Totally anecdotal, but it has worked on everyone that I've shared this with. Take a paper towel and put it over a cup of water and drink the water through the paper towel. I'm guessing the net affect of this is similar to the straw mentioned in the article. It feels easier to do that a breathing exercise.
We've been doing that at my company on our mobile applications for a few years now. There is no reason to be shoving 5-10mb GIFs down a users throat on a mobile device. Not only does are MP4s smaller (file size), frames per second will be constant on all browsers, unlike GIF (although most browsers are supporting up to 50fps these days). Although outdated, you can read more about that here. http://nullsleep.tumblr.com/post/16524517190/animated-gif-mi...
I wrote a simple js lib for detecting the duration of a GIF for each browser. It was a fun weekend project. https://github.com/rfrench/gify
If webp gains more adoption, it's another alternative now that it supports animation.
"Don't worry, I'm not going to nab your kid, I already got this one."
Is this common place? As of a father of twins; I regularly take my kids to the park and either I'm oblivious to these looks or I am too busy playing zone defense on two almost 3 year olds that I don't even notice.
I can assure you whatever position you were interviewing for 3 years ago, it wasn't for this. That was most likely for the previous reskin they did a few years ago.
The frontend / backend was completely rewritten over the course of this year, throwing out most of everything from the old site.
It also does work while being inebriated