I love my Steam Deck, but I hate that it‘s still the best gaming handheld on the market. Valve has been pretty transparent about their process of getting the Deck right. Things like working with AMD to create a mobile APU optimized for gaming, using an optimized OS and an optimized UI, balancing performance and battery life, using and iterating over the controller design, leveraging FOSS and so on.

But somehow no one else seems use all of this knowledge, trying to innovate on top of it. Sure, there are handhelds which take some of these learnings into account, but never enough of them to actually improve on the Deck as a whole. I would have expected other manufacturers to catch up with Valve four years after the Deck‘s release. I don‘t like only getting excited about gaming hardware made by a single company.

I can‘t find the specific video where it came up, but I remember Chet Faliszek, who worked at Valve from 2005 to 2017, mentioning, that Gaben‘s death is something that has been planned for and won‘t be as much of an issue for Valve as people might think.

It‘s of course in no way guaranteed to work out in the end, I don‘t know the specifics of the plans or if everyone‘s going to go along with them. But seeing how well Valve is doing and also how little Gaben actually seems to steer the company, I‘m somewhat optimistic that it‘ll be fine after his passing. Not optimistic enough not to have my most beloved Steam games backed up somewhere, of course, but still somewhat optimistic.

I think this really depends on the company’s culture and size. From my experience, having only worked in smaller teams, I’d say trying to partake in management duties proactively has probably been most successful for colleagues who wanted to lead.

So when your boss or supervisor has a meeting about your product, ask if you can join. If you have a well thought-out idea on how to improve things, like introducing better processes, fixing recurring issues, introducing better tools or something like that, talk about it. Being visible as someone who genuinely cares about the success of your team, product and company is, in my experience, probably the most important thing.

Just make sure this is actually what you want. Depending on the company, you might end up doing very little programming and lots of spreadsheets and misery instead. Find out what’s keeping your current team lead busy and ask yourself if that’s really what you want to do.

I believe it‘s even more strict than that (insert obligatory I am not a lawyer here).

For military commands, German soldiers must not obey orders that would constitute a criminal offense (§11(2) SG). Outside of that, the respective laws for civil servants are applicable (§11(3) SG). These laws, specifically §63 BBG, contain an obligation to object to illegal orders (Remonstrationspflicht). If a civil servant doesn‘t object, they are personally responsible for their actions.

So it‘s not just an option to object to unlawful orders, it‘s an obligation.

This is a great example of open source adding value for everyone. Users of those GPUs get improved performance, Valve gets to sell them more recent games, and AMD gets a nice, free reputation boost because their older hardware still receives meaningful updates.

So if anyone ever needs to convince management that open-sourcing something could be good for business, point to this!

I think it’s quite possible to become confused if you’re used to software that, bugs aside, behaves pretty much completely predictably, then get a feature marketed as “intelligence” which suddenly gives you unpredictable and sometimes incorrect results. I‘d definitely be confused if the reliable tools I do my work with suddenly developed a mind of their own.

No, they didn’t dump it on the dark web. They‘ve dumped it on the regular web instead: https://okstupid.lol/