“The Unix nice command for the people in your life. Mother-in-law runs at nice -20. Your college roommate at nice +19. Your attention is the kernel scheduler. Thanksgiving is a fork bomb.”
The Problem
Every human in your address book runs at the same priority. Mom texts, Slack pings, the dentist voicemails, and the CFS round-robins the lot until you enter D-state in bed at 8:47pm holding a granola bar you never opened. Modern life needs preemption.
wed 3:47pm · your-attention.load
mom (renovation questions)
92%
landlord (mystery leak)
74%
dentist office (vm x3)
61%
the group chat, unspecified
57%
therapist (invoice past due)
44%
college friend (podcast idea)
12%
load avg: 4.71you are thrashing
The Solution
Ship a ~/.nice config over every person in your address book. Kids get nice -20 (real-time, preempts even sleep). Boss gets -5. Your college group chat gets +15. LinkedIn-guy gets buried so deep the kernel forgets he exists.
you@self:~$ nice-top
WHOPIDNI%CPUSTATE
your-kids401-2074.2R (running)
spouse402-1512.1S (sleeping)
mother-in-law601-204.4D (uninterruptible)
boss501-58.0R (running)
therapist700+01.2S (sleeping)
college-gc831+150.1T (stopped)
linkedin-guy999+190.0Z (zombie)
load avg: 0.87 · up 3dyou are okay
The Kernel
Preemption is real. When a kid pages, we pause everything. When your mother-in-law calls, we context-switch even during REM sleep. When LinkedIn-guy DMs, we route straight to /dev/null and log the incident nowhere.
scheduler timeline · sat 6pm → 10pm4hr window
240 min of your saturday8% went to you · kernel logs available on request
Pricing
free
Default CFS. Everyone runs at nice 0. You are, functionally, a dial tone.
$9 / mo
Renegotiate up to 25 people. Weekly niceness report. Group chat visibly calmer by month 2.
$29 / mo
Real-time priorities. Preempt work on kid-page. Sleep uninterrupted by non-family. Includes 3 ‘nice reset’ passes / yr.
custom
For CEOs. Every ping evaluated against your marginal cost of attention. Personal assistants get root; interns get niced to +19.
TAM
addressable market · humans currently thrashing
3.4B knowledge workers × 11 context switches / hr × $0.18 attention / switch
= $58B in unallocated CPU
Methodology: watched our CTO stare at his phone for a full sunday.
The Ask
$4M seed. Half funds the on-device classifier (whose message is this, really). The other half funds legal — niceing your mother-in-law to +19 is a family law event in most states. Series A pitch: “We’re Linux, but the processes love you.”