i think that once you turn an alcoholic, your body depends on a small quantity to unlock its full potential

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The cafe stuff is real whipped cream. The air bubbles that are incorporated into it while it’s being whipped are smaller than the air bubbles in the canned crap. The crap in the cans gets it’s bubbles from the gas (CO2?) that’s pressurized into the can along with the cream-like-substance.

Do you mean foam that’s made from an espresso machine?

It’s a combination between the actual milk/cream they use, their machines, and technique.

It’s likely that the cafe is using higher quality milk or cream specifically for cafes. Especially with alternative mills, many brands have a barista blend that has a higher fat content which helps maintain the stability of the foam. For traditional milk, it’s likely they’re using whole milk or half and half which has higher fat content than like 2% or lower.

The machines that cafes use are also professional coffee makers. They’re designed to control all the aspects of the coffee making process. When it comes to foaming & steaming milk, you can normally control the volume and intensity of the steam.

And of course, people working in cafes are making coffee and foaming milks for them almost back to back for hours on a shift. So they’re getting more experience and perfecting their techniques to get the perfect foam. From getting a perfect swirl in the cup to evenly steam and warm all the milk and fold air creating micro bubbles, to also getting a feel for the perfect temperature for the milk. All of those things are dialed in to create better foam.

If you’re only making coffee daily at home without the same tools and ingredients of a cafe, it’ll be a while before you get exactly the same level of foam as you get at a cafe.

The cream on a coffee at a cafe is usually whipped fresh from heavy cream, which contains a high amount of fat. This whipping process incorporates air into the cream, creating a light and fluffy texture. The fat in the cream helps stabilize the air bubbles, making the whipped cream more firm and able to stay on top of the coffee for longer.

In contrast, the cream that comes out of foaming pressurized canisters, often called whipped cream or whipped topping, is made from a mixture of cream, sugar, and stabilizers. These stabilizers help the whipped cream hold its shape, but they also make it less stable than fresh whipped cream. As a result, the whipped cream from a can tends to break down and become runny more quickly, especially when exposed to heat or moisture.

Additionally, the whipped cream in pressurized canisters usually contains less fat than heavy cream, which can affect its texture and stability. So while whipped cream from a can is convenient and easy to use, it doesn't have the same stability and flavor as freshly whipped cream made from heavy cream.

I thought I was mixing computer with my static....this explains everything!

See, there's your problem. You mixed static with your computer.

It drives me crazy that I can understand the HOW, but not the WHY of the thing. As an engineer I love knowing the how and the why, but with computers its just....static and frustration.

I've been a computer geek my whole life - like, I learned the alphabet using the keyboard of my family's 1989 Dell and a passion for them just continued to grow from there.

Not only can I not fathom that they work consistently, I can't fathom how we ever figured out how to get semiconductors to perform logic equations. I've probably spent days worth of time trying to wrap my head around it and I just can't.

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Because that's not real troubleshooting, instead it just lets you revert back from a known good state, the starting state.

Real software troubleshooting is not only expensive, but also out of regular user's capability to collaborate.

The fact that computers work consistently when bits are about the size of atoms is absolutely incomprehensible to me.

I think the best way to answer this is to understand what is going wrong. What's causing the device to go wrong is that some sort of glitch--like a software bug, a hardware bug, an environmental glitch (power spike or drop), etc. has caused the system to be in a state that doesn't work. For example a software bug has overwritten the variable that tracks the number of players. or a hardware glitch where if the power drops for a millisecond or two, the DAC loses some sort of initial configuration.
So how do you fix that? Just turn the power off, then back on and the device will start back up in the initial, pristine configuration.

Thus the Row Hammer attack.

In addition to the other insightful comments, tech support often recommends turning it off and back on for a much simpler reason: the device in question could have been powered off in the first place. But if they ask it directly, “is it powered on?”, in all likelihood they are going to get a snarky “of course it is, who do you think I am”. Instead they ask for some placebo procedure like blowing on the power cable, and in a not insignificant portion of the cases the caller is going to realize who they actually are but will say “OK, that helped, thanks” without losing face.

Even after you shut down a computer or other device, there is still a residual charge left in the circuitry. To really reset to zero, that charge must be drained. This can be done by unplugging the device and waiting, or unplugging and holding the power button to try to turn the device on. Either way, the charge dissipates.

> Something like an electrical fluctuation can cause values stored in RAM to change. This can even be caused by planetary scale things like solar flares or little things like temperature changes.

Relevant article I read years ago from Oracle Linux Blog: Attack of the Cosmic Rays!

When your computer first starts up, it initializes to a known good state. A lot of problems that happen in software are a result of things ending up in a bad state. By turning it off and on, you return to that original good state.

Take a game of chess for example, when you start, all the pieces are in known positions and you can start playing the game (good state). Now, say halfway through a game, someone bumps the table, and scatters all the pieces around (bad state). You don't know exactly where everything was, so the only fair thing to do is clear the board (turn off), and start a whole new game (turn on), thus returning the pieces to their starting positions (good state).

Sometimes you have a bad day. Maybe you got a flat tire on the way to work or maybe you tore your favorite shirt. Then you find out that your crazy Uncle Bob is in jail again and that is going to mess with family plans, your friends cancel last minute on you, your randoms in your game of League are dogshit, etc etc.

Sometimes there's no saving a bad day. Sometimes, all you can do is go to sleep and start over fresh the next day.

Adding to this, RAM in desktop computer is typically NOT error correcting. That is usually something we only put in server hardware due to cost.

Error correcting RAM basically has an extra storage chip on it that continually checks for memory corruption.

RAM is actually insanely sensitive to environmental changes. Something like an electrical fluctuation can cause values stored in RAM to change. This can even be caused by planetary scale things like solar flares or little things like temperature changes.

Let me give this a shot. I'm an electrical engineer, for context, so I'm more on the hardware than the software, but here goes.

Preface: In an ideal world, a computer would work the same way each time. That's what code and circuits are designed to do. However, obviously, that doesn't always happen.

Hardware answer: All your machines are made of circuits, as you know. The software is running on something. When you transmit data from point A to point B, like when you press keys on your keyboard and signals go flying out to the processor, things can go wrong. Some common issues in circuit design, some of which should be caught by engineers in design:

- Marginal voltages, where you barely have enough juice to run what you're trying to run and any sagging in the power will cause problems)

- Transistors overlapping their switching, where you get "shoot-through" where power connects to ground briefly, usually happens in motor drives,

- Overheating, where electronics change behavior sometimes drastically when hot, and can even melt/fuse

- Not enough static protection, so you can shock it with your finger when you touch it and change the voltages inside

There are so many more. Sometimes your traces on the printed circuit board are poorly matched, so high speed components will sometimes glitch out when they don't recognize a parallel data bus that comes in out of sync. Sometimes your power rails don't come up in the right order. I could write a list as long as my arm of issues that can cause intermittent bugs.

I had to restart my smartwatch once when I shocked it just right that it froze up -- presumably the sudden voltage spike, while taken care of by protective diodes, had caused enough chaos inside that the processor didn't know what to do. But once you drop the power rail and everything goes to 0V (roughly), you can start it up again and now it's fresh. It doesn't remember what went wrong unless you physically damaged a part.

The summary of all this is that there are many parts to a machine that are functioning marginally, such that small random events can determine when it works and when it doesn't. Restarting just clears out the negative effects of a bad run, can allow hardware to reset its voltages or cool off, and starts from scratch for another try. Good engineering will minimize the chance of these random events causing issues, but a few will always get through now and then.

Turning it off and back on again is a temporary solution. As an engineer, I am not allowed to just reboot and let a known bug through. It will show up again later. Bugs are almost never single events, even if it takes a while for them to reappear.

> everyone understands what to do

laughs in IT support