The odds are, you have a device deliberately designed to be addictive in your pocket or on the table next to you if you aren’t staring at it right now– your smartphone. We’ve seen a number of projects that try and help people control or moderate their phone usage using a variety of techniques; this vitual pet by [brenpoly] does it by weponizing human empathy, and our bizzare ability to pack-bond with literally anything.
The virtual pet itself is based on an ESP32 in a cutesy 3D-printed case, and we think it would probably work well enough if it just had hard-coded behaviors based on hooks in what you’re doing on your phone– the “my little buddy is sick because I’m doomscrolling” should be effective enough on its own, and that part is hardcoded on the ESP32 along with the regular virtual pet behaviour–but this is the year of our Llama 2026, so there has to be an LLM in there somewhere, right?
Some people would leave this part out, but we think [brenpoly]’s use of a local LLM on the phone does improve the project. The local agent doesn’t just have access to his screen time, but his notifications, too, and runs a whisper model linked to a microphone in the virtual pet via bluetooth. So you can get the contents or a summary of your notifications without looking at your phone, or just ask the little guy to tell you a joke. Giving the pet a voice with a the local piper model is also more effective at getting you to put your phone down when you hit the limits.
They’ve put the whole thing up on GitHub if you want to make your own– and if we can keep one person from strapping themselves to a shock collar, then this project is doing good in the world. If helps [brenpoly] or any of his fans do less scrolling and more hacking, that’s even better. Of course there’s a whole spectrum between “electrocute yourself” and “lovable virtual pet” when it comes to controlling your phone use, a spectrum that includes phone stands or even smart vaults for your device.
Thanks to [brenpoly] for the tip! Remember, all of your doomscrolling is justified if you find something to send to our tipsline.
Indeed I do have a smartphone. However, its wifi is disabled, its “mobile data” (aka GPRS, 5G or whatever) is disabled, its GPS is disabled and its bluetooth is disabled. All the notifications and their sounds are disabled, SMS sound is disabled, ringtone for numbers not in my phonebook is disabled. “Unremovable” crapps were removed with
adb. The phone does nothing for 99,7% of the day, with the remaining 0,3% being a daily call from my mother.I like its smartness when I need it, but somehow I skipped the whole “doom scrolling addiction mobile phone zombie” thing so common amongst… everyone. I still use it to read a PDF book, navigate with OpenStreetMap, browse the web in a pinch or take photos, but I wouldn’t care much if it was back to Nokia 3310 or even an analog phone.