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’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.

They did overhaul the controller mapping in this update, along with just about everything else, so it would be worth checking out. I really can’t emphasize enough how massive this update is, it’s like the emulator leaping from 2010 to 2024, they’ve been exceptionally active over the past 4 years.

Aren’t there emulators for newer platforms out there now?

And of course. I assume you’re referring to RPCS3 for PS3. PS4 is also in the early stages of being emulated, with simple games being playable.

Ugh, if only. Amazon has done everything in their power to bury and strip that number from the internet. Once upon a time that worked great.

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.

For sure, valid to fear the enshittification of steam. But they aren’t killing proton. Maybe ignoring proton at worst. But Steam has profit motivations for not being reliant on Windows, which has actively been trying to supplant them with the Windows Store for years.

As another separate, profit-motivated company, with a gaming division and a lot to gain from eating Steam’s lunch, Microsoft is not Steam’s friend. Proton is a critical bargaining tool for them, and not having to include windows licenses for devices like the Steam Deck helps their costs too.

Honestly, I like this idea, just because it means I could block your instance in my app and instantly filter out that kind of content, just like how someone can block lemmynsfw to get rid of almost all porn.

Yeah, nothing but respect for Lego here. Tried it, proved it wasn’t viable, chose not to do it just for the PR, and set back out to continue looking for something that actually works.

This seems amazing! As someone with an overflowing shelf, and a lust for some of those insane 500$+ Star Wars sets they’ve been putting out, I’d go crazy for this.

Hopefully this does very well, and we can have a similar concept in Canada one day.

Not much of an addition, but you’re absolutely right, in most systems that are expected to be highly available, there’s standard maintenance times, an agreement in place, and no critical use of the system is permitted to be scheduled in that regular time period. Any deployments are limited to that window, in case a rollback is necessary, data sync, etc.

All of that is in addition to the type of high availability stuff you’re describing.

Very true. As someone who likes the all feed as a decent way to find new communities and just generally see more content, it’s been a lot of using the “Block Instance” button, and I have NSFW turned off, there’s still an abundance of Lemmynsfw celeb type content. I won’t even consider enabling NSFW until we get that functionality.

Agreed. The upload schedule has been a holy grail within LTT for a long time, and I truly believe it’s the root of all of this, yes, even the sexual harassment. Or at least how that harassment was handled so poorly. When do you have time to make good HR policies? Pull people into HR for reprimanding? Have opportunities for others to second guess decisions? Do training? Or heck, even just have less tired and irritable people making in-the-moment stupid decisions?

This uncompromising maximum velocity hurts everyone, and I hope they keep never bring it back to this pace, even after the process improvements they have planned.

Exactly the mistake threads just made, trying to capitalize on twitter’s rate limiting fiasco. The “general public” is extremely fickle, and Reddit will give us more opportunities.

I’m not sure I understand your position here, because voting is such a minor part of the system. A troll that only trolls by upvoting and downvoting isn’t much of a threat, unless they’ve got a dozen alt accounts or a botnet, both of which are different situations that should be handled differently. “The definition of a troll” is ridiculous hyperbole.

And as far as bans are concerned, that’s a moderation problem, not your role as an individual. I’ve never suggested votes should be completely untraceable, that’d be patently ridiculous and remove the ability to actually handle vote manipulation. Moderators and admins should obviously have that access, as I’ve asserted in this thread.

I’m also not advocating my votes be anonymous, I’m fine with having them public on my page. That alone gives you the complete ability to make a judgement about me as a person, or whatever it is you want to do with that. What I’m suggesting is that a user who’s just been downvoted shouldn’t have a trivial way of linking it to the individual who downvoted them in order to harass them.

Frankly, the impression I’m getting is that you’re not actually paying much attention to the case I’ve made, and are instead just using my comments as a platform to have a completely different argument that you’re passionate about. That’s the ONLY way that you could have missed my point so entirely, and come to the conclusion that I could ONLY be a troll or a moron.

It’s not being a troll, downvotes are part of the system for a reason: suppressing toxicity. If you downvote a toxic comment to push it down in the algorithm, there shouldn’t be a risk of that toxic person deciding they have a grudge and attacking you personally. Otherwise you risk downvotes not being used for their intended purpose, and an overall more toxic environment.

Yeah, having it on your user page is much less dangerous, imo. Still a possibility of getting called out if you downvote someone you’re arguing with, but you’re already in the comments there.

The only way I see a problem is if someone writes a bot or extension that reads the user profile into something “per comment”, and if that gets enough traction and use to build up a strong database. However, in that case, I’d imagine the Lemmy devs would build a feature to let instance admins hide that information from regular users.