Zap to Zero Day 23 | Nocturnal
A colleague at my previous company also had regular sleep problems. He told us that he got diagnosed iirc with something I certainly don't remember. He told us in one team meeting that over time, he realized that shifting his sleep by one hour every day works the best for him.
So this means that he goes to sleep one hour later every day and thus also wakes up one hour later. Maybe I'll ask him how he's doing. He was one of my favorite colleagues to work with. Excellent coder, very honest in his feedback to anyone in the company, especially higher-ups. During an onsite where the whole company was invited (we were spread all over the world), he reminded me of this guy:
However, he didn't like programming even though he knows that he's good at it. He told me this when he asked me if I would feel comfortable to have a call with another company where he is interviewing for a position which involves less coding. It wasn't a secret that he was looking for another position so that wasn't the problem. The problem was just the conflict of interest: He was essentially asking me to talk to someone who plans to "steal" one of the last great colleagues that were still here when I started almost 3 years ago. And my answers could apparently have an effect on their decision to hire him.
I accepted since I also felt honored that he picked me. I was just a working student but had daily interactions with him. For some reason, I was the only one in the whole company who worked closely with him on his projects. I guess the reason was simply that my own project had a great overlap with what he was doing. But I was not the only one who was asked to do such a call. The other company (a major player in the software industry) wanted to have three such calls.
The call itself was pretty funny. They asked me questions where it was quite obvious what they wanted to hear:
How is it to work with him? Can he communicate clearly? Does he take responsibility?
So the call was a breeze and was over within 10 minutes. I didn't make anything up—since as mentioned, it was indeed great to work with him which made the invitation to the call a little awkward—but it felt more like a formality than something impactful. I think they already made up their minds but wanted to make super sure that none of his colleagues would surprise them and mention something really bad about him. Apparently, none did and he got hired.
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 | 6008 | 6931 (3982) | 1 | 21 | ⚡ |
| 2024-01-18 | 6827 | 7606 (2544) | 27 | ⚡ | |
| 2024-01-19 | 5193 | 6027 (3755) | 1 | 11 | ⚡ |
| 2024-01-20 | TBD | TBD (1756) | TBD | TBD | ⚡ |
JavaScript such random, much surprise, very fun
Recent Superzaps
1. How do you explain zapping to non-bitcoiners?
This post from @Scoresby (who was also featured in @Car's recent post) is about the lingo of bitcoiners.
I found this post very interesting since I also have some personal experience with this. But first some history since I find etymology also very interesting:
[Etymology is] the history of a linguistic form (such as a word) shown by tracing its development since its earliest recorded occurrence in the language where it is found, by tracing its transmission from one language to another, by analyzing it into its component parts, by identifying its cognates in other languages, or by tracing it and its cognates to a common ancestral form in an ancestral language
As far as I remember, the term was first used around the time when @jb55 created NIP-57 and called it Lightning Zaps. With this NIP, he wrote rushed history almost a year ago:
I kinda rushed this and might be underspecified, let me know if anything seems unclear.
One indicator that this is indeed one of the first times the term "zap" was mentioned is that @bumi wrote this in the PR:
I am excited to see the interest of deeply integrating lightning payments into Nostr. The name zaps is great!
However, I am not sure if @jb55 came up with the name by himself. Maybe it just came up in a discussion on nostr or elsewhere. But I am pretty sure that around the time the PR was created and merged in February 2023 (much quicker than @benthecarman's PR), people quickly started to call sending someone sats on nostr zapping. SN followed the trend and renamed all mentioning of "tips" to "zaps" in commit
3e4161a1 in June 2023.Kind of crazy that this isn't even a year ago. Can you imagine nostr without zapping? Or can you imagine calling zapping not zapping? I wasn't even sure how we called zapping on SN before.
I personally am very happy that we have a own term for it now. Zapping fits so nicely since the world is closely related to lightning (etymology matters!). Also, I think the term "tipping" was never a great fit since imo, "tipping" is about paying someone more after you already paid them. But that's not what we do on SN and nostr. Maybe that's also what confused Apple when they took Damus off their app store (probably not). If you tip someone, the common usage implies that you bought something from them before.
Regarding my own personal experience with explaining it to others: I found it hard to explain to friends that it's not awkward to receive money. They felt like that makes the whole interaction weird. I tried to explain it less constrained to social media. I imagined a world where everyone knows how to zap each other. So if someone was nice to you that day, you could just zap them. I think that made it even weirder for them.
But I think where I did a bad job was that I didn't mean that you have to do it immediately on the spot. If someone held the door open for you, you don't pull out your phone to zap them. That would indeed be awkward. It also invites people who do something just to get zapped and thus start to feel entitled:
I was so nice to her, why didn't she zap me?! She must be a horrible person.
But imo, zaps shouldn't be the reason why we're being nice to each other—even though I know it can be hard and is a big reason. Humans are greedy by nature. But maybe it helps to say that it shouldn't be the only reason?
So what I struggled with was to explain that I imagined zapping in this future world more to be about daily reports how other people felt about interacting with you. They simply zapped you later when they were still thinking about you on the toilet or something and wanted to incentivize your current behavior.
If you didn't get a lot of zaps at the end of the day, maybe you weren't as nice as you thought you were during the day. If you received a lot of zaps, you should just continue to do whatever you did. Everything would be anonymous since sats are the signal. No names, no faces, no authority. Just sats via zaps.
2. Fiat Games on Bitcoin
This post from @jimmysong mentioned points that are interesting, important and fresh at the same time.
As an aspiring military (history) nerd, I especially liked his intro about standing armies:
There's a saying about standing armies in peacetime, it's generally not a good idea. Wartime emergencies are one thing, but when you have a standing army during peacetime, they generally just get in the way because, like most armies, they crave action.If you have a perfectly virtuous military, perhaps having a standing army is fine, but given the flaws of the human condition, there's bound to be some trouble. Many a revolution started with standing armies that felt disrespected and seized power when they could.
@jimmysong goes into detail why he believes that doing nothing is better than building something of no value:
I mention this because this dynamic is at play in the Bitcoin ecosystem, where a bunch of bored holders are starting to make trouble. They identified as Bitcoin Maximalist even as recently as a few years ago, yet got off the rails, pushing all sorts of idiocy like this ordinals/brc-20 stuff.The problem with these people is that they crave action. They can't just sit back and enjoy the ride. They're the type that needs to always be doing something, good or bad. And let's face it, once you get that Bitcoin is sound money and have given your pitch to your friends and relatives, it's a matter of waiting things out and watching your fiat enemies float by the proverbial river. I've been in those conversations, they go around the same topics over and over again.As a result, these people feast on news. Wow, Michael Saylor did something, or there's an ETF coming, or X or Y or Z is happening. They're all addicted to talking and rallying the troops and once you're bored of talking about the things that matter, there's a natural tendency to talk about the things that don't matter as if they were.I blame the BUIDL movement that emphasized building something, anything. It's an understandable attitude. Surely, doing something is better than doing nothing, right?
I agree with him. Doing nothing can definitely be better than doing something. I noticed this a lot in the past with things that I consider virtue signalling:
Virtue signalling is the popular modern habit of indicating that one has virtue merely by expressing disgust or favour for certain political ideas or cultural happenings.
I am also a big fan of the analogies he is making. I think analogies can help a lot with understanding what someone is saying since our brains work the best when they can connect things together. He explains this "BUIDL movement" with the $800B TARP bailout during the 2008 crisis, the behavior of VCs in the bitcoin space, and even politicians in general. But you should just read the post.
Challenge of the Day
Try out (open) meditation if you haven't already. Is this even a challenge?
Song of the Day
Put on those shades And wave to yesterday The sunlight hurts my eyes Put on those shades And wave to yesterday The sunlight hurts my eyes
Footnotes
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I love using the git pickaxe. I found this commit using
git log -S "zap". However, I realized afterwards that I could have found it usinggit log --grep "zap", too. I triedgit log --grepbefore but with "zaps" instead of "zap". ↩