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Cake day: September 15th, 2025

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  • This is 100% true. I was fantastic at school. I could read the book and just remember it all when it came time for class and crushed every q&a, quiz, assessment or test offered to us at every stage.

    When I got to college I found the hardest part to be committing to the work since so little of it could be done in class. I still did pretty okay in college because most of it seemed to just be an assessment of what you knew and could do in the moment, but I definitely struggled with time management having never built up the skills necessary to study or knuckle down for a couple of days to cram.

    Where it hit most was with foreign language and computer science classes. My Japanese is shit, but I was able to fall back on my obsession with electronics to make a career out of computer science.

    I got really fucking lucky I think, because I did well in school but I was not very good at it. I know plenty of people that didn’t get the GPA I did or have all AP classes that are currently doing extremely well for themselves because they learned one of the more important skills you can learn in school, discipline.


  • Good thing I didn’t bring up spying at all or you might have a point that somehow speaks to a thing I said.

    What the bill does include is a wish list of stupid things you could only want if you didn’t understand the technology.

    It’s also the thin end of the wedge meant to create a context for an excuse to further restrict these devices.

    Most 3D printers run software that is smaller than most 3D prints.

    I’m going to say that another couple of different ways in case you didn’t understand it, The software that runs on these devices is measured in the hundreds of kilobytes. A 2-in wide Batman symbol with no flourishes or extra details is going to be 10 to 30 times that size. There’s not even enough memory on the device to hold the entire print so it reads the instructions on how to make it one line at a time.

    Those instructions are written in G-Code and g code is older than even the concept of most computer peripherals. G-Code can be written by hand, and is a technology older than computer monitors, digital audio, the mouse, or The indicator light.

    So you want to add more computer to a device than the device normally costs so that it can run software that no one has written or knows how to write so it can detect shapes based on their future intended usage to prevent people from using their highly customizable home manufacturing device to Make single use firearms in a country that already has more guns than people…


  • There is no algorithm for that. That’s just technobabble. In order to detect if somebody is trying to print any specific shape you’re going to need software that can look for that shape in an arbitrary cloud of point data. That software does not exist.

    No one has developed that kind of software and in order to develop it would require a tremendous amount of research and development. Who pays for that?

    Now let’s say you were the company who did that research and development Do you build the cost of developing this anti-product into a line of products that you will sell? What’s the market for that product? If you sold the printer with no chip at all are you exempt from that requirement?

    Will a device that has to include the additional cost that comes with all of the additional needed computer hardware, software development, and anticircumvention technology be in any way competitive on the market against models that don’t include these additional unnecessary expenses?

    How long will people be allowed to make aftermarket modifications to their 3D printer if the aftermarket modifications don’t also include the additional computer hardware needed to run software that could arbitrarily detect gun parts in 3D printed designs?

    I don’t think you understand how completely insane and unworkable a plan like this is because you’re comparing 3D printers to 2D printers. That’s a little bit like comparing paint by numbers to scratch and sniff.



  • Obviously you are not at all familiar with how 3d printers work, how that currency counterfeit prevention works or how the limits of it mean that they had to put tracking dots into the machine as a backup, but here’s a dirty secret about it:

    The reason printers are so expensive, you have limited options for brands, no one has an alternative open source version and they can’t be built at home is because of laws that make it a requirement to have this technology that restricts their use.

    It’s dramatically easier to prevent a two-dimensional printer that requires proprietary software from your computer to prepare the prints to send to the printer. For starters, that proprietary software is only available from The printer manufacturer and it weighs hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of megs. The printer also has on it a pretty powerful chip to receive all that information and instructions and pretty powerful DRM to make sure that you can’t access it without jumping through their hoops.

    Most 3D printers are made from components that can all be taken out and replaced individually. They run software that is custom built and available open source. By their very nature nearly every model of 3D printer is much more customizable and It is widely understood how to build one from scratch.

    Making a law like this is a kin to making a law that says it’s illegal to sell a notebook that people could use to plan a crime. It’s unworkably restrictive and in order to pull it off you’re going to have to violate a whole lot of rights.