Zap to Zero Day 20 | Dancing Guy
I didn't sleep this night. But I slept a few hours before midnight. I went for a walk with a plan at around 5 am instead: Leave the phone at home and only bring your watch that is used by terrorists to build bombs and the book Art of Deception with you. Walk the 30 minutes to the main station and read ten pages. Be back in an hour.
I had a plan and I would say I mostly sticked to it since I also took 2 euros with me and it took me closer to 2 hours.
Just in case I want to buy something. Like some sparkling water to stay hydrated.
I didn't want to buy anything else like my vice iced coffee. I decided that when I come home, I am going to eat breakfast at 8 am and start with intermittent fasting1. If I don't eat breakfast at 8 am, I am not going to eat breakfast at all. That's where the watch came in.
I also used it to test my sense of time. I would say my sense of time can be pretty bad. I regularly feel like I can't tell which time it is. Anything within four hours could make sense. It's a weird but interestingly positive feeling; depending on the context in which it comes up. It can feel like "tasting freedom". I also got this feeling while I walked around; trying to find an interesting new way to the main station: I forgot at which hour exactly I started my walk and how long I was already walking.
Was it 3, 4 or 5 am? And which time is it now?
To test my sense of time, I memorized a random moment. For example, reading some sign and telling myself that I will remember this2. Then I started the timer on my watch.
After some random amount of time being alone with my thoughts; walking around in the dark and meeting and greeting strangers with their own origin stories that I will probably never see again; I somehow got reminded about this moment. That's when I asked myself what I think how much time has passed. I usually suck at this (confident but wrong) but it has gotten better. This time, I guessed 30 minutes and I got it right within ± 30 seconds. That felt pretty good. Like being in control of time.
Still took me two hours to come back though; one hour more than initially planned. But I already knew I wouldn't make it back in time when I arrived at the main station since one hour already passed.
Satistics
| Date | Spent | Stacked (Rewards) | Posts | Comments | Rewarded |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023-12-28 | 13k | 8808 (n/a) | 2 | 35 | n/a |
| 2023-12-29 | 16.1k | 15.6k (5222) | 3 | 52 | ⚡ |
| 2023-12-30 | 10.8k | 9752 (7026) | 1 | 41 | ✍️ |
| 2023-12-31 | 20.5k | 17.9k (4379) | 5 | 61 | ⚡ |
| 2024-01-01 | 12.5k | 10.7k (7684) | 3 | 47 | ✍️ |
| 2024-01-02 | 16k | 19.5k (9353) | 6 | 36 | ✍️ |
| 2024-01-03 | 15.9k | 15.6k (6729) | 2 | 46 | ⚡ |
| 2024-01-04 | 11.4k | 11.4k ( | 3 | 38 | ✍️ |
| 2024-01-05 | 11.3k | 11.4k ( | 1 | 41 | ? |
| 2024-01-06 | 6691 | 6282 ( | 0 | 38 | ✍️ |
| 2024-01-07 | 8053 | 8503 ( | 3 | 20 | ✍️ |
| 2024-01-08 | 8873 | 9164 (1219) | 2 | 12 | ⚡ |
| 2024-01-09 | 5828 | 6808 (4649) | ✍️ | ||
| 2024-01-10 | 14.1k | 14.4k (4857) | 3 | 22 | ⚡ |
| 2024-01-11 | 11.8k | 10.4k (4109) | 3 | 22 | ✍️ |
| 2024-01-12 | 8743 | 8016 (4778) | 3 | 41 | ✍️ |
| 2024-01-13 | 9393 | 9339 (3116) | 2 | 17 | ⚡ |
| 2024-01-14 | 14.2k | 6697 (3533) | 4 | 41 | ✍️ |
| 2024-01-15 | 10.2k | 11.3k (3395) | 1 | 15 | ⚡ |
| 2024-01-16 | 6867 | 11.1k (2500) | 2 | 27 | ⚡ |
| 2024-01-17 | TBD | TBD (3982) | TBD | TBD | ⚡ |
Recent Superzaps
1. Solitude and Leadership
This post from @Kathleen_Croteau is the title post of this post3. I read this before going on my walk. In fact, this post inspired me to go on my solitary walk. It also inspired me to start taking notes while reading since a lot was going through my head while reading it.
This post explains very well why I am so intrigued by the military. I think my fascination started after I read Chickenhawk, the memoir of Robert Mason, a Huey transport pilot in Vietnam between August 1965 and July 1966. Can really recommend this book. Now to my highlights of the linked essay:
See, things have changed since I went to college in the ’80s. Everything has gotten much more intense. You have to do much more now to get into a top school like Yale or West Point, and you have to start a lot earlier. We didn’t begin thinking about college until we were juniors, and maybe we each did a couple of extracurriculars. But I know what it’s like for you guys now. It’s an endless series of hoops that you have to jump through, starting from way back, maybe as early as junior high school. Classes, standardized tests, extracurriculars in school, extracurriculars outside of school. Test prep courses, admissions coaches, private tutors. I sat on the Yale College admissions committee a couple of years ago. The first thing the admissions officer would do when presenting a case to the rest of the committee was read what they call the “brag” in admissions lingo, the list of the student’s extracurriculars. Well, it turned out that a student who had six or seven extracurriculars was already in trouble. Because the students who got in—in addition to perfect grades and top scores—usually had 10 or 12.So what I saw around me were great kids who had been trained to be world-class hoop jumpers. Any goal you set them, they could achieve. Any test you gave them, they could pass with flying colors. They were, as one of them put it herself, “excellent sheep.” I had no doubt that they would continue to jump through hoops and ace tests and go on to Harvard Business School, or Michigan Law School, or Johns Hopkins Medical School, or Goldman Sachs, or McKinsey consulting, or whatever. And this approach would indeed take them far in life. They would come back for their 25th reunion as a partner at White & Case, or an attending physician at Mass General, or an assistant secretary in the Department of State.That is exactly what places like Yale mean when they talk about training leaders. Educating people who make a big name for themselves in the world, people with impressive titles, people the university can brag about. People who make it to the top. People who can climb the greasy pole of whatever hierarchy they decide to attach themselves to.
"People the university can brag about" reminded me about an experience I had during my bachelor's degree.
I took a robotics lab with a friend and we almost failed it. The plan was to create a picking hand for a guitar. I don't remember if the fretting hand was also part of our project but it probably wasn't. We came up with this project idea on our own (they had some proposals for groups with no own ideas) and were really excited to build a robot that could essentially play live music. The faculty and tutors were also excited. One of the lecturers gave us his guitar which we could use to test our hand.
I think we were inspired by this video
However, we underestimated how much work printing something with a 3D printer would be in the final week. It also took us too long to figure out that we have to do PWM in software to be able to control six servos for the picking hand at once—one for each string.
So when it came time to print the 3D model, we showed it to our tutor and he said that this won't work at all. We made rookie mistakes. You can't print any 3D model. You have to consider that the 3D printer prints from the bottom to the top in layers. So some shapes are just impossible to print. We also didn't account for material costs. So we had to redo our complete model but then it seemed okay and they started printing.
The next day, they told us that the 3D printer stopped working and we don't have time to print another model; assuming the 3D printer would even start working again soon. That's when we went into panic mode. Up until then, everything seemed fine since we didn't account for an equipment failure like this and that they wouldn't give us more time in a case like this—even though it was their equipment that failed.
We then spent the last few days and nights in the lab to come up with some solution. Fortunately, we weren't the only ones who still were doing stuff at the last minute—like true students, you could say. The best part was when I overheard another friend of mine in another group telling someone from his group that complained about being tired that it doesn't matter in a very annoyed voice. If he wants, he can "go home like a baby" but he's definitely going to stay and sleep here if that's what it takes to get it done before the presentation tomorrow. He also said something like this:
Do you really think it's still about what we want? I think we're way past that point.
While they were arguing, we literally collected empty toilet paper roles to replace the work of the 3D printer and glued picks to the servos which we then somehow glued to pieces of wood we found around the lab. Whatever we built there, it must have consisted 90% out of duck tape.
my friend gluing a pick to the moving servo piece
For presentation day, we wanted to play Sweet Home Alabama so we programmed the servos to pick the strings at the right time for this song while one of us play the fretting hand. Imo, it worked well and was impressive considering the circumstances. It wasn't the full song but iirc, our project was more intended to be a proof of concept anyway.
However, I was obviously sleep deprived on presentation day. This means that I was joking a lot during the presentation about how much we improvised and how bad everything looks but still works somehow. The lecturers must have cringed a lot and iirc, I did give my friend almost zero time to speak. At the end of the presentation, the lecturer who lent us his guitar for our project immediately detached our toilet paper roles from his guitar visibly annoyed; probably even in disgust that his guitar had to endure this.
That lecturer who was initially as excited as we were about the idea later told us how he will never try something like this again with any student because we failed him so hard. There was no mention about how their whole equipment sucked ass. We had to use our own laptops for the whole time because the PCs would just freeze on attempted logins. And if they didn't freeze, they were so slow that they were of no use anyway. The tutors didn't care much—it seemed to not be their responsibility to make sure the PCs work. They also gave us basically no helpful guidance about the servos during the whole semester and kind of even slowed us down by telling us we should definitely do all the C and micro controller tutorials first, hence we spent like 20% of our time or more just turning LEDs on and off.
After the storm settled and we anxiously waited for our grades—what we thought was certain failure—we found out that we didn't fail the lab. We passed. We passed with the lowest grade possible but we passed. That surprised us. Because I also felt bad how the lab turned out, I asked for a meeting with the lecturer who gave us his guitar.
During this meeting, I learned that we only passed the lab because it would look bad in their statistics if we didn't. They are paying a lot of money for the lab so they have to "produce credit points" else the administration will shut them down because they are already very expensive.
I was kind of shocked to hear this. He was very blunt with us (which I also appreciate in hindsight) but it all sounded ridiculous, too. Didn't seem that way for him though. I left that room and didn't mention anything about how they failed us with their guidance and equipment as much as we failed them in his eyes. I think he was projecting a lot.
The both of us kind of became legends among the student body of the computer science department because of our presentation. The next year, they updated the rules for the labs. Students had to have regular meetings with their tutors now. And they did offer our project idea to students; unlike what was mentioned before with "never again".
Why is it so often that the best people are stuck in the middle and the people who are running things—the leaders—are the mediocrities? Because excellence isn’t usually what gets you up the greasy pole. What gets you up is a talent for maneuvering. Kissing up to the people above you, kicking down to the people below you. Pleasing your teachers, pleasing your superiors, picking a powerful mentor and riding his coattails until it’s time to stab him in the back. Jumping through hoops. Getting along by going along. Being whatever other people want you to be, so that it finally comes to seem that, like the manager of the Central Station, you have nothing inside you at all. Not taking stupid risks like trying to change how things are done or question why they’re done. Just keeping the routine going.
This reminded me of this scene from The Pacific:
We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going.
And this part seems to be about the same thing this meme is about:
Marlow believes in the need to find yourself just as much as anyone does, and the way to do it, he says, is work, solitary work. Concentration. Climbing on that steamboat and spending a few uninterrupted hours hammering it into shape. Or building a house, or cooking a meal, or even writing a college paper, if you really put yourself into it.
Also very relatable. For example, going bouldering alone or with a friend are two very different things to me. I also like to go on long walks on my own. When it gets warmer, I will do these long hikes early in the morning again. I really miss them.
Definitely among the most inspiring essays I've read.
2. Opinion: Spam can't cause high fees - Thriller post
This post from @Car which forwards sats to @Scoresby and @ThrillerBitcoin (isn't that basically @Car?) goes in depth about the following thesis:
If spammers are willing to pay the high fees, then the fees aren't actually high or the spammers aren't actually spamming.
I also liked how it has a comparison of "Spam that comes in your inbox vs Spam that comes in a tin" at the end since I have seen the argument that people who don't want to block or censor (or however you want to call it) inscriptions should also disable their spam filters in their inbox. Imo, it's not the same since spam on bitcoin has significant cost to it:
Spam that comes in your inbox vs Spam that comes in a tinThe spam you get in your email inbox doesn't pay any fees. A lot of the building blocks of Bitcoin itself have their roots in designing cost back into email to prevent spam. The spam that comes in a tin, on the other hand, may be unhealthy and gross and may fill up menus at our favorite restaurants– but it definitely won't be driven away by fees.I believe there are two different conversations here. The first one is about how you stop something like spam in your inbox. Sure, the spammers want to send their emails and and we want to stop them, but it's not censorship because there's no built-in system to regulate the cost. Essentially it's figuring out how to deal with a DDOS. The second conversation, about how you keep spam in the tin off menus at restaurants or shelves at grocery stores very much is censorship.
The post had 44 comments so I am pretty sure there is something in there you might want to read.
Challenge of the Day
Set a time at which you will do a specific thing. And do it at this time with no excuses. For me, it's dinner at 6 pm. If I don't start with preparing dinner at 6 pm at least (that's already a failure but we should roll with the punches), no dinner for me today.
Song of the Day
I walk a lonely road The only one that I have ever known Don't know where it goes But it's home to me, and I walk alone I walk this empty street On the Boulevard of Broken Dreams Where the city sleeps And I'm the only one, and I walk aloneI walk alone, I walk alone I walk alone, I walk a—
I am really running out of ideas about things to say about endings. When did I even start with this?
Is this the end of me ending my posts with something about endings?