zaps forwarded to @mo (20%) @TomK (20%) @justanumber (20%) @Fabs (20%)

Zap to Zero Day 18 | Triple Agent

A triple agent is a spy who pretends to be a double agent for one side while they are truthfully a double agent for the other side. Unlike a re-doubled agent, who changes allegiance due to being compromised, a triple agent usually has always been loyal to their original side. It may also refer to a spy who works for three opposing sides, such that each side thinks the spy works for them alone.
— Wikipedia, Triple Agent
Yesterday, I realized I must be a nonconformist thanks to this comment from @02399d3080. I realized I have been a nonconformist my whole life. The more people agreed on something, the more skeptical I became.
I was always the one who seemed to disagree. But I didn't necessarily disagree. No. All I wanted to know was their reasons for agreement or disagreement. I didn't care what their opinion was. I cared about the why of their opinion. Most people didn't get that but I don't blame them. I think I didn't even get that myself until yesterday.
One time, a friend of mine even went to the bathroom saying "you deal with that." I again played the unsolicited counterparty to the opinion of someone. It was about getting some experience as a dev (we all studied computer science) vs. signing a contract for another year as a cashier.
They are raising my pay if I sign this contract.
While my other friend agreed with him because of the increased pay (iirc), I told him that this might be a dead-end job and they are fully aware of it. I must have said something along these lines:
They are raising your pay because they know you don't really want to do this. They are raising your pay so you continue to do what you've been doing for the last few years so they don't have to find another one who can replace you. That would probably be more expensive to them. I think it's a dead-end job and you know it since you've been complaining about this job for a while. I think you should find a job as a dev if you really want to get paid one day for what you learn in university.
He didn't like hearing that. The other friend in the room didn't like hearing that. They seemed to focus on the "replacement part":
So you are saying being a cashier is not as important as being a dev?
I didn't like hearing that. I tried to explain myself but I think it was in vain. Everyone in that room already made up their mind.
I don't remember what happened. I think at some point, he switched to a working student position as a Java developer because another friend recommended the position to him since he was also working there. Or did he even work two jobs while studying at one point? I really don't remember. We lost contact after I finished my bachelor's degree and I don't miss him. In hindsight, I think he was the archetype of a person which complained all the time and blamed everything except themselves because developing some sense of agency in their life would be too much effort.
The sense of agency, or sense of control, is the subjective awareness of initiating, executing, and controlling one's own volitional actions in the world. [...] In non-pathological experience, the SA is tightly integrated with one's "sense of ownership", which is the pre-reflective awareness or implicit sense that one is the owner of an action, movement or thought. If someone else were to move your arm (while you remained passive) you would certainly have sensed that it were your arm that moved and thus a sense of ownership for that movement. However, you would not have felt that you were the author of the movement; you would not have a sense of agency.
— Wikipedia, Sense of agency
I am still good friends with the other person in that room though. We used to go climbing together.

Satistics

DateSpentStacked (Rewards)PostsCommentsRewarded
2023-12-2813k8808 (n/a)235n/a
2023-12-2916.1k15.6k (5222)352
2023-12-3010.8k9752 (7026)141✍️
2023-12-3120.5k17.9k (4379)561
2024-01-0112.5k10.7k (7684)347✍️
2024-01-0216k19.5k (9353)636✍️
2024-01-0315.9k15.6k (6729)246
2024-01-0411.4k11.4k (3954 4093 4131)338✍️
2024-01-0511.3k11.4k (3954 4092)141?
2024-01-0666916282 (3665 3954)038✍️
2024-01-0780538503 (1219 3665)320✍️
2024-01-0888739164 (1219)212
2024-01-0958286808 (4649)2 634 35✍️
2024-01-1014.1k14.4k (4857)322
2024-01-1111.8k10.4k (4109)322✍️
2024-01-1287438016 (4778)341✍️
2024-01-1393939339 (3116)217
2024-01-1414.2k6697 (3533)441✍️
2024-01-15TBDTBD (3395)TBDTBD
I even hit zero twice yesterday. Nice.
The day before yesterday, @Undisciplined mentioned in the saloon that he "reached something of an equilibrium in my initial search for the optimal default zap. For a couple weeks now, I've been hovering around 270." He also asked how "other people's (@ekzyis and @elvismercury) current zap experiments [are] going".
I bookmarked his reply to my reply so I can respond to him here and he has to search where he was mentioned. Isn't that fun?
How are other people's (@ekzyis and @elvismercury) current zap experiments going?
Am I not writing every day how my current zap experiment is going? :)
But I guess you are right, I kind of lost to share what I learned in these posts like I did in the beginning. Will think more about this and reply here or create a post or just add them to my next Z2Z post.
— me, #386524
I just meant quick takeaways. How has your experiment changed your own zapping behavior? Have you noticed changes in other users? How have your rewards been affected? That kind of stuff.
Even though I said I would think more about this, I didn't. So I am just going to pull stuff out of my ass like the original ass puller and namesake @orthwyrm did here. I hope ass pulling is welcome here like in ~oracle.
1. Less bias enforcement in comment sections
I used to zap a lot more comments because I wanted to see my own bias in their ranking.
For example, if I saw one comment that I didn't like (as much) have 2x more sats as another comment that I liked (more), I would zap that other comment enough to make that comment 2x the sats.
But you could say I used to do that with the whole comment section. I zapped my favorite comments enough sats that they have the most sats in that section. But obviously, that can get pretty expensive if there are a lot of other comments with lots of sats on them.
2. More precise zaps
This means (hopefully following the definition of accuracy vs precision) that I think more about how much sats I want to give a post or comment. So I use the custom zap amount a lot more now.
3. Sats feel more rare
It's very fun to get very close to 0 just to then get a zap bomb out of nowhere which means I have more sats to play with again.
This also means that I appreciate getting zapped a lot more now. It's kind of obvious but it's still nice to experience it first-hand. Since I really can only play with sats I earned on here and I have to zap them all away within a day, SN sats have become a lot more rare to me. Zapping someone 1k sats is something I really have to consider before doing it — or at least I should before I find myself in a position where I cannot zap other stuff which doesn't feel fair. This brings me to my next point:
4. Zap amounts depend on wallet size (and thus on time in my case)
My zap amounts unfortunately still depend a lot on the size of my wallet at the time I saw the content. I want to eliminate the time dependency of my zaps. I don't want to value content more just because I saw it earlier and my wallet was bigger at that point but unfortunately, I still do a lot.

Recent Superzaps

1. You're a slut and a whore for the algorithm.

@mo brings my feelings about social media or algorithmic feeds in general to the point with this post. It contains a very good quote:
[...]
You’re looking for that viral moment so it opens up the door and you can do the thing full time. But you start to compromise just to get the door to open: guessing what it wants, debasing yourself, alienating yourself. Until you’re not even in service to your art anymore. You’re in service to the algorithm. Deep down every artist just wants to be seen. Everyone does. And that’s how it controls you. The algorithm makes you behave in a certain way, create in a certain way, in exchange for being seen. And if something can change what you do, it can change who you are.
[...]
Unfortunately, there wasn't a lot of discussion in there (only 7 comments so far). Maybe because it's our current sad reality?

2. What's your "ritual" for reading a book smoothly?

I might need to subscribe to @Fabs. He seems to speak regularly out of parts of my soul I am not necessarily aware of.
I currently struggle to find time to read the books I want to read. And there are a ton of them. I also noticed how reading in the morning should be a great idea but due to bad habits, I didn't do that yet.
@Coyote_Cosmico calls this "bookending":
1 - "Bookend" the day. Reading first thing in the morning (especially before going online in any fashion) and then reading at night before sleep.
They also have a lot of other very good tips. Naturally, @elvismercury chimed in:
Highlighting and rereading.
I'm not a believer in highlighting, at least for myself, since what happens when I do it is that I accrue a series of things that I vaguely intend to come back to one day; and yet that day never comes, because there's always more to read.
[...]
The key is to know what it is you're after. I have read thousands of books that now, years later, I have only the illusion-of-knowing about. Since my goal is to engage with the book, and be changed by it, interactions that don't afford that are useless to me. It's just LARPing, bedpost-notching.
Not saying this is right for everyone, just what I do.
I also like that he used the term LARPing. I really like LARPing (the term).
Coming back to me being a nonconformist, I also want to read Mastering Ethereum one day. I have read a lot of comments on here how people think Andreas M. Antonopoulos is a shitcoiner because he wrote a book about a shitcoin. I can see where they are coming from but — seriously? I think that summarizes very well how bitcoiners aren't as special as they think they are. I think AA is still a very based person like (@niftynei mentioned here). AA might simply be ahead of our time — or less degenerate.
However, I want to add it's not only bitcoiners. It's just any group of entrenched people, really. And there are a lot of such groups out there.
100%. It's just that bitcoiners generally thump their chests about their intellectual honesty, and then devolve into kindergartners when thoughtcrime strikes a dischordant note against the symphony playing inside their echo chambers.
So I expect better from them, as a group, and hold them to a higher standard that is often sorely disappointed.
I shouldn't talk in generalities this way, I know. It's a sore spot.
I think that also summarizes one of the biggest problems in our society today: To judge the whole character of a person via nitpicks from biased third-hand experiences. In this case here, these nitpicks are true (he did write a book about a shitcoin) but in some cases, people don't even care if their nitpicks are true or make sense at all [0].
Ok, I ranted enough about this here. I still have another post I want to mention.

3. Swedish government discusses cash retention

@TomK linked to "good news for the freedom movement from Sweden".
Good news for the freedom movement from Sweden: it seems that the new government is trying to make cash compulsory. It's news like this that should startle the parasites in Davos!
I have to admit here (no, I don't really have to do anything) — again, coming back to me being a nonconformist — that I pay mostly with my debit card. I use YNAB and it makes it very easy to track expenses.
As mentioned above, I care more about the why's of people. So here are my why's:
  • YNAB is just too convenient
  • I want stores to feel the pain of card processing fees
  • I don't think using cash is a good way to prevent CBDCs. Imo, that's like advocating to go back to gold and as significant like trying to mine bitcoin using CPUs. But I didn't do much research. That's just how I feel currently. I change my mind all the time (what is imo a virtue if done for the "right" reasons)
  • I don't care about the ~privacy of my everyday transactions. I believe in hiding in plain sight. If I want to buy something in a very private way, I'll use monero [1]. I mostly don't even have a choice. That's simply what is accepted on most DNMs. I have yet to see a DNM that uses lightning.
The notion of hiding in plain sight originally developed in the 1600s as a military tactic that posited that soldiers could occupy any space on the open battlefield as long as they remained out of the line of view of their enemies. As weapons technology advanced and combat evolved beyond rank-and-file fighting, the concept expanded to include early forms of camouflage.
[...]
As a theory, hiding in plain sight relies more on the limits of human perception than outright trickery. The paradox of the visible remaining unperceived is a function of our need to filter sensory information in order to navigate the world. According to Eviatar Zerubavel, author of Hidden in Plain Sight: The Social Structure of Irrelevance, the discrepancy between all that we could see versus what we actually notice underscores the critical role of intent attention to our perception.

Challenge of the Day

Call me a shitcoiner with good arguments.

Song of the Day

I was scared of dentists and the dark I was scared of pretty girls and starting conversations Oh, all my friends are turnin' green You're the magician's assistant in their dream
Oh-ooh, oh-oh And they come unstuck
Lady, runnin' down to the riptide Taken away to the dark side I wanna be your left hand man I love you when you're singin' that song and I got a lump in my throat 'cause You're gonna sing the words wrong


[0] That's also party the reason why I like prediction markets so much. If you want to talk shit, that's fine. But you'll have to pay for it later.
[1] I would be very pleased if you let me know if this makes me a shitcoiner in your eyes, too.
On precision vs accuracy: my recollection is that a process is precise if it's outcomes have a low variance, while an accurate process's results have a mean value that is close to the correct value.
So, "precise zaps" implies that while it might not be the correct amount, it is more or less the only amount you were going to zap.
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Damn, you are right. So I basically said the opposite of what I wanted to say.
And it was even me who posted this. Should have reread my own post.
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It might depend on what we mean by the "correct" value.
If that means zapping what the post is worth to you, in the abstract, then your zaps might be inaccurate due to your somewhat arbitrary budget constraint.
If, however, "correct" means zapping the right amount for your chosen budget constraint, then your zaps are both accurate and precise.
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WOW! thanks for the forwarded zaps! I feel warm, fuzzy thoughts at having inspired you but also somewhat surprised.
I have had similar interactions with other people. I find myself genuinely wanting to have an interesting conversation or perhaps even philosophical debate about something. The non-conformity not only confuses but angers a lot of people. Like you, I want to ask them why they think a certain way and express my thoughts also but it is often misconstrued as looking for an argument or a fight. It usually ends with them realising my opinion on something is completely left field (to them anyway) and they are confused or stunned. I'm left feeling very awkward and misunderstood, whilst they usually completely misinterpret me, can't grasp the left field thinking, think I'm cookoo and I seriously wish I'd just sat making small talk instead.
I read in an article that up to 75 percent of people tend to go along with the decisions of a group (I suspect it might be more) even when the decision doesn't make any sense. It said this is because of our strong drive to achieve social conformity. It’s hard to disagree when everyone else is singing from the same song sheet - apparently. I don't get this same feeling to go along with everyone and most of the time have the strong urge to disagree! XDDD
I have learnt to appreciate peace by choosing when to say something and when to just leave it. I leave it most of the time! XD
One of my kids is very similar and when he was younger he came across as quite arrogant and a knowitall. I had to teach him the zen practice of just letting people be right, whilst encouraging the quirkiness at home :))
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222 sats \ 0 replies \ @mo fwd 15 Jan
Wowowowww, I'm amazed! Thanks for selecting my post @ekzyis I was hoping to have stackers interactions on the theme, but as you mentions, it's probably just the sad reality of facts and people accept it silently!
True is that there's so much good content on SN those days that it's really hard to filter the signal. Your posts always help me a lot (and sometimes validate) what matters around here.
Thanks again
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... And that makes three.
We all know what's going to happen now, don't we? It starts with a "W"...
He seems to speak regularly out of parts of my soul I am not necessarily aware of.
I'm simply the humble soulmate y'all didn't know you needed, nor wanted, yet here I am.
The paths of the universe are unfathomable indeed.
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I have a message for you: gdsorj
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gdsorj
Since you mentioned here that it's a Caesar cipher, I tried it again. But none of these plaintext make sense to me:
I used this decoder. I also used this one to verify but same results.
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Damn you chat gpt. Why did you mislead me? Now I am going to get fired.
Try this gdqjoh and please don’t tell interpol.
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10 sats \ 9 replies \ @ek OP 17 Jan
Damn you chat gpt. Why did you mislead me?
Because it wasn't the right tool for the task
Try this gdqjoh
Is it "dangle"?
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Very nice. The code word is dangle.
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Why did you use ChatGPT for this?
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Don’t judge me. I was a diversity hire for interpol. They had to meet their lazy quota. I will report you to HR if you keep bullying me.
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What if I start bullying you?
Andreas is indeed based as fuck.
There's almost no single fact[1] that I could learn about someone that would make me form a decisive conclusion about them with no other data, but if someone is dissing on AA for being a "shitcoiner" that is pretty damn close to enough.
[1] I'm talking about realistic stuff in the btc domain. Outside the btc domain there's lots of single datapoints that would lead me to a strong conclusion.
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Hi, how are You and thanks for forwarding Sats. But would You please be so kind to explain me by what circumstance I came to this honour? Greets Tom
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The third post I mentioned is from you :)
Great stuff… the first part reminded me of the comment ‘I think you would rather complain than quit’ from Henry Rollins about people saying they hate their job.
As for being a shitcoiner? Everything is a shitcoin… Rai coin is the only financial instrument I would use. Immutable? Nah. Immovable is the way of the future lol.
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Big day for your side.
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40 sats \ 0 replies \ @ek OP 15 Jan
Looks like a bug though. Maybe related to all the sats I got forwarded from the release.
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Hmmm...Mission Impossible 2 was / is one of my favourite movie ;)
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as you wish, shitcoiner @ekzyis 😂
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100 sats \ 6 replies \ @ek OP 15 Jan
But where are the arguments? :)
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fishing sats everyday 😂😂😂 damn, that sounds more like POW.
still trying to think.
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me digging through What are you working on this week?...
okay, I got one - sometimes @ekzyis promised / said something but often late or even forget to do it. 👀
you need to do what you promised - action aligns with your words.

no hurt feeling, because you asked for this:)
Call me a shitcoiner with good arguments.
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okay, I got one - sometimes @ekzyis promised / said something but often late or even forget to do it. 👀
you need to do what you promised - action aligns with your words.
That is indeed a good argument!
no hurt feeling, because you asked for this:)
That you think that could hurt my feelings is what actually is hurting my feelings, lol
But I think you are just playing messing with me :)
playing sounds more like you would play with a dog, lol
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Mhh, you're partly right. Foxes are kind of between dogs and cats.
Playful like a dog but fighty like a cat!
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Hey... that's my cat!
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Wow thanks for the forwarded Zaps!! YAY to nonconformity!
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deleted by author
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