[-] Hazzard@lemm.ee 17 points 1 day ago

Eh, this is a thing, large companies often have internal rules and maximums about how much they can pay any given job title. For example, on our team, everyone we hire is given the role "senior full stack developer", not because they're particularly senior, in some cases we're literally hiring out of college, but because it allows us to pay them better with internal company politics.

[-] Hazzard@lemm.ee 2 points 2 days ago

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.

[-] Hazzard@lemm.ee 6 points 3 days ago

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).
[-] Hazzard@lemm.ee 4 points 4 days ago

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.

[-] Hazzard@lemm.ee 37 points 2 months ago

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.

[-] Hazzard@lemm.ee 75 points 3 months ago

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.

2
Looking for First Build Advice (ca.pcpartpicker.com)
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by Hazzard@lemm.ee to c/buildapc@lemmy.world

Never built a PC before, but I've got some tech awareness, LTT videos, Digital Foundry, that kind of thing. I've also helped friends build PCs, but I've never actually pulled the trigger and built my own PC, so I'm hoping to get some experienced eyes on this thing to help out! I based this build off PcPartPickers default "AMD build", and replaced many of the parts one by one.

Budget is about 1500$ CAD, and I'm hoping to use this thing as a living room gaming PC. I've also got a Series X, so I'm mostly looking to run emulators at high settings, mod some games, play some of the Sony exclusives that hit PC, some non-crossplay multiplayer, that kind of thing.

Looking to get something upgradable, that I can build onto in the future as well. Thus my paying a little more for AM5, for example.

Please let me know if I'm buying anything dumb, or making any missteps like not getting enough VRAM for modern system emulators or something. Incredibly nervous and excited about finally doing this! Thanks so much for any help you can give!

[-] Hazzard@lemm.ee 134 points 10 months ago

A lot of assuming that this project was dead serious in here.... he's a college student, presumably working on a senior project or something. Hooking up a glasses display, to his phone with a mic and the ChatGPT API isn't a massive endeavour, either, and this is funny as all hell if you assume he's mocking the industry and being tongue-in-cheek. RizzGPT? Charisma As A Service?

Point being, don't despair for this guy, he's hilarious!

[-] Hazzard@lemm.ee 86 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think maybe you're out of the loop here. This is part of a trend to screw over bots that automatically steal art and sell it on random sites. That's why others are commenting stuff like "I'd buy this on a t-shirt!".

The tactic has already been proven to work several times, when people post stuff like this, and then report the shops that steal it to Disney's legal team. It's a clever way to leverage Disney's lawyers to protect regular artists who couldn't afford to sue all these random websites.

[-] Hazzard@lemm.ee 59 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[-] Hazzard@lemm.ee 43 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] Hazzard@lemm.ee 130 points 1 year ago

Hmmm, tbh, I don't think that's a feature I'd want. Every now and again you see "that guy" furious that he's getting downvotes, doubling down and trying to start an argument or something. I don't need that guy showing up in my DMs.

[-] Hazzard@lemm.ee 81 points 1 year ago

This is very intriguing.... I actually work in CBC (nowhere near content or with the social media people who'd make these kinds of decisions), but as a developer I get 20% time to dabble with anything I think might be useful. I haven't used it in a while, but a CBC ActivityPub instance may be just the right project, especially if it can auto-publish our content from the same feeds that power our site.

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Hazzard

joined 1 year ago