AI-generated slop. This is a pretty basic story, you should have the basic capability of just typing out a couple sentences. Assuming that the entire account isn’t just a bot, of course.

You’re interviewing them as much as they’re interviewing you. It reflects poorly on you if you don’t ask questions. Because it shows that you haven’t actually thought about how you plan to fulfill your job expectations.

Advice: do some research on the company, know what they do, know what you’ll probably do if you get hired. Then come up with questions - things that aren’t obvious through your research. For instance, ask them to talk about work culture, management style, expectations of your performance, etc. The exact questions will depend on the specifics of the job. But in other words, put some careful thought into envisioning the day-to-day activities of the company and how you foresee yourself fitting within that structural framework.

Second advice: search up common interview questions, and prepare an answer to them. It’ll be shame if you get tripped up on easy questions. For instance, you should know how to respond if they ask you why you want this job.

2000 a month is not enough to live on (California), but it’s also not nothing. It’s a pretty serious amount of money, especially if it’s given per month. For reference, the median salary in California is around 4000 per month before tax (according to US Census). If we assume that he is an average person from California, then he is giving you 50% of his entire income. He’s left with 2000 a month himself, which isn’t enough for him to survive. And California pays well, so if he’s not from California, then he’s likely sacrificing a lot more than in this example.

As a general rule of thumb, a single person’s salary in America typically cannot support 2 people, so even if he’s “only” giving you minimum wage, it’s still a very substantial amount of money. Also, 2000 a month is almost double of what you earn on federal minimum wage, so what your friends say isn’t even true.

Honestly, my read is that your friends sound problematic. It’s minimizing and downplaying his contribution and sacrifices, even if it’s meant to be a joke.

Stats is technically math but it’s the softest math you can imagine. A huge amount of it is data collection and interpretation. It works different parts of your brain, requires different skills than pure math

I think, at the core, my argument is simply this: don’t rush into sex. Take your time to figure out if this is really what you want.

I believe everyone can agree to that statement. But my perspective is that quantifiable, actionable advice is more helpful than advice in which the recipient has to apply their own judgment (what’s the purpose of giving the advice then?), and so I have semi-arbitrarily chosen that 6 months to wait is a safe bet and 1 year is ideal.

And I acknowledge that waiting a year is unusually chaste - that’s why I consider it to be an ideal circumstance rather than a practicable target. Is waiting a year for sex unusually risk-averse? Yes, undeniably. But you also can’t deny that waiting that time would give you the best perspective on whether or not it’s a good idea to have sex with someone

I think we’re actually on the same page then. I don’t think you’re wrong in any way, I just also don’t think these 2 perspectives are necessarily mutually exclusive

Very true, I acknowledge that safe sex can be had much earlier. But I don’t think my advice is as absurd as it sounds at first glance.

6 months seems long on paper but from what I’ve observed, it’s really not that long in context. By my estimate, that’s around the time when a casual relationship transitions into a more serious relationship. So really, all I’m saying is to make sure that you’re serious before you commit to taking the risk. I’m just drawing a semi-arbitrary line to delineate a casual and a serious relationship. I consider it to be more actionable to have a solid number, especially for someone who doesn’t yet know what a casual or a serious relationship looks like.

In context, I know an acquaintance whom I would describe as very free-spirited. She ended up waiting something like 4 months before her first sexual contact with her significant other, and that was without any advice. So 6 months is quite doable in my opinion.

There’s certainly nothing morally wrong with casual sex, I do not hold it against someone if they choose to have sex before 6 months. But practically speaking (and I would argue that an inexperienced person is in most need to hear practical advice), I still stand by my stance that it’s a good idea to err on the side of caution. It’s always more preferable to start having sex too late than to start having sex too early. And that’s especially true when you factor in that we are starting off this potential relationship with some concerning red flags

I think sexual intimacy can be okay at an earlier stage, as long as you ensure clear and honest communication beforehand about expectations and comfort zones.

Completely fair point. It’s definitely a lot more nuanced than I wrote.

In my eyes, I find that there’s a lot of pressure to have sex, and very little pressure to hold off. This is especially true for inexperienced people. People will tend to rationalize themselves into having sex, even when in hindsight they really weren’t ready. So to avoid having to consider edge cases and/or irrational thinking, I find that just setting a hard-and-fast rule where you just really should not have sex for x amount of time ends up being the simplest and most applicable advice

Yes, he likes you.

I would be cautious, this sort of behavior is unusual, even for someone who likes you. The reason behind it is up for interpretation. In the most generous interpretation, he doesn’t know how to act either and is attempting to hint that he likes you. In the most uncharitable interpretation, he is attempting to lovebomb someone who doesn’t have the experience to recognize the red flag.

Either way, I would approach with caution, because you don’t need to be malicious in order to be abusive. That is to say, abuse very rarely occur because someone is actively trying to manipulate you. Typically, it occurs because someone has an unrealistic expectation of how relationships work in practice, and this expectation biases their actions and judgment (funnily enough, Obsession is about this exact theme).

What this means is that inexperienced people are typically more likely to be abusive just by sheer virtue of not understanding what a relationship is like. I don’t want to be overly negative - I want to be clear that it’s possible that he’s just also inexperienced and that he is wise enough to learn quickly.

If you want to interpret his actions charitably and if you want to give him a chance, then I would highly recommend you have a good conversation at the very beginning about your (and his) expectations of a relationship, both in the short term (ie, what do you expect the other person to do in x/y situation? Is there anything that the other person may do or may stop doing that would cause you to feel upset?) and in the long term (ie, do you have compatible life goals? Do you expect that you will have a long distance relationship at some point in the future? Would you be OK with that?). Don’t be scared to talk about uncomfortable or shameful subjects - it’s better to get these questions sorted now than to sort them out later, when shit has already hit the fan.

And, also be aware that because both of you are likely to be inexperienced, both of your expectations are almost certainly going to change over time, and so it will be a good idea to build a habit of checking in once in a while to see if those expectations have changed

One final but irrelevant advice: hold off on sexual intimacy. It’s important to build a relationship around life habits rather than just sex. That, and people will typically be guarded when in a new relationship. It typically takes about 1 year of close contact before someone starts to lower their guard, and 2 years before someone fully shows who they are (this also happens to be why most relationships last 2 years). I guarantee, the worst thing you can ever do in a relationship is to have sexual contact with someone who turns it to be crazy. It’s going to be hard to hold off, I get it. Been there, done that. But it’s vitally important for the overall health of the relationship to not have sexual intimacy for at minimum 6 months, and ideally at least longer than a year

For the most part, yes. But also, I think if you dig into the details, it’s less that bacteria have the upper hand, and more that we’ve reached a truce with the bacteria.

A lot of bacterial species need us to provide the environment for them to live, and our immune systems are pretty paranoid with our gut bacteria, especially if they getting too close to the intestinal walls. Also, our bodies are pumping out bacterial-killing compounds constantly.

I would describe the situation as that our bodies can’t kill every bacteria, and bacteria can’t kill us (not easily, anyways), so we’ve reached an agreement that as long as the bacteria stay in their lane, they can stay, and we might consider doing some trading at a distance

I don’t really have a use case, but I would have considered picking one up anyways sometime down the line if it was a good deal. It’s unfortunate that it’s not. I was really hoping that Valve would try to subsidize it a little to at least make the cost not as painful, but I understand that it was never an expectation for them to do so.

I think it’ll sell anyways, since there are people who don’t want to worry about the technical challenges of building their own computer, and also don’t want to spend time looking into and vetting pre-built brands. They just want a pre-built from a brand that they already know and trust. And I think the Steam Machine would fill that niche. It’s a niche of a niche of a niche, but I suspect there would be enough people like that to still sell a decent number of Steam Machines.

As for the prices of other consoles? Steam Machine is such a low volume product that other consoles would not feel a thing no matter how successful it sells

I assume you mean to get a higher-clocked 64 gb? Personally, I’ve never really felt the difference between different memory speeds. I’ve seen the benchmarks, I know the numbers. But I’ve never had a moment where I’m using my computer and I can say that the memory speed is bottlenecking my PC.

So in my eyes, memory clocks are quite low priority for me - I put more weight in ensuring that you have the total memory capacity to do what you need to do. Which is to say, if you have the money to spare, then sure, you can get higher-clocked memory. But if not? I don’t see the problem in getting lower-clocked memory.

Additionally, if you get an X3D chip (which I assume is one of your considerations), those are known to be fairly resilient against memory clock speeds, in which case it extra does not matter what your memory clock is

It’s better to get whatever you need to be comfortable, and upgrade later when prices get more affordable. So, for instance, you can get a 64 gb now, then get a 64 gb later for a total of 128 gb. Though I think it’ll really depend on exactly what you’re doing - for me, I would consider even 64 gb to be insanely futureproof.

You’ll get banned anyways, regardless of karma. Remember that karma doesn’t mean anything. It’s just funny little internet numbers.

My advice: don’t waste your effort.

Yes, but anti-cheat is still one of the biggest pain points of someone who might want to switch over. And just telling people to give up on their favorite games isn’t a real option.

We don’t have to use it. But having the option - any option - is better than none at all.

Bitter. Too bitter for my liking.

Plus, I’m quite happy with having full mental faculties. Never understood why people would enjoy diminishing it.

The word “nice” used to mean “stupid.” It derives from the Latin “nescio” (translated: “I don’t know”) and carried over into old French. At some point, it came to be associated with generosity, the assumption being that someone stupid is too innocent or naive to be selfish.

It then got carried over into middle English, and the connotation for stupidity got dropped, making it so that the word meant “kind,” as opposed to “stupidly kind”

It seems that the lag period (pre-Steam Deck) is causing the exponential fit to not be that good. Can you try fitting only to data from the past 4 years to see if the fit is better?

Edit: Was easy enough for me to do, and I had the software to do it, so I did it.

Details:

Fitted entire dataset with a non-linear regression (minimizing sum of squares), with the given model:

Y = baseline + Y0 * exp(k*t)

Fitted equation was determined to be Y=0.7717 + 0.04451 * exp(0.04677 * t)

With this fit, doubling time is 14.82 months.

R^2 is 0.8851

95% CI:

baseline = 0.6029-0.9093

Y0 = 0.01744-0.1023

k = 0.03749-0.05734

Doubling time = 12.09-18.49

Edit 2: if we do a bit of the statistical funny, we can plug the equation into Desmos and try to extrapolate:

With this data, we can estimate that Linux usage will hit a solid 5% on Steam after ~97 months (most recent datapoint is month 91 in my dataset), which should correspond to ~November 2026. If we extrapolate farther into the future, we can estimate that Linux will hit 10% at ~114 months, which corresponds to ~March 2028

I don’t know about your field, but that does seem somewhat suspicious to me. I suppose it depends on which company, which product, and which field.

For instance, I could presumably see an argument for turning down a salesperson applicant to Microsoft for not having used Microsoft Office before. ie, if not using a given product demonstrates lack of experience in the field.

Is the product well-known or a standard in the field?