the kitten who led the Great Gecko Chase; Anchovy is the kitten who meditatively masterminded the Amazing Poop Fling. Really need to get these guys adopted out.)
And as a practical matter, just chillin' is safe. But still:
[sitting] can get uncomfortable. But when you finish,
for some strange reason you feel better
Meditation requires some guidance appropriate to the person. Some people are attracted to meditation for the wrong reasons; encouraging them without proper direction can make things go badly for them.
Zen shinkanzen in particular is considered difficult for new students because it is object-less meditation (unlike e.g. Tibetan use of mandala, Christian prayer, or Vispassana body-awareness). Even Zen teachers often start with breath-counting and progress to other heuristics before approaching emptiness.
People are generally robust to thoughts and opinions, even somewhat negative ones, so it seems like the marketplace of ideas and apps is a fine place for that. But I would encourage people writing meditation apps at a minimum to take the same care that any health/diagnostic app would, amplified by the likelihood that someone emotionally unstable might embrace your offering a little too closely...
I've been meditating for most of my life, and agree that objectless meditation can be frustrating/scary/emotionally challenging.
That's precisely why I say that although I use it for meditation, the goal of the app is just to sit down and do nothing for a minute or two. That's it.
FYI I consulted a qualified therapist (CBT, ACT) after building it and they didn't see any issues with my app or the article. She also practices and teaches meditation, so I got lucky I suppose!
I don't know about you but I have way too many ideas. Some are good, most of them are terrible, and some of them are downright evil. It often takes a quiet mind to see which is which and not talk myself into indulging bad ideas.
For me it's not even that I have bad ideas that I find problematic about my thinking (though I do of course), sometimes they just hurt. Kinda like how you might walk around and stub your toe and now you're like, ouch, this is frustrating, and an unreasonably intense pain for such a minor and commonplace injury. In the same way, sometimes I'm minding my business and a painful thought pops into my head and it's like, no thank you, I don't really need that. (A stubbed toe is also a good estimate for how much they hurt.)
Sitting and just sort of existing for a little while without thinking (to the extent I'm able to refrain from thinking, which varies) keeps me grounded in the world beyond thought. If you forgot you had an entire body and thought you were just a foot, stubbing your toe would hurt a lot more.
It's good to think about things carefully for extended periods of time without distraction because it allows you to understand things you would not have understood otherwise.
That is basically day dreaming, not really true meditation.
It's best to do both for different purposes. It's kind of like biking and weight lifting. You could count both as "exercise" but they serve different purposes and can work in conjunction.
It's anecdotal of course but during a first body scan for a mindfulness course I got a panic attack. I stopped and on subsequent days did shorter meditation exercises before attempting another body scan (guided by audio, think it took like 35 mins), which was ok. It's not hard to imagine that if I would've tried to "push through" and hadn't stopped the body scan the first time as well as continued doing it on following days that this would have negatively affected my mental health.
I'm an autodidact so this chaffed at me too. But I have met people who've gone in a very strange direction by assembling a syncretic set of ideas plucked from different schools of thought, and ended up with something that was kinda nuts. And operating from this nutty set of principles sometimes lead them to make bad decisions, and made it very difficult to communicate with them.
I don't know think having guidance from a teacher is the only way to avoid that, but I think without feedback from others in some way it's really easy to start believing your own bullshit.
I apologize for the tone. I'm learning how to not offend while getting my point across.
I must re-emphasize that in many people's experiences, meditative practices could have powerful effects on one's mind (potentially positive and negative), and they are not matters to be trifled about. It's one thing to not practice it because one does not believe in them, but it's can be very dangerous to encourage others to dismiss such concerns as fancy, because it could endanger those who experiment with meditation without precautions.
> I'm learning how to not offend while getting my point across
Yup and you'll find that your point gets across much better once you develop the habit of sanding off the sharp edges. The latter scratch the reader and then draw all the attention and energy, meaning your actual point gets lost. Not all readers react that way, but the ones who do will be more likely to get activated into commenting, and discussion quality suffers greatly.
There's an interesting phenomenon I've noticed: sometimes when people are replying to a moderator comment, they explain what they were trying to say in the first place. Often this 'second take' is a clearer and more neutral explanation. That's how I read your second paragraph there.
HN comments don't have to be completely neutral in every way—that would be a bit bland if not robotic—but it's a good idea to err on that side if you're unsure of how you're coming across. Over time you can develop the habit of not coming across as aggressive, and then you can gradually make your comments more colorful if you want to.
They did ask the question in snarky way, and it isn't cool to disrespect people's spiritual/contemplative practice, but in fairness to them it does sound a little silly. Especially if you haven't had any powerful experiences with meditation, I would have had a hard time taking the suggestion seriously a year ago. And I think they were genuinely curious about the answer.
We don't know if they're gunnuh use the app or not, either. They're here and asking questions, right? So they're at least curious about it. I have no idea if this is the case for them, but sometimes snark is even a defense mechanism for people who are a little embarrassed to be curious about something.
I think telling a story about them like that makes things personal and confrontational in a way that's unhelpful. In order to understand your point, they'd first have to discard any feelings of insult that might arise. Which I at least find taxing.
But all that said, I understand why it upset you, and in truth the snark did bother me as well.
I think it was the minimization of meditation, not the part about Twitter. There's a subtext that meditation is too trivial for anything bad to happen.
It wasn't any disrespect, at least I don't have any spiritual practice to disrespect, but rather the cavalier attitude against a reasonable warning.
Imagine somebody warns you about "don't open random email attachments" and a random guy shows up and says "well, explain to me how my grandma's christmas card email is going to make my computer explode".
The cavalier attitude can cost lives. I honestly have nothing against that person who made the comment, I just felt I had to make it clear one must be aware what they are getting into before dismissing something as trivial, and also don't negligently make comments that might put others at risk.
I wish I could have phrased my original comment better, but once it's out there on the internet... :-/
I mean, maybe I should have filtered it through ChatGPT to make it less abrasive since I couldn't force myself into the "speak nicely" mode when I was writing it...
Interesting project. One thing I noticed: when I clicked the button, a fullscreen window got spawned, without any prompt asking me if I should enter fullscreen (Latest Firefox). On a sidenote: this could be used for browser-in-the-browser attacks[0] where someone could present a mock browser UI with a fake URL.
Other than that, it's a great project. Anything to just sit without distractions gives us an unfair advantage over the majority of the world's population who are addicted to phones.
Browsers allow entering fullscreen as long as it's in response to user input, such as clicking a button. When entering fullscreen, browsers emit a prompt about exiting fullscreen, partly to make sure people know how to exit and partly to make sure entering fullscreen doesn't go unnoticed. So, it'd be hard to pull off such an attack.
That's what you'd think, but people rarely pay that much attention. The fullscreen prompt only shows up for a few seconds.
For example, recently a family member clicked on a fake YouTube link from an ad in Google's search results. Clicked the search bar and it immediately turned their whole screen into a "call apple support" popup.
They called me up because they thought it was a virus, but really it was just a fullscreen webpage, and being not very technologically inclined, they didn't even try Esc, Cmd+Tab, Cmd+Q, etc.
That's why I've installed adblock on every relative/friend's browser. Also disabled browser's notifications.
Then one day one of them blindly followed instructions to remove it so they can access an online newspaper. The only time they could actually follow instructions, it was actually malicious.
How many people actually read prompts? People literally share 2FA codes with scammers over the phone even though the SMS itself tells them not to share it with anyone, including their own support workers.
This post turned out to be wildly off-topic to the actual topic, but it's relevant for this subthread of the conversation and I've written so many words already that so I might as well post it:
I believe that fullscreen notification got implemented exactly because of people not noticing their browser went into fullscreen mode.
I agree with some other poster, that it's unreasonable to assume that a majority of people would actually read the message. Luckily, though, that's not actually necessary. It's enough for them to notice that there was something fading away. Something unexpected happened.
Now it gets interesting: Regardless of people actively reading "Press [Esc]", as long as it was within their vision, their brain would still process it anyway.
This means that, in the state of confusion caused by the fading text, they'd be wondering "what just happened?" and their brain would execute the command "press [Esc]" regardless of the text being actively read or not.
The state of confusion causes the input to go right through, getting it executed, causing the user to press Escape.
That's a really fucking neat confusion technique!
PS: I'm not good at linking to topics so people gain better understanding, but I'll just read through some until I find good ones.
> when I clicked the button, a fullscreen window got spawned, without any prompt asking me
This behavior is a pet peeve of mine. I almost never want anything to be fullscreen, and it's extremely irritating when applications or, especially, if a website makes the browser do it.
Trying to use technology to get people to spend some time meditating is fun :) I especially enjoyed the gong sound, the font selection, and the friendly wording in your app.
There's a button "breathe for food" that'll trigger a similar effect as your website. The difference is that the user is given a digital reward ("food") which they use to feed their digital ant colony.
I'm now trying to add intelligent behaviors to the ant colony in an attempt to make them seem alive and compelling enough for users to repeatedly engage with the breathwork exercises.
I’m curious what the ants are up to, do they do a great deal currently?
I’ve been running it for a short while and they’ve dug a little L shape with blue pheromones vertically, and purple horizontally - looks like they are putting food in the horizontal but one ant is stuck behind a food block. Poor Taquan.
Edit: the ‘view crater’ button also crashes the simulation, at least on an M2 Air using Chrome 120
So, ant.care is intentionally designed to be a slow moving experience, goal is to have it unfold over real-world months, but until I get sufficient environmental depth it's going to feel weird. I give the user the ability to control time in sandbox mode to provide a practical means of demoing.
The queen will give birth to worker ants every hour or so. Worker ants have a low chance of applying tunnel/nesting pheromones when they are surrounded by other ants. So, when your colony grows to a few worker ants then they'll start digging more tunnels and chambers to give themselves space. Food is taken from the surface and brought into the nest and has a higher probability of being dropped near other food which allows for food piles to form over time.
Ants go to sleep at night (not realistic, but I thought it was cute) and, if they're well fed, can regurgitate food to other hungry ants (like the queen, who can't move once giving birthing). They'll emote when these things occur.
And oops, yeah crater view shouldn't be live. I forgot I shipped an update live to debug iOS performance (works on iphones now without crashing!). The goal is to get a "top-down" view and to let ants leave the nest to forage for food, but have been struggling with architecture issues blocking me from it for a while.
Hey thanks! It's still in its infancy and isn't something I use as part of my daily routine yet, but that's certainly the goal and direction I'm marching towards :) Hope you keep it in mind as it grows.
I've long given up on meditation timers. I go to a room without any digital technology except for a Casio F91W. I have gotten good at gauging how long I've been concentrating for and if I have aversion to continued sitting I just peek at the watch to know how long it's been.
This is a solved problem that costs $0 and I don't have to worry about receiving personalised ads because I'm into 'mindfulness'.
Yup. I count my breaths in batches of 12 (batch count on the in breath, breath count on the out breath). So like "1-1, 1-2, ..., 1-12, 2-1, 2-2" and it works out that the batch count is the number of minutes I've been meditating. So if I want to meditate for 10 minutes I do 10x 12-counts. No technology needed, can be done anywhere, anytime.
I haven't heard about this before, did you learn it from someone? I usually just count breaths up to 10 and then restart and have a timer for 10 minutes - the timer usually ruins the mood. This is genius and I'm going to start doing this instead.
This is brilliant. For me it was about 8 counts per minute (and I could adjust on the fly). This is a good one to add to the arsenal of breathing techniques.
Re: the app. My personal experience has been after while if you need an app to do nothing …
Author here. I 100% agree, don't obsess about the tools, do whatever works for you. I use the app mainly for meditation and despite having decades of experience I tend to lose the track of time.
I get the impression that you haven't read the article/UI text in the app, so can't comment on the rest of your message I'm afraid.
But, to you some time: I don't charge for the app, I hate ads, I just want people to sit down and do nothing/stop doomscrolling. No need to meditate and no ideology involved.
I suppose it costs one Casio F91W, but I get what you mean.
Good-quality incense burns pretty consistently -- when I sit, I sit the time it takes one stick to burn down. There's even incense-burners that will ring a little bell when the stick burns down, but I just stay aware of it.
> I don't have to worry about receiving personalised ads because I'm into 'mindfulness'.
That's my reaction to all these mindfulness and mental health apps/services. The same tech bros that have created and profited off this crisis in the first place are now trying to sell a solution.
This also gave me the idea to use web tech to build the timer I always wanted, which is the reverse of this one: a bong when the timer expires, but also ticks every minute (or 5) while the timer is running.
Edit: you also have a very beautiful website... and extremely nice drawings!
I suffer from extreme time blindness and one apparent solution to this is to have a regular metronome like pulse - I would love an app for say a smart watch or something that did this with vibrations!
Managing time blindness has been a challenge, too.
I've discovered a helpful tool: the BlipBlip app on my Android device. This app allows for customizable settings such as selecting a ticking interval—in my case, a 15-minute reminder—and choosing from various ticking sounds, with my preference set to Casio.
Notably, it also enables the configuration of periods without ticking, particularly useful for nights or weekends.
The are plenty of other options but these are the ones I care about the most.
> I was in a (unnamed cafe) browsing HN. I clicked on 'sit'. didn't expect the gong noise & my headphones weren't connected - got strange looks from a couple people.
> I'm usually super hyperfixated with things but I immediately just snapped into a zone. the 'you can stop looking at the screen for now' prompt was super helpful.
> so just I let my eyes just wander, it felt weird to do so, but slowly felt those knots in my brain fizzle out
> I started with the window, watched some people past - the usual mindfulness - nothing too interesting. started listening to the traffic on a car-by-car level which seemed to bring everything into scope. I saw a baby pigeon pick at something across the street, a mother lean down to kiss their baby in a pram.
> then my gaze sort of drifted back into the cafe, both visually and audibly
> I heard the coffee machine whir, listened to the waiters giving each other ordered - which felt sort of intrusive but also kind of like a superpower.
> THEN I caught this waitress' gaze, and I shit you not, she smiled at me.
> maybe it's because I looked like a creep sitting in a cafe watching people with an open laptop in front of me but...
> I learnt things from that 2 minutes of mental silence. thank you
edit: as I was writing this comment, the same waitress brought over my food and we had a chat!
side note: on my Mac there seemed to be some kind of UI glitch with the minutes dropdown menu - it was gigantic
The together version found here https://nothing-together.sonnet.io/ is neat as well, you can play simple sounds to another person or a bell gong to everyone
One thing i found a bit distracting is the very obvious looping point of the background music
This together mode is amazing. I want this combined with the sitting so I feel like I'm sitting with other people.
I also kind of want to personalize the sound my gong makes and to be able to share that with others who are sitting. If we could create a sound bath with all our little gongs it would be sooooo cooool!
Plomking feels more like making a gesture, and I think we still lack that in the online world. Any reactions on social media usually have deeper and more loaded meaning than, say, a nod of acknowledgement, or even a wink.
I was wondering, could it be due to the value we mentally assign to our reactions when interacting online? “Liking” a post or message is never just about the “like”, it is also:
- forcing you to make a decison to “like” or not react (is this really worthy of my “like”?)
- broadcasting to everyone that you’ve liked something
- signaling the algorithms that there is some weight to the message
- keeping permanent record of your “like”
“Likes” and other reactions have so much weight and complexity behind them.. it kinda takes any intimacy and any human touch out of the equation.
Oh yeah, EB Garamond is doing the heavy lifting for me, design-wise, no doubt about that:)
I use it on sonnet.io, consulting.sonnet.io and sit.sonnet.io
I didn't use it on days.sonnet.io only because I felt weirdly obsessed with performance when I was coding it.
> as long as I can get you to sit down on your ass for a moment and stop trying to be productive, I’m a happy man
I love this. You are my kind of a person. I'm also a big fan of meditation, mindfulness, and taking care. I hope you find success in this goal.
"Sit." as a name for the app just doesn't work for me. I laughed out loud when I found out it was an app for meditation, as I think of "Sit." as a put down. For people who don't know, It's a commonly used aggro comment put in match chat when you kill someone, typically in a high stakes duel.
However, that association puts me in the exact wrong headspace for meditation. Probably just me though.
In this, they are still trying to get the person to meditate. To sit with very little and wonder what they are doing wrong.
A few months ago I created Harbor (getharbor.app) which played some sounds with some haptics and tried to get people to focus on the sensation of the haptics.
I'm a meditator, but I know many people who aren't and trying to get them to just "sit" and do nothing is a challenge. Some people get stressed out about are they doing it "right".
These are the challenges to try to overcome with meditation, so I'm not quite sure why Sit is different to other timers.
> These are the challenges to try to overcome with meditation, so I'm not quite sure why Sit is different to other timers.
You're looking at it as a product, which is understandable, but that's not the point. I communicate with people through my articles, drawings and code, and this is one of the ways of achieving that. It's like telling a friend that it's ok to slow down and do nothing for a moment but then scaling it up to 50-70k people. You can call it meditation or fucking around, I don't really care.
Thanks for sharing Harbor. Weirdly enough, I actually worked for a company specialised in using generative audio + biofeedback during therapy sessions (led by some prominent scientists in the field, mainly from Imperial College IIRC).
Thanks, you're right. I do look at these things from a product standpoint most of the time.
Harbor was just a weekend of coding for me, as we work in neurotech focused on sleep, and I hadn't published anything that people could use in a long time, and it was getting to me.
We decided not to pursue Harbor because the science behind the impact wasn't compelling enough.
I'd be keen to find out more about the work you did at the Imperial College.
We may pick Harbor up again in the future, if we can be convinced of the efficacy.
I came, I sat, I conquered. So simple, yet immediately effective. (Full disclosure: I'm a regular meditator, so it's pretty easy for me to slip into mindful awareness.)
Cool, but there's an error there. "Just sit" is not a Zen koan, although it is a meditative technique used in Zen-Buddhism, particularly the Japanese Soto school of Zen. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shikantaza
You are right, but Google search is a terrible way to make the comparison. They are returning all websites that are vaguely related to the phase, not doing a word search.
No, I'm doing a quoted phrase search, not a vague vector similarity search. Turning on verbatim mode doesn't change the results much (13 times more instead of 15).
My feeling has been that "brutally simple" evokes the meaning of Brutalist architecture, it is a phrase applied to something that is simple, honest, and functional.
I guess if you can't make something complicated or push the limits, you just call it "art" or "thought provoker" and spend lots of words talking about an egg timer.
Is this some sort of challenge on how far you can make it into the article before throwing up? I have not read something this pretentious and self absorbed, yet painfully lacking in self-awareness in a long long time.
It is beyond me how this fart huffing pseudo spiritualism becomes intertwined with engineering culture.
I mean, I respect the hustle, turning lifestyle advice and a general sense of being better than you into expensive billable consulting hours.
First, I disagree with the premise that you cannot criticize articles in the comments. That's what they are for, after all! My delivery could've been more refined, and maybe my comment was as unnecessarily angry, I still fully stand by its contents.
The whole article is a giant ad for the guy's management consulting gig. It contains a mishmash of far eastern mysticism, self-help nonsense, political signaling, all of which have nothing to do with developing software, even though the article suggests otherwise.
Mental health is important, and each of us lets off steam in their own ways, but to claim that the aforementioned things give you product development superpowers is the exact same mental jump as claiming a particularly fancy (and maybe religiously/spiritually meaningful) piece of jewellery has healing powers. It is quackery, the enemy of every skilled professional.
My delivery could have been refined as well - I don’t mind criticism per se, only when it’s angry and comes off as mean. To some extent I do believe in public praise and private criticism, but less so when an author links their own work like they did here.
I built Sit. for the reasons mentioned in the article. The consulting page was published almost 1 year after I published the app (the source is available on my GH).
I took a break from work because of mental health issues, and after a year I decided to work on something useful, and ideally help others. I've never charged anyone who called me asking for advice via Say Hi, be it students, ex-CTOs/FAANG engineers or founders, never (and people have offered money, believe me). I've burned through half of my personal savings so will need to find a job to support a sustainable business I want to grow, something very much against the techbro culture you bring up here. Hence the link to a consulting page posted several months later.
There's nothing spiritual about Sit., I even call it a dumb alarm clock/glorified gong in my other articles.
I don't want to change your opinion, but I'm happy I hadn't read this +1 year ago, when I was feeling shittier. Now things are much easier, in large part because comments like this are an exception and people, generally, are kind.
^ this. This is pretty much the only thing I would add; when doing an "add to home screen" and going to full screen, it still shows the phone and browser borders, which aren't black. Adding a manifest.json, setting theme_color and background_color: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web... would help a lot on mobile with the immersion effect Sit is aiming for.
> immersion effect
Totally agree. At the moment, add to home screen creates a shortcut that opens up Safari (along with its other distracting tabs ;) would be great if Sit could be set up as a web app too!
In a marvellously diabolical turn of events iOS nosleep support works as long as the app is not in standalone mode. aargh! Will post an update with that later.
You are a legend! I came back to your website for a little over 10 minutes with Sit because I saved the bookmark to my home, and then I ended up getting pulled into your website to explore it a bit.
I was really loving the minimalist aesthetic, and it made me wonder why I usually complicate my own web designs by adding boxes around things instead of letting the content flow. Also, your writing style in your technical posts is very refined, clear, and succinct, which I appreciate.
Eventually, I found your post mentioning that Sit was a PWA now, and it made me remember I had commented back on here. I came back wondering if you had replied, and sure enough, you had!
Thanks for making the improvement! I'm very glad I can install it as a PWA now, and I know I'll be using it more!
(also a fan of Obsidian and SvelteKit, for the record)
"Rant: It just feels perplexing how preoccupied we are with sending people to a dead rock 138600000 km away by treating some random tech bro like your favourite football team, where at the same time we have 1000s of Curies, Teslas, Newtons worth of human potential, brain power which could be unlocked with sometimes relatively little work. Those people are not 1 au away. Yet, we fetishise those who make us miserable instead."
Immediately, one of the foster kitten sidled past me with a half-butchered gecko, still weakly struggling. I leapt up, grabbed a nearby broom, and gave chase. What followed was an episode of Tom & Jerry, but with more swearing. As I managed to part the cat from the gecko and punt the gecko outside, a calm bong brought me to my senses.
1/10, this did not make me sit.