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Games: Pips, Proton Experimental, Steam, and More
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Ken Shirriff ☛ Solving the NYTimes Pips puzzle with a constraint solver
The New York Times recently introduced a new daily puzzle called Pips. You place a set of dominoes on a grid, satisfying various conditions. For instance, in the puzzle below, the pips (dots) in the purple squares must sum to 8, there must be fewer than 5 pips in the red square, and the pips in the three green squares must be equal. (It doesn't take much thought to solve this "easy" puzzle, but the "medium" and "hard" puzzles are more challenging.)
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Andrew Healey ☛ Solving NYT's Pips Puzzle
Pips is The New York Times' daily puzzle where you have to place dominos onto a board within a set of region restrictions.
I wrote a solver for Pips by encoding the game logic and searching through a tree of legal game states until a complete board is found, along with optimizations to make it ~16× more efficient than a brute-force search.
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GamingOnLinux ☛ Proton Experimental brings fixes for Assassin's Creed Shadows, Age of Empires: Definitive Edition and more | GamingOnLinux
A fresh batch of fixes for Proton Experimental to run Windows games on Linux / SteamOS + Steam Deck arrived October 17th so here's all that's new. In case you missed it a release candidate for Proton 10 is also in testing.
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Boiling Steam ☛ TGS 2025: A Conversation with Alibaba Cloud
In the second hall, there were many booths and not just the ones that were indie or hardware related. There were also middleware companies and many other services, such as vendors proposing Hey Hi (AI) models to speed up asset creation and more stuff in that field. As I was walking around, what caught my attention very quickly was the Alibaba Cloud booth. Everyone knows the company that is behind AliExpress, but maybe some of you are not aware that they also are an Hey Hi (AI) model powerhouse, with very effective teams developing models under the Qwen and Wan brand names. Those are very advanced models and they also happen to be frequently released as open weights, so that you can run them on your own hardware if you have what it takes. I had a conversation with one of the employees at the booth who could tell me a bit more about what’s happening in more details. Let me just preface this by saying that is all hearsay and that I have no proof of everything I have heard. But at the same time, the person I talked to seemed to speak honestly so I don’t think the following was just some of exagerated bullshit.
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Boiling Steam ☛ New Steam Games Playable on the Steam Deck, with Ball X Pit - 2025-10-18 Edition
Between 2025-10-11 and 2025-10-18 we selected 5 newly released games that are rated as Verified or Playable on the Steam Deck, and meeting specific criteria in terms of user ratings. Looks like Devolver has a new hit in their catalog with Ball X Pit, a strange mashup of survivor, shooter, bouncing ball mechanics as well as base-building with roguelite elements. It seems a mouthful but once you see the trailer it all makes sense. This game is a very big deal and has become massively popular.