Watching this run, I wonder if you could use something like this to desensitize yourself from notification addiction. Since this is stimulus without any reward, ever, may it break the normal stimulus-response-reward cycle of real notifications?
It's like this comment comes from a different reality, but I imagine so. You can probably also use use it to desensitize yourself from notification phobia.
Could you add Facebook and instagram sounds? Not so it makes you sound busy, but as a few other commenters have said, it may help with desensitization of notification sounds and I like that idea a lot
What distribution did you use for the gaps between sounds? Feels a bit too regular to me. May I suggest Poisson distributed intervals based on the slider?
Heh. I can quote the answer as the answer is easy.
If you want the time between the last sound and the next sound to average T, schedule the next sound to begin at
next = last - T*Math.ln(Math.random())
Explaining why this is correct requires a bit of calculus and a couple perspectives from probability theory...
To give a quick outline, if this were discrete timesteps then the answer would look like this: given that one event has a probability p of happening, then the probability it happens after exactly n tries is
(1–p)^{n–1} * p
Since it has to not happen independently n–1 times. Then we want to scale this to N tries per unit time so the timestep dt = 1/N... Evidently p needs to also decrease and we assume it just scales down with the timestep, p=k dt, t =
n dt, so n = N t. Making those substitutions one gets the defining expression for e^x and so the probability that the event happens between time t and t+dt is, in the limit, k dt e^{-kt}. We can then integrate this to confirm that it is normalized and to discover that its mean is 1/k.
Then coming from the other side, the probability of the given expression being between t and t+dt is the probability that Math.random() falls between A and B, which is just B–A. Some more calculus gives the exact same expression with k=1/T, bada bing bada boom.
That’s a neat solution, my instinct would have been futzing with the universal distribution of Math.random() into a normal distribution (incurring even more cost than the Math.log() call in the process).
Lovely idea! Any plans turning it into an app? I think just a wrapper around a webview would work for iOS, and PWA on Android. The only things that need a small work IMO is to remember last settings and autostart on app start.
I was a bit disappointed that the "vibrating phone" sound didn't actually vibrate my phone. Chrome has support got that built in, might be a nice touch.
Also, the sliders don't render right in Firefox on Android.
How about adding the 'call' tones for some of the services that have calling options, but make it low frequency (once a few minutes) by default. Might help to show a tooltip or something about how frequently it will trigger.
Yes. Word of advice to anyone reading this: if you are given an on-call phone, change the ringtone to something you’re unlikely to ever hear in any other context.
I spent $1.99 on a custom ringtone in the Apple AppStore. Best $1.99 I ever spent because I’ve never heard another phone with this ringtone (can’t be said for ANY of the default ringtones).
That’s after several hours using GarageBand to create and export a custom ringtone. That was an utter nightmare because there’s just no easy way to get custom ringtones onto iOS unless you buy it from the AppStore.
Not me... My phone and desktop have been on silent with all notifications off since summer of 99'... My family hates me because I'm always missing calls, but I sleep like a rock.
Navigation voice is also off in my car ritually since it started talking too much and unnecessarily pointing out places of interest, I always miss turns but oh well. No big deal.
I still wonder if there is a Google assistant command to turn ringers on and off though, maybe one year I'll look it up. I have a feeling that one day soon we may not have a choice of turning notifications off because it gets in the way of fake manufacturer notifications though...
There's a bunch of evil ManuFacturers out there lately creating fake notifications.
Android has it too, although it's software (but some have a hardware switch which kinda-sorta does similarly). I just leave my phone permanently on DND and whitelist a few contacts and apps.
More recent Android has a feature where your phone will not present notifications when face down. Flip it back over to start getting calls, texts, and other chimes.
Shush mode iirc. I've had it on for multiple versions and it survives updates.
> My family hates me because I'm always missing calls, but I sleep like a rock.
Is there any solution out there for Android to have the phone in silence, unless there is a call or message from specific contacts (whitelisting notifications for Android)?
I'm glad to be working from home, and I've taken to not picking up the phone outside of working hours / during lunch, or if there's a message, to do a glance at best - send a message or make an appointment, and if it's a message or e-mail, by default it can wait. My personal time is mine and if you want any of it, pay me.
In 2011 I shut down a failed business only to realize I had personally guaranteed a high five-digit loan. I offered the bank 50 cents on the dollar to release me, they told me to get lost ... so I did.
I silenced my phone while agencies called me for about three years. (Interestingly, that's the only thing they did - I never got a letter or an email or a text.)
The collections agencies went away, my credit was never dinged, and I learned that receiving on-demand phone calls are 100% unnecessary in my life.
Re: credit YMMV. I fully expected my credit to be impacted, as it well should have.
I've successfully waited out debts, even a felony possession warrant once the time I got caught buying MDMA and fled the state. Took their toll stress-wise, though.
My phone is on silent/vibrate at all times, and automatically goes into "do not disturb" mode in the evening. Only calls from very few specified numbers are allowed during DND mode.
If I had to listen to all the beeping and noises that other people seem to, I would have thrown the phone out the window by now.
The ring out on the iMessage ding is really long. Are these official sounds? Is it just that the speakers connected to my system are much better to hear how long the sound plays compared to an iDevice crapeakers?
Yes it’s very long and no, iDevices speakers are actually pretty good (for their size).
iOS ringtones are pretty nice tbf (especially the alarm clock ones) but they are the same for years so, as nice as they are at start, you inevitably end hating them.
For the record, I randomly noticed that when enabling ringtone plus the vibrations, the Taptic Engine vibrates in sync with the ringtone in a subtle way that emphasizes the notes. I found it smart.
My dad likes to do "Can I call you?" which I might see later, after which he won't respond which for me essentially means I will go through "worst case scenarios" in my head over and over..
"When I see something like 'Can I call you?', it implies to me that there's something really important you need to tell me, that's too important to send over text. I know you don't mean it that way, but it's very scary to me in the absence of more information. Can you please include a reason why you'd like to talk next time you text?"
Once my folks understood that they were putting across the subtext of a death in the family, they started adding why they wanted to call!
I had this same conversation with my father last week. He is a low-frequency communicator, so when I get the "Call me" text I feel I have to take a deep breath and brace myself for thew news.
I had to have the conversation twice; the first time I got really mad at my mom for sending me "Call me as soon as you can". She didn't really get why I was so upset - probably because I was too upset to think clearly about why I was.
The next time it happened, I clued my folks in to the subtext of that message for people of my generation. They were horrified and apologized profusely. They've also never done it since.
Ugh. Yesterday I got up, was sat around in my office at 8:30am in my underwear when I get a text from my lawyer: "We can have a chat after the court hearing this morning". Court starts at 9am. I'm an hour from the courthouse. I'M NOT EVEN DRESSED. I saw this judge once imprison a man for 30 days for laughing at a joke the judge made.
In remote work environment compliments are generic and criticisms feel brutal. I feel like 80% of the time the notif sound is associated with bad news and deep down we are all Pavlov's dog. I don't care how people percieve no immediate reponses, because it takes me sometimes a lot of effort to see what I mucked up this time. I feel like a solution to this would be performance or surprise bonuses. But that is never going to happen.
I'm an atheist, but the philosophy of Buddhism (westernized as Mindfulness) makes a lot of sense for me: we suffer because we desire, and we suffer less when we desire less.
I had to unPavlov myself when my phone rang during home office. As soon as it rang, I assumed it was trouble and wished it would go away. Now I just answer, and if it's trouble, at least it doesn't bother me more than it should.
Same goes with positive desires. I had to learn to enjoy working from home as long as possible, and not stressing because we would return to the office eventually. Home office has ended for me, but the last couple of months were less stressful because I stopped wishing for it to last more.
Was having fun clicking the icons until I clicked the Outlook button, and my entire body convulsed as my eyes jumped to the bottom right corner of the screen. Need a black box warning for some of these sounds!
114 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadIt'd be nice to make the notifications come even slower however ;-).
Yes this is great.
Bonsai buddy left us too soon :(
Honestly love this.
What a neat APP, thanks! Very cool!
What distribution did you use for the gaps between sounds? Feels a bit too regular to me. May I suggest Poisson distributed intervals based on the slider?
lol, I love HN so much.
If you want the time between the last sound and the next sound to average T, schedule the next sound to begin at
Explaining why this is correct requires a bit of calculus and a couple perspectives from probability theory...To give a quick outline, if this were discrete timesteps then the answer would look like this: given that one event has a probability p of happening, then the probability it happens after exactly n tries is
Since it has to not happen independently n–1 times. Then we want to scale this to N tries per unit time so the timestep dt = 1/N... Evidently p needs to also decrease and we assume it just scales down with the timestep, p=k dt, t = n dt, so n = N t. Making those substitutions one gets the defining expression for e^x and so the probability that the event happens between time t and t+dt is, in the limit, k dt e^{-kt}. We can then integrate this to confirm that it is normalized and to discover that its mean is 1/k.Then coming from the other side, the probability of the given expression being between t and t+dt is the probability that Math.random() falls between A and B, which is just B–A. Some more calculus gives the exact same expression with k=1/T, bada bing bada boom.
(It'll also never return anything more than 6 standard deviations away from the mean, but it's not like you actually want that in most applications.)
Would you consider adding Zulip?
Notification sound at https://github.com/zulip/zulip/blob/main/static/audio/zulip....
Logo at https://github.com/zulip/zulip/blob/main/static/images/logo/...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlyGdpyI1zI
Also, the sliders don't render right in Firefox on Android.
But you did a great job overall, and the design is completely fitting.
On the other hand. This page is kinda anxiety triggering https://www.tiktok.com/@ashleasexton/video/70000143018891543...
That’s after several hours using GarageBand to create and export a custom ringtone. That was an utter nightmare because there’s just no easy way to get custom ringtones onto iOS unless you buy it from the AppStore.
What possible justification could Apple have for such a limitation? "Security" again?
Navigation voice is also off in my car ritually since it started talking too much and unnecessarily pointing out places of interest, I always miss turns but oh well. No big deal.
I still wonder if there is a Google assistant command to turn ringers on and off though, maybe one year I'll look it up. I have a feeling that one day soon we may not have a choice of turning notifications off because it gets in the way of fake manufacturer notifications though...
There's a bunch of evil ManuFacturers out there lately creating fake notifications.
I have never experienced this in Romania. But if the proprietary clouds give you trouble, try OsmAnd, which uses OpenStreetMap: https://osmand.net/
It is also available on F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.osmand.plus/
Shush mode iirc. I've had it on for multiple versions and it survives updates.
Easily the best thing with their phones.
Which app is this? I am really concerned about this.
Is there any solution out there for Android to have the phone in silence, unless there is a call or message from specific contacts (whitelisting notifications for Android)?
Will this also work with messaging apps (e.g. Whatsapp) or only on the phone/sms app?
I silenced my phone while agencies called me for about three years. (Interestingly, that's the only thing they did - I never got a letter or an email or a text.)
The collections agencies went away, my credit was never dinged, and I learned that receiving on-demand phone calls are 100% unnecessary in my life.
Re: credit YMMV. I fully expected my credit to be impacted, as it well should have.
If I had to listen to all the beeping and noises that other people seem to, I would have thrown the phone out the window by now.
iOS ringtones are pretty nice tbf (especially the alarm clock ones) but they are the same for years so, as nice as they are at start, you inevitably end hating them.
For the record, I randomly noticed that when enabling ringtone plus the vibrations, the Taptic Engine vibrates in sync with the ringtone in a subtle way that emphasizes the notes. I found it smart.
The ability be silent is an upside.
I have my phone on silent. I would still like to hear it vibrate when it's on a soft surface for example.
You may enjoy this:
https://www.makewordart.com
That's XP! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_(image))
So this is what a career-ending catastrophic production failure sounds like.
I feel I should be responding to this like a horror movie with clowns in it.
"When I see something like 'Can I call you?', it implies to me that there's something really important you need to tell me, that's too important to send over text. I know you don't mean it that way, but it's very scary to me in the absence of more information. Can you please include a reason why you'd like to talk next time you text?"
Once my folks understood that they were putting across the subtext of a death in the family, they started adding why they wanted to call!
The next time it happened, I clued my folks in to the subtext of that message for people of my generation. They were horrified and apologized profusely. They've also never done it since.
I had to unPavlov myself when my phone rang during home office. As soon as it rang, I assumed it was trouble and wished it would go away. Now I just answer, and if it's trouble, at least it doesn't bother me more than it should.
Same goes with positive desires. I had to learn to enjoy working from home as long as possible, and not stressing because we would return to the office eventually. Home office has ended for me, but the last couple of months were less stressful because I stopped wishing for it to last more.
https://f-droid.org/packages/com.github.ashutoshgngwr.noice/
Man. These sounds are to my stress levels as a bell is to Pavlov’s dog’s drool.
We'd just put on https://nyan.cat and see how long they nyaned for until they realized their laptop was unlocked for.