Valve is a relatively small company that punches well above its weight. Perhaps it's the low staff numbers—or maybe just a general libertarian lilt—that makes its approach to content moderation on Steam a hearty "Can't someone else do it?"

Its freewheeling approach has drawn criticism for what it allows to proliferate and, of course, has its hard limits: Valve delisted all manner of adult content from the platform last year following pressure from payment processors.

But it's clearly an approach Valve co-founder and big boss Gabe Newell is personally keen on. In a recent report from Bloomberg, we got an anecdote from an anonymous former Valve employee of a time when Newell downright bit the head off Valve general counsel Karl Quackenbush. The lawyer was advocating for a more hands-on approach to content moderation on Steam as it pondered embracing outright pornographic content.

Newell's response to that proposal was, ah, forthright: "What the fuck do I pay you for if that's your opinion?" the Valve boss reportedly snapped at Quackenbush and—while we don't have further details on the story—we sure know who won the debate in the end: Steam very much did open the floodgates on NSFW content, and its approach to content moderation is as laissez-faire as ever, barring the odd payment processor contretemps.

It's an interesting but brief glimpse into the Valve black box. The studio's public image is A) taciturn and B) democratic, with the memetic image of Valve devs' wheeled desks serving as a bit of a metonym for its willingness to let its employees work on whatever they're interested in. Newell himself barely registers in that picture—the perception is he's a hands-off boss who spends most of his time literally at sea.

Clearly, though, Newell does stick his oar in from time to time, and is willing to throw his weight around on topics he deems important enough. You've gotta feel a bit sorry for Quackenbush—getting yelled at by Gabe Newell ranks high on my personal listings of things that would make me cry.

And hey, Valve owes him: it was Quackenbush who enlisted the aid of a Korean-speaking intern named Andrew to help the studio sift through a ream of Korean-language docs from Vivendi in a legal case where Valve's future hung in the balance: a move that pretty much saved Valve.

Never one to be short of hyperbole, at a press Q&A with the Nvidia CEO of course talk of the new RTX Spark SoC was on the menu. The Nvidia RTX Spark (AKA N1X) is a chip built in partnership with MediaTek, combining a custom Arm core (though quite how custom it is, I'm not sure) with an Nvidia RTX Blackwell GPU core. Connected via a super-quick NVLink connection and sharing a pool of LPDDR5x unified memory, the SoC is one of the most exciting things to come out of Computex this year, and Jen-Hsun says it is "100% awesome".

While it is absolutely being aimed at gamers in some form—though probably not in its peak, 128 GB guise—it is also being introduced as the hardware necessary to make your laptop less of a tool and more of an R2D2, a robot assistant. But even though it is being designed to make the AI the UI, it is still just using Windows.

The platform has been designed with Microsoft with Windows-on-Arm very much at the forefront of what Nvidia's doing, but that's still just a very standard Windows operating system. So maybe that itself doesn't make it feel immediately like a transformative moment.

Which is why someone asked the Nvidia CEO if maybe there should be a fundamental change in the UI, or even the OS itself, to encourage people to think about using these RTX Spark devices in different ways.

"The good news is that this PC is 100% awesome at everything everybody expect the PC to do," says Huang. "And it can do more.

"So you can go to that journey at your own pace. I think if we were too abrupt in changing either the UX, too abrupt in changing maybe even the name and its positioning, maybe the people who believe they still need a PC might have a harder time on that journey."

And it is going to be quite the journey, because as Jen-Hsun notes: "N1X has N2X and we've got N3X already planned." We've seen the roadmap, and with an RTX Spark Vera Rubin and RTX Spark Rosa Feynman on the way in 2028 and 2030 respectively there's a long way to go on that journey.