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A macOS app that blurs your screen when you slouch

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Re: A macOS app that blurs your screen when you slouch

#221
post #44

You can measure my productivity by how slouched I am. Sitting up straight at my desk, chair locked, perfect posture? I’m doing nothing, maybe looking through System Preferences to change the system highlight color. Sliding down in my chair like jelly, with my shoulders where my butt should be and my head resting on the lumbar support? I’m building the next iPhone and it’ll be done by 2 AM.

Funny, I’m the same. I also like taking walks to think but I’ve found that I must have my head pointing almost directly down (I.e. looking at my feet). It’s also how I stand thinking in the shower, with the warm water hitting my angled neck. Maybe something beneficial about that position of the neck, or maybe just habit! I will also have conversations in my head during my walk, I’ve done this my whole life and I’m no…

I have my best ideas and illuminations for the day when I brush my teeth in the morning. Somehow, that's when I can think best.

Re: A macOS app that blurs your screen when you slouch

#222
post #62

Congrats on the app. I'm seeing that "great-ai-unlock" is happening. I see in last month a lot of new software being codeveloped with claude/codex/gemini/you-name it. Before, it was too costly to do sth like the Posture app: here, you would have to know Swift and apple apis to write such tool. Would you be C# (very good) programmer with free weekend, and an idea: no cookie for ya. These days, due to "great-ai-unlock"…

Jevons paradox is a failure mode, not something that "works".

Re: A macOS app that blurs your screen when you slouch

#223
post #44

You can measure my productivity by how slouched I am. Sitting up straight at my desk, chair locked, perfect posture? I’m doing nothing, maybe looking through System Preferences to change the system highlight color. Sliding down in my chair like jelly, with my shoulders where my butt should be and my head resting on the lumbar support? I’m building the next iPhone and it’ll be done by 2 AM.

In a previous tech bubble I figured out that the Aeron chairs were great - if you were using good posture. Slouch at all and they'd hurt you. The humanscale chair was the one that was actually good for feet-on-desk, keyboard-in-lap, staring out the window while rotating data structures in my head...

Re: A macOS app that blurs your screen when you slouch

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

then I need to get someone to audit the LLM, which is considerably more difficult

Do you expect this programmer is in cahoots with Anthropic?

if you use code you can't trust to audit code you can't trust, you're not doing an audit at all

personally I do not implicitly trust Anthropic or any other company

Re: A macOS app that blurs your screen when you slouch

#226
I've now installed this and it's already improved my posture -- thanks! It reminds me of how I now wash my hands for at least twenty seconds every time, because my Apple Watch will annoy me if I stop at even 18 seconds. Little reminders like this are wonderful, and I appreciate you for creating this.

ps -- I added two feature requests and commented on another on the repo.

Re: A macOS app that blurs your screen when you slouch

#227
post #44

You can measure my productivity by how slouched I am. Sitting up straight at my desk, chair locked, perfect posture? I’m doing nothing, maybe looking through System Preferences to change the system highlight color. Sliding down in my chair like jelly, with my shoulders where my butt should be and my head resting on the lumbar support? I’m building the next iPhone and it’ll be done by 2 AM.

Funny, I’m the same. I also like taking walks to think but I’ve found that I must have my head pointing almost directly down (I.e. looking at my feet). It’s also how I stand thinking in the shower, with the warm water hitting my angled neck. Maybe something beneficial about that position of the neck, or maybe just habit! I will also have conversations in my head during my walk, I’ve done this my whole life and I’m no…

Yes, shower thinking with warm water on my neck is absolute peak. In those conditions I'm unafraid of tackling the most challenging of thinking.

Re: A macOS app that blurs your screen when you slouch

#228
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally a tangent here but it amazes me how a company as big as Herman Miller could screw a product page up so much by not even having a picture of the damn product.

Lol, I see the image fine but if I click the red "Buy Now" button, I get a 404. Fortunately, I type this, sitting in my wonderful 15 year old Embody chair so I don't actually need to buy now. Everyone is different and I never raved much about Aerons but the Embody has been very good to me, whether my posture is textbook "good" or "badly" slouched and reclined ... it supports and makes me want to sit and work. :-)

if you are US based, it seems like switching to United States as the country works (or en_us in the URL from en_gb)

Re: A macOS app that blurs your screen when you slouch

#229
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another thing to note: slouching and back pain tend to have more to do with back strength than people realize. I have suffered back discomfort and pain in periods I haven’t gone to the gym for long enough to lose back muscle.

Does it? I think strength may be related to pain if you're very weak, and statistically there are big confounders (i.e. people who are weak also have other conditions that exacerbate pain experience). But past a certain point I don't think the evidence suggests that strength itself is protective. Otherwise, competitive lifters would never experience back pain for instance, but they still do. Pain is multifactorial, a…

Never said it’s the only factor, and we shouldn’t assume all pain is the same pain

The type of pain people weight train suffer tends to be related to muscle or tendon damage. The type of pain that comes from sedentarism tends to be related to overworked (weak) muscles and bad circulation.

Re: A macOS app that blurs your screen when you slouch

#230
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my case, though walks help declutter my mind somewhat, for deeper thoughts, I have to write it down sitting or laying in the bed in the worst of positions. Thinking too deeply while walking only leaves me anxious in the end as I tend to get sidetracked a lot in conversation and always have to restart the conversation over and over again.

I used paper a lot to jot my ideas and all sorts of diagrams but lately I just pull Claude and chat it out, it works like a thinking environment.

I tried doing the same. Sometimes it made my understanding of things much clearer. However most fimes, I found it worked best when I had a clear idea on paper, either to validate the idea or when I needed to an opinion. Otherwise, ChatGPT in my case, built upon my idea that I hadn't thought through well and confuse the shit out of me.
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