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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: January 5th, 2026

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  • This is a fantastic example of using selective information to mislead people. It‘s completely omitting important details like

    1. France‘s much older population (malnutrition deaths are much more common in the elderly)
    2. Data reliability (France‘s data is very comprehensive, while data from countries with authoritarian governments is less reliable; the IHME tries to (opaquely) compensate for that, but that‘s only possible by imputation and modeling, which is less reliable by definition)
    3. Differences in recording deaths (France has a multiple-cause-of-death recording system, while many other countries only record a single cause; this means malnutrition as a result of another disease is much more likely to be recorded in France)
    4. Ignoring counterexamples (include Germany, the UK, Austria, New Zealand or many other countries with a capitalist system and suddenly it doesn‘t really seem like there‘s any correlation between a country’s system and malnutrition deaths)

    Sorry, but this graphic can only be seen as plain propaganda, if you actually look into the data it‘s based on.






  • 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.





  • While that might be true on the surface, I just don‘t think it‘s worth it.

    Anthem has had many problems and being a live service game was just one of them. Converting it to a single player game wouldn‘t solve the myriads of other issues like boring mission design, a very samey and needlessly huge world, loading screens everywhere or the complete disconnect between story and gameplay where you get too much story within the main hub having to listen to NPCs babbling for hours, while getting practically no story at all while actually playing the game.

    Making the game playable again would be a good thing for preservation, but I really can‘t imagine a lot of people actually having fun with it. I think it would be a better use of the developers’ time to analyze the many reasons for the game‘s failure objectively and learn from that for future projects. I don’t think this former exec has really done that, if he still thinks Anthem is salvageable as a game.