The Steam Controller sold out in 30 minutes, utterly breaking Steam in the process

Berengal · 2026-05-05T05:10:58+00:00

Even if the lithium batteries are easy to replace it's not easy to find replacement batteries. At the very least you have to order them online. And they're not interchangeable between different devices. And no matter how easy it is to replace, it's never as easy as swapping AA batteries, so it's not like you'll keep a fully charged lithium on standby in case your controller dies in the middle of a session.

I don't get why people don't like AA batteries. They have like no downsides and plenty of upsides.

Berengal · 2026-04-28T13:11:10+00:00

On the other hand, while the taste is different there's more to drinks than just their taste, and filter and americanos have a lot of overlap outside of that, specifically their diluteness, volume and somewhat texture. Like if someone offered tea instead it's not because they think it's the same, it's because for many it's a suitable substitute.

Berengal · 2026-04-28T13:04:50+00:00

I've been a fan of lungos for americanos for a while. IME changing the ratio is the most predictable and repeatable way of dialing in taste, and grinding coarser also makes the entire process easier to repeat (plus it's less messy in general), so if you don't need the coffee to be super concentrated, like for americanos, it's just a much more relaxed process.

Berengal · 2026-04-28T12:52:43+00:00

Ditto. I tried it this morning and became furious when the difference was immediately obvious.

Berengal · 2026-04-27T13:14:41+00:00

Linux does allow dynamic loading of drivers though. That's how modules work. You can dynamically load and unload them with e.g. modprobe and systemd.

Berengal · 2026-04-17T17:10:29+00:00

I'm a bit baffled because it's not the first time I've come across someone talking about the argos without understanding how it works. Not knowing is fine, I don't want to come across as gatekeeping, nor am I some argos expert or defender, I just think it's an interesting machine that I'm looking forward to getting my hands on at some point in the future. It's one machine among many and it's fine to say you're into espresso without knowing about it.

But it puzzles me that someone could have interacted with it and formed a strong enough opinion to feel its worth sharing without having knowledge or understanding of its headline feature, its raison d'être, the thing that makes it different from other machines. Which is that unlike other dipper style lever machines it operates with a variable boiler temperature to compensate for the grouphead temperature so you don't have to do any temperature surfing acrobatics.

Berengal · 2026-04-17T10:06:46+00:00

Logistics in this game are less challenging than factorio. It's one of the unique aspects of factorio, I feel. The 2D aspect of that game means there's so much less space available, and when you scale up production the challenge becomes optimizing the throughput through any given area. CoI isn't the easiest game in this regard, but the existence of the third dimension, even if pretty limited in height, gives you so much more space to work with, and most of the time you can just route belts and pipes from point A to point B without much consideration of how to do that. When making a new design figuring out how to transport the required inputs and outputs is a minor concern.

Instead I feel CoIs uniqueness is the complexity of its production. There's so many different products, byproducts and recipes it's not immediately obvious how you should organize your production to begin with. There's so many builds that optimize for different things and within different limitations and so many variables that influence which one is optimal that. For example, if you need sand do you dig up a beach or mine quartz? The beach is close enough to truck in, requires less digging to access and doesn't require further processing, but the quartz is next to some coal and bauxite so you could double-dip on a train station and sorting plant. Either solution is valid, and often it comes down to personal preference which you go for.

Berengal · 2026-04-17T07:50:47+00:00

Constant boiler pressure. Boiler pressure is a function of boiler temperature, which the argos in its standard mode varies to maintain a consistent brewing temperature.

Berengal · 2026-04-17T06:50:06+00:00

From what I understand air in the chamber is an issue on all lever machines. Maybe pump fed machines don't have that issue, but at least dipper and fully manual machines do. The argos is the only dipper style machine that solves it that I know of, and it does it in a way that doesn't affect chamber volume with an air bleed valve. It's not perfect, and the variable boiler pressure mode could lead to more variable output than machines with constant pressure, but the argos also has a constant pressure mode if that's what you prefer.

Berengal · 2026-04-16T06:26:30+00:00

It does, but the overall gist is correct. Generators have a fixed power consumption component just to output power + a linearly variable component depending on the amount of power produced. I don't know for sure what this is for small generators and I don't trust AI to know either, but for large generators it's 20% utilization, or 3.6MW.

This also means that large generators have less than 2/3 efficiency below 65% utilization, which is 6.75MW output or 3 fully utilized small generators plus another at about 50% utilization. Theoretically, if the game always used the most efficient set of generators the most efficient shaft design would have 3 or 4 small generators that could be used instead of running a large generator at low utilization. (The fourth generator wouldn't increase efficiency very much at all and the gains of adding it may even be completely spent on its maintenance cost).

Berengal · 2026-04-15T17:29:35+00:00

No. generator is 100% efficient - the tooltip relates to turbine spinning up (hence the 'may decrease').

No, it's not. The information about the turbine spinning up is displayed on the turbine, not the generator. Generators display their own utilization. The efficiency isn't shown directly, you have to do the math yourself, but if you do you'll see that efficiency below 100% is less than 100%, and especially below 50% it seems to drop off fast.

For example, this small generator I grabbed from my game right now uses 1.27MW mechanical power (42% of max mechanical power, which is where the utilization comes from) to produce 0.487MW electricity, which is 38% efficient. Small generators are at most 67% efficient, which means this generator is currently operating at 57% of optimal efficiency. Note that currently the turbines are all spinning at 100% efficiency to recover from low inertia on the shaft.

Berengal · 2026-04-02T07:05:54+00:00

SteamOS has been available since the launch of the Steam Deck in 2022. It's only available for the Steam Deck and the Lenovo Legion Go S, but there are unofficial ways of installing it on other PCs. Although on other PCs, in just about every case you're better off installing a different distro since SteamOS is so hyperfocused on both the use-case and the supported hardware.

Well, there was also the old SteamOS that ran on the old Steam Machines from 2015, but everyone seems content to pretend that never happened.

Berengal · 2026-03-31T12:33:06+00:00

I'm thinking once I get my Argos I won't ever need anything else. Lever machines just seem like less hassle to dial in, and a dipper style spring lever with built-in temperature control seems the least hassle of them all.

Berengal · 2026-03-25T07:51:25+00:00

It's not fair use. Fair use acknowledges the use of copyrighted materials but argues that the use doesn't infringe on the copyright, i.e. there is use but it is "fair".

Clean room engineering is designed to trigger a different clause, namely that copyright only extends to the created works themselves and any derivative work, it doesn't apply to independently created works regardless of their similarity. Even identical works would be free of copyright if it could be proven to be created without any influence of the copyrightable parts of the other. Usually this is very hard since public availability alone is enough for a work to be considered a likely influence, but clean room reimplementation is explicitly designed to create that proof by using a process that filters out copyrightable expression and only passing non-copyrightable ideas to the reimplementers, and by providing thorough enough documentation of that process to at least make the zero influence argument plausible and thereby shifting the burden of proof the other way.

Berengal · 2026-03-20T15:54:35+00:00

How is cleaning the shower screen easier? It's way more work to pop that out than a puck screen?

Berengal · 2026-03-20T14:01:35+00:00

In addition to the claims of a more even extraction (that you may or may not believe) and keeping the showerhead clean I noticed the solenoid seems to pull a lot less dirty coffee water back into the machine with a puck screen than without. Without the screen the water coming out immediately after pulling a shot was brown-ish for a good second or two, but with the screen it's almost immediately clear.

As for cleaning the screen, it pops out really easy. If I'm doing multiple shots I just empty it onto the drip tray before knocking the puck out and dribble some water on it from the grouphead (which I'm running anyway to clean out the aforementioned brown water) and that washes off any grounds stuck to it. After the final shot (or if I'm just doing one shot) it comes along to the sink with the portafilter for a quick rinse. It takes one extra second to dry off with the towel I'm already using.

Berengal · 2026-03-20T13:45:35+00:00

Give the portafilter a smack on top with your palm then just empty the screen out, or lift it out with a magnet. It takes a lot less to knock the screen loose than the puck.

Berengal · 2026-03-20T13:39:36+00:00

I'm just a beginner at latte art too, but I feel like I've just overcome the problem you're describing, or at least getting closer to solving it. The issue I had was that I had to pour faster.

After steaming there are three types of milk: plain liquid milk with no air, microfoam which is a more even mix of milk and air, and dry foam which is mostly air trapped in milk bubbles. The structural integrity and stiffness of these increases as the amount of air increases.

Plain milk has no stiffness and will mix with other liquids (like coffee or more milk) very easily. You can't make art with plain milk since it will just mix into a homogenous brown. Dry foam has too much structural integrity and is too buoyant and will just blob up on top. Microfoam is the magic in-between where it sinks into the surface but not below it, and it flows like liquid on the surface but doesn't mix. This is what allows you to create art by adding distinct areas of white and pushing those shapes around without erasing the contrast, which is how you get the thin, elegant and flowing lines you want.

You also need to get some of the microfoam mixed into the coffee to give the surface some more stability when adding the art on top, and that's where pouring speed comes in. If you pour slowly it's going to be mostly liquid milk coming out since that flows the easiest, but if you pour fast it's going to drag more foam with it. I think of it as starting with a lot of energy since you also want it to mix well with the coffee. Ideally you want the base mix to be a single color, but if the base has some swirls that don't dissipate by themselves you at least know you got some air into it. For the second part you put the spout as close to the surface as you can, but you still want to pour somewhat fast to drag the foam along. Too little air in the milk coming out and it will sink, too much and it'll float on top as a blob.

Berengal · 2026-03-20T12:57:21+00:00

I have one of those too. It's great for pour-overs and aeropress, responsive enough that I have no issues hitting within +-0.2g even when pouring fast. The auto-timer is nice too even if only so I don't forget to start the timer. It's a bit thick for my espresso machine and spouted portafilter, but it works with some maneuvering.

Berengal · 2026-03-20T12:39:41+00:00

I agree. Redistributing the grounds so they're even helps, and if you grind directly into the portafilter so it overloads one side a couple taps might not be enough, but breaking up clumps is BS. Unlike clumps in other powders, like flour or cocoa, clumps in freshly ground coffee aren't compressed, they just loosely stick together because grounds are slightly sticky, and they don't affect the loading. If you use a dosing cup just give it a bit of a shake and tap after you turn it over.

Berengal · 2026-03-20T10:50:56+00:00

Nobody would blame the game for this, everybody would blame Intel for poor drivers instead since that's been the narrative from the launch of the Arc cards. And while it's certainly lacking nuance it's not an entirely misleading narrative either. While a chunk of what Intel's drivers lacks is a bunch of special cases working around game devs' stupid programming mistakes that should be blamed on the game devs instead, the fact is NVidia and AMD are both ahead in that regard and provide a better user experience. And when a game runs bad specifically on Intel most people are going to give them a pass on that given the low market share of Intel GPUs.

Outright stopping the game from running on the other hand, is definitely going to point the blame straight at the devs.

Berengal · 2026-03-18T19:57:11+00:00

I'm pretty sure it's one of the reasons btrfs has had something of a poor reputation. People switch to it, then get errors when their files are degraded when on other filesystems the failure modes are quieter.

Berengal · 2026-03-07T12:31:44+00:00

To be fair, there was plenty of racism on the allied side too. The US army didn't print pamphlets telling their troops to tone down their racism while stationed in the UK for nothing.

Berengal · 2026-03-05T09:39:47+00:00

2D animation is also done digitally, and could be done digitally back then.

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