Ah, he recommends saving 1000$, then tackling your debt, then building to 3-6 months expenses. Which is… fine, I agree with the principle of it, but that number is definitely one of those things I’d consider being more flexible with. The amount I think you should save before tackling your debts depends on a lot of factors.

I also don’t necessarily agree with saving that amount in two blocks, we personally saved 1000$, paid the most pressing card off, and then saved another 1000$. I think it makes sense to adjust that minimum emergency fund number as your situation evolves.

Just another case where I find he works fine as a starting point, but where most people shouldn’t follow his advice to the letter.

Mmm, excellent addendum to my proposed changes. 1000$ is better than nothing, but it hasn’t really kept up with inflation, and circumstances really change things. For example, if you have a house, the potential opportunity and cost of an “emergency” goes up immensely.

But yeah, for us personally we pretty quickly went up to a 2000$ emergency fund, despite the relative stability of renting and driving a fairly new car. We’ll be working on our 3-6 month expense emergency fund soon. I definitely think it’s better to view the baby steps as flexible guidance on a starting point, rather than the concrete law they frame it as.

I think I have an interesting perspective here, as someone who did kinda get their finances under control thanks to a Dave Ramsey course, and later had the unpleasant experience of discovering how much of a right-wing idiot he is during COVID.

Something I’ve noticed is that a lot of his advice seems targeted towards people who are crushingly bad at navigating debt. One of the most viral things they do is called “the debt free scream”, where people share their stories on his radio show after getting debt free, and just… do a victory scream, essentially. Kinda fun, not really a bad thing, but it shows how most of the people he deals with directly and the ones that make the best marketing are people with hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of debt despite making very average money. Just absolutely no self-preservation instinct around available credit.

And for these people I think his advice makes sense. Absolutely no debt, debt is the enemy, it will crush you. And stuff like how he pushes you to chase paying debt with high intensity, get multiple jobs, etc. Because otherwise it’s impossible to even manage to put money on the principle of a debt that large.

For the average person though? His best advice is basic budgeting, focusing on paying your debts one by one so you can celebrate each victory quickly, and building an emergency fund so you don’t need to go backwards as soon as you have a car problem. Also, yeah, ditch the brand new truck, it’s burying you in debt you didn’t need.

But absolutely, I’d highly recommend modifying his recommendations for most people, and I don’t doubt someone out there is doing a better job of teaching this stuff than Ramsey is. My advised tweaks:

• Find a budget you can live with, paying your debts a couple months faster isn’t worth being miserable, and makes it more likely you’ll be able to stick to a budget for as long as it takes.
• Zero-based budgeting (budgeting every dollar at the start of the month) isn’t really necessary, leaving a little loose change that you can allocate later once the month is actually happening is pretty helpful. It’s ok to shift things around so long as you aren’t spending money you don’t have.
• Actually do keep “fun money” or “restaurant money”, so long as you’re capable of including it in the budget without hamstringing your ability to pay debt. If you’re giving more to debt than these things, then you’re probably fine.
• Ultimately just… think for yourself, and make your own decisions, based on your own income and expenses. Ramsey is a decent, if aggressive, starting point (and again, not the best person, he seems to have lost the plot somewhere).

I don’t know if I give it a 0% chance yet. He needed to average 8 points per race, and Red Bull has been all over the map lately.

But yes, this shifts the onus over to Red Bull having to screw up, moreso than Lando being able to do it while they maintain performance. Lando could potentially earn up to 25 points if Max has a single DNF, which would erase this weekend entirely. And we don’t know that he won’t crawl his way up to 5th or something tomorrow either, nor does this necessarily mean Max will dominate tomorrow.

Still lots on the line though, if Max does place particularly well and Lando can’t get into the points, a 20+ points swing in his favour would lock down the WDC pretty well. An interesting race to watch for sure, the end of this season has a much more competitive WDC than last season’s.

Makes sense. I wouldn’t think the average person taking on the exceptional training of Olympians would be good for you, but of those with the natural health and talent to try, Olympians are the ones who got that far without injuring themselves, and will therefore likely continue with some safe training with proper technique, and maintaining good health into old age. I’d imagine that benefit outweighs the damage extreme sports and training does to your body.

I’d assume that measuring generally fit people who exercise regularly and eat well, without pursuing the extremism of world class athleticism, would live even longer on average.

Unsurprised. I was involved in some great discussion on SBMM on Lemmy recently, and people’s issues with it, but this confirms what I suspected. SBMM is better for companies, maximizing player on-boarding and player retention, which is what’s necessary to get more players and revenue. Even if I honestly think it’s a worse experience than the old school way, and keeps me from personally enjoying these games.

I’m inclined to agree! That’s awesome, adding that to my following immediately.

Ooh, this is very interesting. I’m a sucker for emulator progress reports, just a fascinating intersection of programming, graphics, and gaming. My personal RSS feeds right now (which I’d love to add lemmy discussion to) are:

https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/feeds/ https://pcsx2.net/blog/rss.xml https://www.libretro.com/index.php/feed/ https://blog.ryujinx.org/rss/ https://xenia.jp/feed.xml

Yeah, agreed, a good DLC is awesome. The example that comes to mind for me is From Soft. Top notch content, delivered well after the release of top notch games, at a fair price, which expand on the level and boss design and improve it every time, while stepping up the difficulty for those who loved and fully completed the base content.

I wish every game I ever loved would get DLC like that.

Yeah, personally I’ve always enjoyed playing IRL with people who are better than me. Having a real person gives me that constant measuring stick I’m looking for, and playing with someone better gives me someone to watch and learn from, which helps me improve way more quickly. But that’s… not what gets you the big sales numbers and a smooth player onboarding.

For PvP stuff, the experience I enjoyed the most was playing Smash with dorm mates in college. Getting my ass handed to me in 1v1 matches for months by the guy who owned the console, but learning, grinding, letting that guy I wanted to beat motivate me to use the training room, to watch YouTube videos, study techniques, and try to really master my character, learning how to be unpredictable and perform mix ups that needed to fool an experienced player who knew my weaknesses better than anyone, it was so satisfying. And by the end of the year we were on even footing, and I was maybe even a little better, which just felt incredible and so well earned.

That experience is what ranked PvP just completely lacks. Every time you win they just swap in new players who are that little step better than you until you’re perfectly even again. Which is great on a game-to-game scale, each battle is hard fought, but just offers nothing on that wider timescale that I need to really care.

Fair, you definitely become more skilled (I put 500 or so hours into DotA 2 years ago), and you can somewhat measure that, but I find it’s not nearly as potent.

My additional issue, if you take a long break like I did, is that the MMR somewhat traps you. When I came back, not only was it extremely frustrating to have the head knowledge about what I needed to do (I.E. denying creeps and stealing last hits for optimal farming) while not having the skill to execute it anymore, but I was also trapped in matches with only players who had the skill to capitalize on those mistakes and destroy me. Add to that the pressure of letting down a whole team of 5 players, and my attempts to get back into the game later were miserable.

By comparison, I’m returning to Celeste right now, and checking out the strawberry jam mod. It’s been incredibly satisfying to see how quickly I pick up and relearn those mechanics, and I’m just crushing the base game levels that gave me so much trouble the first time, while giving me an enjoyable de-rust. It’s been a pleasure to dive back in, and I’m excited to see what heights I can reach, eager to beat the Farewell DLC that I gave up on before and to push myself to even harder modded content.

Maybe I could get a similar experience in DotA, by playing hours of bot matches to relearn fundamentals, and watching lots of YouTube content to learn how the meta is shifted in my absence, but that’s a much different grind than I’m having in Celeste, just enjoying the nostalgia of the game and revelling in how much quicker relearning is than the initial learning. And I never have to cope with any social pressures of letting my team down, or watching my hard earned MMR crumble away as the game repeatedly reminds me how much worse I’ve gotten.

Despite the massive amount of comments here, I still don’t see anyone talking about my personal issue with PvP here.

It’s ranked matchmaking. In order to keep things working at all, you have to pair players with players of a similar skill. And this means that fundamentally you don’t get a sense of progression besides an MMR ranking. Your win rate will always be roughly 50%, unless you either smurf, or become the literal best in the world. Compare that to tough PvE games, like Doom Eternal, or a brutal platformer, where you can raise your difficulty, beat stuff you could’ve never beaten before, and generally see your progression. Heck, if you want to relax, just put the difficulty back or crush some earlier levels. I love to go back and learn to speedrun some of my favourite platformers, and that feels awesome. Games like Souls are also great at this, when you have to explore an earlier area and the enemies are just… so easy and satisfying to roll through. Or moments like in Sekiro, when you go into NG+ or just start a new playthrough and crush Genichiro on the first encounter.

And this whole thing is just… so fundamentally necessary for PvP to work, you can’t let new players get utterly crushed by veterans, so it’s not something anyone is going to “fix”. But I’m not hopping onto an endless treadmill that’s never going to give me a sense of mastery. Especially not with so many other fantastic games out there I want to check out.

From what I understand, the majority of the most ridiculous minecraft feats are just… writing code to write Minecraft world data for logic circuits, not actually placing the blocks by hand. At a certain scale writing some kind of monstrous compiler to place blocks for you based on a proper circuit plan or programming language becomes easier.

Had a coworker today ask me to change a variable to be in “screaming snake case”. So I google it, and sure enough, take your snake case (example_variable) and put it in All Caps (EXAMPLE_VARIABLE). And now your snake case is screaming. Had me giggling reading the PR feedback, I love stupid programmer naming conventions.

Storytime! Earlier this year, I had an Amazon package stolen. We had reason to be suspicious, so we immediately contacted the landlord and within six hours we had video footage of a woman biking up to the building, taking our packages, and hurriedly leaving.

So of course, I go to Amazon and try to report my package as stolen… which traps me for a whole hour in a loop with Amazon’s “chat support” AI, repeatedly insisting that I wait 48 hours “in case my package shows up”. I cannot explain to this thing clearly enough that, no, it’s not showing up, I literally have video evidence of it being stolen that I’m willing to send you. It literally cuts off the conversation once it gives its final “solution” and I have to restart the convo over and over.

Takes me hours to wrench a damn phone number out of the thing, and a human being actually understands me and sends me a refund within 5 minutes.

Fiction is fiction. This is the same kind of logic that adults used when I was a kid because Harry Potter promoted witchcraft, or when the country had a moral panic because Call of Duty had their children killing people. Nothing in the game literally advocates for or glorifies IRL slavery, that would be absurd.

If you can’t parse fiction from reality, then you aren’t fit for just about anything. Movies, music, video games, books, etc. Every medium frequently depicts things you shouldn’t emulate. Even the literal Bible has depictions of slavery, rape, incest, and murder.