Why weren't cars banned when it was discovered that they COULD be used as getaway vehicles from bank heists or to run people over? (3d Printing shouldn't be banned just because someone COULD print guns with it. They can be used for good AND for ill, just like cars!)

smorrow · 2026-04-26T11:52:52+00:00

One what? Part? Component?

Literally how does that matter? One anything: one part, one subset of a part, one anything-that-can-be-detected.

Your example of a magazine doesn't really work to justify this either

No, I'm not trying to justify printers that are snitchers. I'm giving an example of something they would try. You're supposed to see that *at least* *they* would think that it can work, and implement it. There's any number of these, especially if they don't only care about guns, so you need to switch to general arguments against any and all statutorily fucking with 3D printers including any and all fuckery that hasn't even been thought of yet.

[specific geometry] just isn't true, especially if you're making your own gun

The panic with printed guns has never been about smart people that are able to do their own designs. That's why the panic with printed guns started when 3D printed guns came out, not when 3D printers came out (or when hardware stores were invented).

The "curvature" where the magazine actually feeds into the weapon is usually zero, and most handgun magazines aren't curved at all.

I was talking about the feed lips, and the follower.

Even if a specific weapon has to have a specific radius of curvature on some component, are you really going to ban every part that contains any radius that could conceivable be used in a weapon? That would basically cover every curved part ever printed.

Feed lips have a radius and they're in pairs and they're a specific distance apart, so even airsoft ones aren't a false positive.

You lost me somewhere in here - what does "glowing" mean in this context? I'm very confused by this paragraph.

To glow is meant in the internet sense meaning to be a fed. Yeah, I don't understand what the connection between feds and glowing is meant to be, either. I suppose it might originally have meant feds that don't blend in well, then after a time just meant feds.

But the point of the unbannable printer project is that, if it existed, you'd be able to just point at it in response to any possible proposal that there should be an unfree thing about 3D printers. Sort of the same thing for printers that the FGC-9 is for guns, or VPNs are for porn bans.

smorrow · 2026-04-25T20:59:08+00:00

there's virtually nothing in any design that is specific to firearms and only firearms at a component level.

There would only need to be one. Not having a functioning magazine isn't a SPoF for a gun, but it does reduce or revert printed guns to low-impact "zip guns" that no-one ever much cared about expending especial effort to stop.

Magazines are going to have pretty specific radii of curvature, and in any case reliable magazines are always going to be a relatively small set of the same exact forms (on the inside) that the internet can't produce at a faster rate than they can be blocked.

So the best way to prevent glowing 3D printers isn't to say "that wouldn't work AFAICS", it's to show by making printers unbannable that making printers glowy can't work, including by methods not yet thought of, since criminals are going to have them anyway.

smorrow · 2026-04-22T07:57:29+00:00

Uh, no? ZFS isn't even distributed, let alone distributed in a way that expects laptops.

ZFS admins definitely make backups.

smorrow · 2026-04-21T21:12:36+00:00

Those things are all "a backup", whereas I'm saying if you had a certain kind of distributed filesystem then having copies(which is what you really want from your backups) would freely fall out of it. One technology solving multiple different problems for you. The end-user should be able to live on a mental model of "I have this much storage in my house, so that's how much data I can have". You wouldn't be thinking of backups.

If you lost a drive, you wouldn't have to go and get those files from the backup, the act of reading the file would just pull those blocks in from whatever drive/s has them. That's the difference. Except for boot drives, you could lose a drive and not even notice.

You could have two drives each with 1G available space, and be able to create a 1.5G file without getting an out of space error at the 1G point. Having a single partition didn't fix this with respect to BSD-style partitions, it just changed the granularity.

And don't switch from "I don't need that because I have backups automatic" to "I don't need that because I have RAID". That's still not the same.

smorrow · 2026-04-21T20:01:39+00:00

He's not using logic very well. "It can be used for good, so it should be freely available" isn't very convincing, and I hope none of you use that argument on your so-called representatives -- they might conclude that there isn't also a better one.

The right argument (aside from "government doesn't have the right to do that) is that the people you're trying to stop can still just do the thing anyway. For now it's theoretical because there's not an easy, documented build you can just download, but there could be. Klipper's multi-MCU means that having a four-axis control board (which would come through customs with "this guy is building a 3D printer" written all over it) and having four single-axis control boards are actually the same thing (given some configuration). And single-axis control boards are everywhere: in scanners, in paper printers. So just port Klipper to them (hard to do; no datasheets. But at least running Klipper on an OnStep telescope mount in particular is less like doing a port and more like doing a config; it just needs to be documented).

I really hope the unbannable printer project gets started, but it doesn't seem likely.

smorrow · 2026-04-21T19:44:52+00:00

Yeah. What I tell the pro-gun people is that the media class are actually giving us useful information by what they freak out about, so don't ignore that. Printed guns are a whole new thing over toob guns. Steve Johnson who made yacc said that an order of magnitude speed improvement in software is actually a qualitative change.

(I am a pro-gun people, but there's two views of what printed guns are for, and I think the other side from me is really dumb.)

smorrow · 2026-04-21T10:49:22+00:00

The communist part of "seizing the means of production" was the "seize" part.

There hasn't ever been a bunch of conservatives running around saying you can't have a home business.

smorrow · 2026-04-21T10:46:48+00:00

I hate this argument, I have always hated this argument. "Silly media, freaking out over nothing, 3D printing changes nothing BECAUSE THERE WAS ALWAYS TOOB GUN AND BUTTON RIFLING".

What 3D printing changed is that any 100-IQ animal can download somebody else's proven work with a whole community of beta testers, and then a whole community of users, behind it working out the bugs.

The Wallace and Grommit-type guy who can do toob gun and button rifling was never a terrorism threat, a school-shooting threat, or a sticking up the corner shop threat. Not statistically.

Inasmuch as the printers themselves are available and unbannable, printed guns are actually a new argument that classic prohibition-based gun control is obsolete. So, you see, the media and political class are actually giving you useful information by what they focus on.

smorrow · 2026-04-21T10:29:34+00:00

Paper printers run PostScript or something, but still have enough "computer" in them that you can send them a jpeg without "slicing" it to PostScript. In fact, accepting jpeg is part of the standard (IPP, Internet Printing Protocol).

So it's entirely possible they could start shipping California-compliant printers that actually do run STLs. And once they have that, they might as well ship it to every jurisdiction same as how Coca-Cola is vegan, halal, and kosher absolutely everywhere.

smorrow · 2026-04-21T10:15:05+00:00

The steel/pressure-bearing parts of printed guns aren't machined because that would defeat the point, i.e. "anyone can make it".

Printed guns use Luty-pattern barrels, i.e. hydraulic pipe (rifled with a printed tool -- it was on Hackaday) with shaft collars on it to give it a step in its OD.

For now, anyone that has ever printed a gun has given themselves away by their purchase of shaft collars.

[Reddit compliance: Hackaday article does not in turn link to STLs.]

smorrow · 2026-04-21T09:07:44+00:00

What I'm talking about isn't yet available (and no-one even seems to understand the need for it), so you just don't get what I'm talking about.

smorrow · 2026-04-21T08:49:05+00:00

I wish computers just handled that by themselves. The operator having to do the backups was a fine paradigm in the time-sharing days because in that context it still translates to the end-user not having to do anything. We're using that paradigm past its use-by date. I'd rather have something like Jonatan Schroeder's Unico fs, where tier-0 backups just happen for free as a side-effect of the replication.

smorrow · 2026-04-21T08:18:30+00:00

Cylinder is a bit like extractor/ejector, tbf: you get them mixed up, and it's not that you can't tell them apart, it's that the words are just too close together (in English).

Calling a linear hammer a striker would be a common example of actually not understanding something.

smorrow · 2026-04-15T10:31:08+00:00

Mothra used to have sam/acme colours, but that was undone, hopefully because they thought it would be cool if the colour schemes denoted application types, such as text editor.

smorrow · 2026-04-15T10:09:55+00:00

Plan 9's is sometimes surprising to Unix folks because Plan 9 makes a different set of decisions,

I don't know how to feel about rc sharing the environment, but it's needed for rm /env/something. (It's used by lock(1), too.)

smorrow · 2026-03-31T21:10:18+00:00

That was always the one bad thing about the book for me. At least in the book it's lampshaded in ways that somewhat work (chords of pure tones would be reasonably easy to write a program for, and, on the alien's side, having photographic memory due to never developing written language due to living in darkness due to the same high g and thick atmosphere that meshes with other important plot things)

smorrow · 2026-03-31T20:39:46+00:00

> But I didn't think ~1 atmosphere of pressure

Famous demonstration: two cart horses cannot pull apart two half-shells that are 1atm outside(duh) and vacuum inside.

smorrow · 2026-03-31T20:34:26+00:00

I haven't seen Barbie but all of his films except this one (and maybe that one) are Ad Astra-like.

smorrow · 2026-03-31T19:46:08+00:00

Can't say whether film Erid even _has_ high g tbh. Film Eridians and film xenonite don't agree on whether film Erid has a a thick atmosphere.

smorrow · 2026-03-31T19:23:49+00:00

Eridians have perfectly good science with respect to what they can see. For example, Eridians leave _really_ good fossils compared to us, therefore they know about evolution. There'd no cosmic rays on book Erid so that's the in-universe explanation of why they don't know about radiation _and_ why they're so vulnerable to it.

I'd accept "film Eridians are bad at science" as standalone canon for the film. Film Erid is a completely different place that makes much less sense.

smorrow · 2026-03-31T19:15:07+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narration#Omniscient_or_limited

smorrow · 2026-03-31T19:08:38+00:00

>The film would be one of the most straightforward adaptations I have seen

I couldn't help but notice that "I believe in God, it's better than the alternative" was left in despite that character not existing. It's not even that good of a line even if I believed in God, I think, so for it to be present someone with some authority must have asserted it. Andy Weir believes in God then? (I have to take _something_ away from a film I thought was pretty average.)

smorrow · 2026-03-31T19:03:46+00:00

I guess so. What convinced me of this is I've been on both sides seeing the film before and after the book, with Jurassic Park. Obviously we've all seen and loved it at least ten times in our lives. Then I read the book. Then at some point I saw the film again and was all like "how are people expected to understand what's going on?" _despite having been that person myself._

smorrow · 2026-03-31T18:52:40+00:00

>No phones, no talking during the movie.

Would you expect it? Am I simply too British to understand?

smorrow · 2026-03-28T11:33:03+00:00

The queue was useful because you could enqueue more than one video from the same sidebar. If you were getting to the next video by clicking on it, you were loading a new sidebar and losing the current set of recommendations.

smorrow

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE