Negentropy v1.0
Measure the ENTROPY of your attention
Start new thread

Negentropy v1.0 - Measure the ENTROPY of your attention

by•
Negentropy measures the entropy of your digital attention in real time — right in your browser. Most tools tell you HOW LONG you spent. Negentropy tells you HOW ENTROPIC your information environment was. Five information-theoretic metrics. Zero cloud. 100% local.

Add a comment

Replies

Best
Maker
📌
Hi Product Hunt! 👋 I'm a physics researcher, and I built Negentropy because I kept falling into "unconscious wandering" — opening YouTube "just for a minute" and losing an hour. The existing tools told me how long I spent on websites, but not whether my attention was ordered or chaotic. So I applied information theory to the problem: → H_text: Shannon entropy of page content (information density) → R: Information flow rate (how fast new content floods in) → H_rate: Navigation transition entropy (how randomly you jump between sites) → G: Goal relevance (is this page related to what you're supposed to be doing?) → D: Distraction Index (composite score combining all of the above) The idea comes from Schrödinger: "Life feeds on negative entropy." Your attention does too. Focus requires continuous injection of negentropy (goals, reminders, structure) to resist the natural drift toward entropy (distraction, noise, wandering). Everything runs locally in your browser. No cloud, no tracking, no external API calls. Your entropy data never leaves your device. I also wrote a paper on the methodology — link in the landing page. The extension is free and open source. Install instructions are on the site (load unpacked in Chrome developer mode). I'd love your feedback — especially on the entropy metrics. What would make this more useful for you?

A small thing that would make this way more useful for me: a per-tab entropy breakdown so I can finally see which tabs are the chaotic ones instead of just the whole browser average. Bonus points if you could flag specific sites contributing the most noise.

Maker

 Thanks Melahat! Per-tab entropy breakdown is a great idea — right now we compute at the browser level, but the architecture already tracks domain-level transitions. Surfacing per-tab scores and a "top noise contributors" list is going into the next version. Would you want it as a separate dashboard view, or inline on the floating overlay?

Running Negentropy for a full work week and exporting a simple report (PDF or CSV) showing daily entropy scores, the five metric breakdowns, and maybe a top 3 "most chaotic sessions" list would be incredibly useful for spotting patterns and actually changing habits.

Maker

 Really appreciate this — you're basically describing v1.5. Weekly entropy report with daily scores, metric breakdowns, and "most chaotic sessions" is high on the roadmap. CSV export is straightforward to add. Would you prefer PDF or CSV as the primary format? (Or both?)

finally someone is measuring the chaos of what i'm actually reading instead of just how long i've been staring at the screen. the local-only thing is honestly the best part, feels like the tool respects my attention the way it wants me to respect my own.

Maker

 Thank you Sedef — "measuring the chaos of what I'm actually reading instead of how long I've been staring" is exactly the insight we built this for. And you're right, local-only isn't just a privacy feature, it's a philosophical choice: a tool that asks you to respect your own attention shouldn't be harvesting it. Would love to hear what patterns you notice after using it for a few days.