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.

Same honestly. And if I ever ask a question that someone might think is a duplicate, I link to that question and say something like “I found X, but the answers here don’t reflect Y”.

Eh, that’s a mixed bag. Absolutely, one could setup shared delete requests, to federate a delete request, but it would be a bit of a lie as anyone could simply… update their instance to simply ignore delete requests.

For now, simply not having a delete feature is a more honest to the realities of the fediverse. There’ll never be a “true” delete, even if they do eventually support one that’s “good enough”.

Yeah, similar experience. The only game I tried was basically a web version of state.io, which was already a free app anyway, but instead I got to play a worse version in YT that made my phone burning hot. Cool.

I actually did enjoy it, so I just… downloaded the real app and never booted a game via YT again.

I’d be very surprised if anything functional actually comes out of this. Far more likely they get scammed out of the money by garbage like the current “AI writing detection” methods, with terrible success rates that cause more societal problems than they solve.

Eh, that is kinda the appeal of Reddit, and its alternatives. Finding smaller communities of likeminded individuals that you can group into a tailored feed.

I always say the magic of this model is that it’s not just a firehose of every possible interest, it’s more like a shower of dozens of tiny handpicked jets. It just happens that on Lemmy, the “All” feed is still reasonably tailored to the main demographic here. That being tech nerds who dislike Reddit’s recent decisions enough to make a change.

Legally responsible, for one.

I.E. If a federated instance hosted pedophilia, that content would be copied to, and served by, your instance’s infrastructure, which is obviously legally problematic.

Surprisingly legible, but feels like I can only read it with momentum, flitting past it and letting my subconscious tell me where the word breaks are. The moment I get confused and look more closely, it becomes almost impossible to read.

So true, I have to do this with some predatory mobile game or another every year or two. Sometimes one of them just gets you.

Ah yeah, there is some of that? Not totally unfounded, although my understanding is more that Angels know God is there, and always have, so they don’t have to have faith, and they don’t have the “sin nature” we do as a result of Adam and Eve eating that apple. Basically they don’t seem to have that natural selfishness we do, so their relationship with God isn’t as personal, and obedience to him comes much more easily. We are more “like God” (“made in his image”, in Genesis terms). As such, those who do follow God will “rank higher” than angels, whatever that actually looks like.

That said… it’s a bit ridiculous to assert that they don’t have any free will, because a bunch of them rebelled against God. It wouldn’t surprise me if Catholic ideology disagrees with me here though, although I don’t think there’s much of that in the actual text of the Bible.

Happy to help! I like studying this stuff, and it’s fun to share it when I get the chance.

Honestly, I suspect the “demons torture humans in hell” probably originates from their seeming to want to torture the possessed.

Because in the biblical conception of hell, it’s very much not “demons torture humans” it’s more like a lake of fire to torture the demons, which unfortunate humans are also thrown into. There’s no organization or structure whatsoever. Also, nobody is currently there, humans are just… dead, or in purgatory/Gehenna, a sort of neutral waiting place, waiting to be raised back to life at the end, and sorted then.

Their role biblically seems to be just… acting against God, out of spite for being kicked out, perhaps? They seem to act to tempt humans not to find/love/follow God. Not much is given as to their motivations though, the Biblical authors truly aren’t that interested in them, besides as a warning about temptation. A shame, as they’re obviously just… fascinating to learn about, but it’s not a priority for them to write about.

They also aren’t given much credit, either. Rather than the “epic struggle of God vs Satan” we like to characterize, it’s more like… Satan and demons are permitted to roam about, but are absolutely beneath God, and can/will eventually be rounded up and thrown out very quickly. They’re characterized as accidentally playing a role in Gods plan, and given tentative leash for that reason. Satan apparently is even still allowed to visit heaven, and argues with God? See Job. Him getting locked out of heaven permanently is one of the kickoff moments of Revelation/the biblical apocalypse. Again, not much detail on this relationship, and honestly some of even this much detail is speculation.

The modern conception of “hell” is quite interesting, as it’s mostly just imaginative fiction, likely heavily inspired by pagan cultures that merged with Christianity as it spread across the world.