Meditation Apps May Be Fueling Anxiety With Streaks, Badges, and Leaderboards

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The $5 billion meditation app industry has increasingly adopted gamification features such as streak counters, achievement badges, and community leaderboards since the mid-2010s. Critics argue these mechanics create guilt and anxiety rather than calm, particularly when users miss a session and see their progress reset. A new app called OneZen is positioning itself as an alternative by stripping away all tracking, registration, notifications, and rankings. The app offers only a simple timer, with no data stored in the cloud and no reminders pushing users to return. Its developers argue that a tool genuinely designed for wellbeing should let users engage on their own terms, without measuring or scoring their practice.

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Fix Kotlin null assertion errors in Jackson by enabling NullIsSameAsDefault

Developers using Jackson to deserialize Kotlin data classes with empty lists may encounter unexpected null assertion errors. The issue arises when a field like a List is annotated with a default empty value but the incoming payload contains an empty list, causing Jackson to treat it as null. A reliable fix in Jackson 2.17 involves manually building the KotlinModule with the NullIsSameAsDefault feature enabled, rather than using the standard registerKotlinModule() shortcut. This configuration ensures that null values from the payload are treated as equivalent to the declared default, preventing runtime errors. The solution requires the jackson-module-kotlin dependency at version 2.17 or higher.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

How to Copy Files from a Docker Container to Your Host Machine

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