Shit, I assumed that valve somehow got a cut of games from keys as well, but looking it up (briefly), it looks like you’re entirely right and they don’t.
That makes it even more bonkers that companies keep trying to siphon off the market share, since you could just take your market proceeds as bonus revenue as long as valve got their share of what they sell.
I’m assuming that’s a big chunk of how things like humble bundle make their money?

deleted by creator

“we’ve built a platform that at least give piracy a run for its money, and used it to develop a massive user base so conditioned to buying from us that they happily joke about how 50% off a game they won’t play is cause for them to buy four times as many. Please, join us all in the baffling orgy of commerce, all we ask is 30% of the treasure.”.
“We will, but we’re gonna try to get the users to come to our platform with less content and maybe a $500 buy-in so we can have a bigger portion of a smaller pie”.
“Lol, go for it”.
“…”.
“…”.
“Why are you being anticompetitive?”

Well, I’ll disagree a bit there. The largest stock investors are institutional investors managing funds on behalf of retirement plans. Those investors tend to prefer consistent long term growth over a narrow quarterly growth target, and will actually look at things beyond just stock price, like strategy and long term market prospects.

Short term thinking from the leadership team is them not having a good idea on how to provide the long term strategy that investors prefer, and instead hoping to appeal to the smaller group of investors who do only care about short term growth so they can secure their own payoff, potentially at the expense of the long term prospects of the company.

Valve is a corporation. They have shareholders other than Gabe, many of whom are not employed at valve of in their leadership team. Their leadership team isn’t looking to ensure that their paycheck comes in over the future of the company, so they make good choices.
Compare with companies like Coca-Cola, which are publicly traded but have that long term plan that lets them openly talk about sacrificing revenue to pursue product plans and market growth that leads to more stable long term profits.

It’s not “some voice” talking “to you”, it really just feels like your thoughts are words, if they’re “word adjacent thoughts”.
Like, thinking about how to phrase that first part, it felt like I was reciting the words I was thinking of typing, not like someone else was saying them to me.

Totally agree on the sensitive or decisive topics point, but I include a caveat that what some people call “sharing decisive viewpoints in public”, others call “not hiding their gender/sexual orientation”, and similar things, so it’s not always perfectly clear cut.

I try to avoid being inflammatory in general, anonymous or not, and I’m not perturbed if people know my city, industry, trade, and vague interests. Basically what you could figure out from a polite conversation while waiting in line.

I’ve got a lot of code up on GitHub, and some of it is absolute garbage. If an employer judges me poorly for sharing my pile of one-off scripts, or “basic human decency and lack of respect for neo Nazis in a casual setting”, then I frankly probably don’t care to work for them.
Admittedly, other than a script that automates figuring out which web hosts are hosting hate groups, there’s not much political content in my software.

I do alright, so my system seems to work.

I wasn’t actually trying to be contrarian, but okay.

I’m pretty sure I didn’t explain how it’s actually shareholders, because the board of directors isn’t “the shareholders”, but leadership of the company.

Valve isn’t publicly traded, but it’s still a corporation with shareholders, a board of directors, and the usual trappings of corporate leadership. They tend to operate in a not shitty way because their leadership isn’t interested in sacrificing greater long term profit for lesser short term profits.
A private, family owned partnership style business can operate with a focus on short term profits over long term profits.

The safest way to ensure that the leadership of both of those businesses out as much money in their pockets as possible is to continuously maximize short term profits. “The shareholders” aren’t the cause for that mindset.

It’s not shareholders specifically, but management that doesn’t give a shit about the company long term.
The business has a fiduciary duty to benefit the shareholders, but it doesn’t have to be short term only, or at the cost of long term benefits.

Most publicly traded companies end up with leadership who are only interested in justifying their employment through the next earnings call or making sure the stock price has gone up between when they last got options and when they next vest.

Valve does good not because they don’t have shareholders, but because their leadership is not gonna get fired for thinking about next year instead of next quarter. So they don’t squeeze the consumers for every dime, so people stick with them, and developers stay even though their fee schedule is not the best because they have all the people.

So a ream of paper is 500 sheets. You’ll be able to search better by looking for the weight of the paper per ream, rather than the thickness.

https://thomasgroupprinting.com/how-is-paper-weight-measured/

Copier paper is likely to be a bit thinner than letter paper.

Careful about going too thin, or your printer will just shred it and jam up. Tissue paper for example is unlikely to work. Newsprint paper might be okay, but you’ll need to look at the numbers.

They’re not. It’s not uncommon after a game is developed for there to be a degree of churn in the development studio, but 1) that’s not ideal, 2) that’s not what’s been happening recently.

They typically don’t refer to the typical post game churn as “layoffs”, and they also typically happen after a game launches, not inline with the entire industry laying off a bunch of people.

Yup, that’s a really good pattern to follow. Not only does it minimize your exposure behind a secured entry, it also makes sure that all of your access is uniformly authenticated.

You have to do some shenanigans to do something similar with other, non-http based services, but it’s possible with most of them.

It’s not a simple task, so I won’t list many specifics, but more general principles.

First, some specifics:

• disable remote root login via ssh.
• disable password login, and only permit ssh keys.
• run fail2ban to lock people out automatically.

Generally:

• only expose things you must expose. It’s better to do things right and secure than easy. Exposing a webservice requires you to expose port 443 (https). Basically everything else is optional.
• enable every security system that you don’t have reason to disable. Selinux giving you problems? Don’t turn it off, learn how to write rules to let your application do the specific things it needs. Only make firewall exceptions where needed, rather than disabling the firewall.
• give system users the minimum access they require to function.
• set folder permissions as restrictively as possible. FACLs will help, because it lets you be much more nuanced.
• automatic updates. If you have to remember to do it, it won’t happen. Failure to automate updates means your software is out of date.
• consider setting up a dedicated authentication setup like authellia or keycloak. Applications tend to, frankly, suck at security. It’s not what they’re making so it’s not as good as a dedicated security service. There are other follow on benefits.
• if it supports two factor, enable it.

You mentioned using cloud flare, which is good. You might also consider configuring your firewall to disallow outbound connections to your local network. That way if your server gets owned, they can’t poke other things on your network.

I’ve been a developer for about 15 years.

Nothing you’ve said makes me feel like you should quit.
Wanting more money is a perfectly respectable reason to want to quit, and if you think it would make you happier, go for it. Get paid.

It’s not better to be an engineer or anything. No one will mind or hold it against you if you come back and say that you were a jr dev, took a position as otherntech job, but it wasn’t for you so now your back with a new perspective and set of experiences.

Programming was once my passion. I got a lot of joy from it. I still do, and I would say that it still is a passion. But I’ve stopped really doing side projects unless it’s particularly interesting. There’s more to life than career development, and that’s okay.

Without seeing your code, I can’t know how good you actually are. Like most people, you’re probably average. Don’t beat yourself up over not knowing algorithms. No one knows those, they know the keywords and how to describe a problem and then how to pick the right one or tweak something to make it right.

The road from jr to senior is also less about technical proficiency than you would expect.
Technical competency is a must, but you’ll go further as a competent technical leader who can breakdown work, describe it, and help their teammates than as a lone high performer.

That’s not how libel works though. The legal meaning of words doesn’t bind publishers of newspapers to use only that meaning, for example.

If you argue that a woman is a rapist in UK court, that won’t work.
If you argue that your usage of the word rapist to describe a woman convicted of penatrative non consensual sexual contact is accurate, all you need to do is point to the dictionary, because the libel case isn’t about the sexual offense, but the plain words used.

I’m not sure you’d get sued for libel. Legally speaking, any non-penis penatrative sexual assault wouldn’t be rape even if you would call it that in other contexts.

Where I live, rape isn’t actually in the criminal code at all. There is only “criminal sexual misconduct, first degree”, which also includes other terrible things that people can do to each other.

No one gets sued for libel for using the dictionary definition of the word rather than the legal definition outside of a courtroom.

Most realistically, no one is going to go on the books as the person who voted to repeal the crime of rape.

More pragmatically, repealing a law that someone is in prison for always creates an argument that they shouldn’t be there any more. Often seen with drug legalization, but I’m sure someone would try to argue that because the exact type of sexual assault they were guilty of isn’t a crime anymore, despite an equivalent existing, that they should get some type of break.

I’m not in the UK, so I can’t speak to their legislative process as specifically unfortunately.

Follow-up: I started to look it up, and as far as I can the the UK legislative bookkeeping system is fucking insane. They don’t organize their laws in sections, they just refer to them by the act that passed it. So rather than passing a law that says “we’re amending section 792.5078r to include new definitions”, they just say “here’s a new act with a new crime, and rape includes mouths now”.
Also the UK has three legal systems, they’re bound together in what feels like a very disorderd fashion, and the following sentence from their judiciary scares me deeply, as a proper American:

Our lack of a written constitution is one of the consequences of the way the current political and legal institutions in the United Kingdom have evolved since 1066

https://www.judiciary.uk/about-the-judiciary/our-justice-system/jud-acc-ind/justice-sys-and-constitution/

That’s slightly misleading. Rape is defined as the specific crime of penetrating a person with a penis.

There’s a separate, more modern crime of “sexual activity without consent”, with both penetrative and non-penatritive variants that was created that was created to be a gender neutral sex crime.

https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/rape-and-sexual-offences-chapter-7-key-legislation-and-offences

One of the purposes of this offence, in addition to the wider range of sexual activity, is to create a female equivalent of the offence of rape, which carries the same level of punishment for what amounts to the same type of offending behaviour.

Honestly, cost wise you should just buy a cheap refurbished desktop with similar specs.

It’s in the name. Copyright. As in, the right to make a copy.

It’s perfectly legal to sell a digital good as long as you don’t retain it as well.
It’s illegal to make a copy of a book and then sell that copy.

From probably the most biased source possible: https://copyrightalliance.org/education/copyright-law-explained/limitations-on-a-copyright-owners-rights/first-sale-exceptions-copyright/

As they point out, most digital works are licensed, not sold, so there are terms and conditions associated with how you can use them.

So it’s perfectly consistent, just grossly out of date for it’s intended purpose of “make sure writers can make money selling their books without worrying that getting copies made will be pointless because someone else will undercut them and leave them with 1000 prepaid copies of their book that everyone bought cheaper”.

We should have a system that preserves that original intent of “creators get compensated”, without it turning into our culture gets owned by some random company for more than a lifetime.

Protip: The ‘B’ is RAID stands for “backup”.