I’ve never played Factorio and had fun playing the game. I think there is supposed to be a tutorial when you first start the game? And I think the tech tree is a good guide for what to do next.

https://prisonjournalismproject.org/2024/03/31/popular-video-game-banned-federal-prisons/

From my prison cell in Colorado, I conquered sites on alien planets, used conveyor belts to supply my factories, and organized weapons to defend against enemy attacks. I was playing Mindustry, a world-building game that relies heavily on logistics and strategy.

For less than $2, I could lose myself in my Android tablet at night — then, when I slept, my dreams about the game replaced my usual nightmares. And I wasn’t alone: Inmates talked about the game over meals and at work.

Then came an announcement from officials last July. Mindustry would no longer be on our prison-issued tablets.

“I knew a lot of people would be upset when I read they were taking it away,” one inmate from Nebraska said. “I could walk around the chow hall, my work assignment and other areas — everyone was talking about it.”

According to a statement from a Federal Bureau of Prisons spokesperson, Mindustry was removed because it was “found to jeopardize the safety, security, and orderly operation” of federal prisons.

When Prison Journalism Project asked for specifics on how the game jeopardized safety, security and orderly operation, the spokesperson said the Federal Bureau of Prisons does not discuss specific security practices or internal procedures for security reasons.

The game’s fans here in Federal Correctional Institution at Englewood, a federal prison in Colorado, included a retired colonel for the U.S. Army.

“All they’ve left us with are stripped-down children’s games,” he said.

Another player had one of the most elaborate mining and distribution centers I’ve ever seen, the fruit of many hours of thought — which, of course, is one key to fighting recidivism.

“Whenever I’m feeling upset, I can pick up my tablet,” the player told me. “It calms me down and changes my whole mindset.”

Users have come up with their own explanations for Mindustry’s fate. One theory goes that players had used the game’s drawing pad to sketch dirty pictures or leave secret messages.

Whatever happened, people are disappointed.

“I wanted to buy a tablet,” one person said, “but now that they’ve taken Mindustry I don’t want one.”

Sentiments like that are understandable. We are still without many of the tablet features we were told to expect, including free e-books through Project Gutenberg, video messaging, and a life skills program through Khan Academy.

In a statement, the prison bureau said that games are controlled by a vendor, and that the bureau has “the right to remove any game that it deems inappropriate.”

I miss the game. When I played it, I could stop dwelling on my past or my unknown future. And it encouraged me to be more social with others, especially when we would discuss strategy. My tablet now lies neglected in my locker.

The player who put together the elaborate mining center isn’t shocked that Mindustry is gone.

“It’s not uncommon for the BOP to take away something we like,” he said.

This sucks. :(

I personally use tankie.tube.

you’re not usually directly accessing/working on the hardware

I mean, you are. Sure, there’s a layer of abstraction when doing tasks that require the intervention of the kernel, but you are still dealing with cpu registers and stuff like that. Merely by writing in assembly you are making your software less portable because you are writing for a specific ISA that only a certain family of processors can read, and talking with the kernel through an API or ABI that is specific to the kernel (standards like Posix mitigate the latter part somewhat, but some systems (windows) aren’t Posix compilant).

Writing it in assembly would make it pretty much the opposite of portable (not accounting for emulation), since you are directly giving instructions to a specific hardware and OS.

Yeah I also never reached the end, though I imagine if playing multiplayer, with enough players and time, that then at some point there won’t be any untouched land.

I’m sure it will once the website has been changed and new players begin calling it that.

I’m so confused when people say that. It’s a short name without any difficult consonant clusters. What in it doesn’t roll off the tongue?

I’m using both.

I installed NoScript just a few days ago, because I’m forced to use a really weak computer that struggles to even browse the modern web. I feel like NoScript improved it a lot, and while quite a few websites broke (including lemmy) (but most will still display the content), I just set the ones that I need working to trusted, but the performance is still good (I should note I’m also using it in conjunction with an automatic tab discarter).

I however also don’t directly use Google. Both SearX and Yandex don’t need javascript, so I’m unaffected by these news, despite being a bit mad about it as a reflection of the direction the web is going as a whole.

The hover-over text says “Disclaimer: I have not actually tried the beta yet. I hear it’s quite pleasant and hardly Hitler-y at all.”

echo and alias are both shell commands. If the shell is running (which it obviously still is), those commands should still work, as it does not involve reading data from disk, but from memory.

Edit: I just noticed the picture said cd was not found, which is also a shell built-in. So, I don’t know.

Besides maybe the second world war.

Hover-over text of ExistentialComics’ comic:

Some people have called Plato the first totalitarian thinker, but if you look at what Democracy is producing these days it’s hard to not think he had a bit of a point…

And text beneath comic:

Also, my Dad is trying to raise some money for a surgery, I already posted this before and we met the goal, but then he contracted dengue fever so the surgury had to get delayed, so we are trying to raise a little more money to cover those expenses. If you could spare a few dollars it would really help.

As for Plato, he criticized democracy heavily, claiming that it gave people too much freedom, and if anyone could be elected by the ignorant masses, it would be too possible for selfish people who only wanted power and wealth to get into power. Democracy, ironically, would inevitably lead to tyranny and demagogues. He thought a better system would be for the wisest, most virtuous, and most selfless people to govern society, which of course would be philosophers like himself. How this system was immune to corruption is a little unclear to me, but given what’s going on with democracies lately you can probably at least say he has some good points.

I don’t get the banana trick. What do I do after pinching? I just end up ripping through the skin of one while trying it out.

Or just always look at the 100g column.

Why does dumping water out of boots have instructions? Isn’t it like dumping water out of any other container?

Thanks for the warning.

You can search for communities across all federated instances by clicking on “All” in the communities page: https://lemmy.ml/communities?listingType=All

If it’s like Lisp, then ? is just part of the symbol and doesn’t have any special syntatic meaning. In different Lisps it’s also convention to end predicate names with a ? or with P (p for predicate)