A therapist's colophon on a WebGL renderer and privacy-first analytics

therapywarsaw.com

1 point·orange-blue··4 comments

Hi HN, I'm a psychotherapist and also the dev behind this site. The project was an attempt to reflect our clinical principles in the design: privacy, calm, and the idea of how unseen patterns can gently emerge into focus.

The background is a custom WebGL2 flow-field I built (physics in a worker thread), and we don't use Google Analytics. Instead, we run a self-hosted, anonymized Matomo instance. The linked colophon has the full story.

For anyone who wants to see the code, I've open-sourced the renderer + GUI for parameters here: https://github.com/23x2/generative-flow-field Happy to answer any questions about the tech, the clinical philosophy behind it, or both.

It's...cute? But the idea that the site I go to engage with a therapist slows my laptop (Dell Inspiron 5770) to a nearly unusable crawl and spins up the fan to max seems to be one of the most egregious impedance mismatch between "what I need" and "what I get" I've seen in a long time. I guess you only get treatment if you have a recent cpu or a gpu.

Thank you for the feedback. It is supposed not to work at all for non-webgl2 devices, sorry it works so poorly. I hope to keep the site for the coming 2+ decades...

Updated to not render on relatively slow GPUs.

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