Tell that to every farmer in the US. Do you seriously not know about the DMCA?

Read some Cory Doctorow.

And really, the politicians are fine with that. The goal isn’t the complete elimination of 3D printed ghost guns. The goal is to greatly increase the skill level required to print a 3D printed ghost gun. With relatively modest tools and enough skill, you can machine your own gun from scratch in your garage. Yet the barrier to entry is so high that few who seek guns for evil ends use these methods. A random street drug dealer might find the idea of printing a gun at the push of a button very tempting. But they are unlikely to find the idea of building a machine shop and learning machining appealing or practical. Or in your case, learning all about open source 3D printers and their software. Yours is just the 3D printer equivalent of the home gunsmith. Yes, you and people like you exist. But the politicians aren’t aiming for complete elimination, just vast reduction.

Accessibility matters. It’s why the printing press was such a big deal.

There’s a much simpler and more horrifying solution here, that would actually be technically possible. All 3D printers sold must have a sort of cryptographic lock on them. Only safety-verified prints are allowed to be printed on them. The code running on the printers themselves will still be dirt stupid, but there will be a software lock on the thing preventing uncertified prints from being printed. Every 3D printer sold is locked down tighter than a John Deere tractor.

Every 3D print company would offer a large number of pre-verified prints. (AFAIK many already have libraries of print files.) But you as a user wouldn’t be able to just print anything you wanted. At best, maybe 3rd-party verification services would exist. Model what you want, then pay 20 bucks to some company for a print verification. You send them the file, they screen it for any contraband, and they send you a cryptographic key that lets you print that file and only that file. Long term they would hope AI can do the screening. For now it will be someone’s job to just stare at 3D models all day and to figure out if it’s a gun or not. It would start with screening for guns, but it would inevitably expand to things like intellectual property protections.

They won’t have to change the fundamental deep logic and operation of the printer itself. Just like the fundamental mechanisms inside a tractor haven’t changed. They’ll just make it a felony to sell a 3D printer that isn’t locked down to Hell and back.

That’s something highly specific that was carefully designed to only activate on currency. They added highly unique dot patterns to currency that scanners could detect. And the printer doesn’t (at least by law) spy on everything you do. The printer will just refuse to copy a dollar bill. The printer doesn’t refuse to operate unless it has an open communications line to the FBI.

If they wanted to do something similar with 3D printers, I would have no objections. Others have pointed out the technical problems with preventing any form of 3D print, but I’ll speak conceptually here. There are 3D printers that print metal. Countries with high-denomination coins might find it useful to bar 3D metal printers from printing those coins. You could assumedly create some sort of 3D version of the dot patterns used on paper currency. Then you pass a law stating that any 3D scanner must refuse to scan an object if it detects those very unique dot patterns on it. Then countries with high-value coins could mint them with these unique dot patterns or other features. If anyone tries to scan a coin to reproduce it, the scanner just refuses or outputs only noise. No need to phone home. No need for mass surveillance. Just a simply refusal that would only be active in this very specific case.

If someone wanted to implement a feature like that into 3D printers, technical problems aside, I would have no objections. That would be directly analogous to the 2d printer example, and it would represent no escalation in spying or restrictions on freedom of use.

Then they’ll make owning an unregistered 3D printer a felony.

I don’t even see how this is supposed to help with phone addiction. Sure, if short form video is your poison of choice, it could help. But if your addiction is more of the reddit, lemmy, discord, or group chat variety, or anything else text-based, wouldn’t making typing easier make these addictions even worse?

Have you not seen the literature showing the effects regular LLM use has on people? You can’t see the obvious demonic connotations of a machine that coaches people into committing suicide? That’s like literal Satan, Prince of Darkness, Father of All Lies shit

Is it actually the spawn of a literal personal devil? Of course not. But the damn things act a hell of a lot like the devils of myth and legend. They tempt you in with the promise of easy effortless success and riches. And in the end they take everything from you.

I mean, it will literally steal your soul. Using LLMs changes you. It degrades your skills. Its sycophancy harms your ability to interact with actual human beings with opinions of their own. It makes you feel like you are never wrong. And use it enough, and it can literally drive you mad.

LLMs are the closest real thing to a malevolent demon that will steal your soul.

Look at this dumb fuck, taking decade-old data from okcupid and making sweeping conclusions about the entire human race from a fucking dating website’s blog post.

Pathetic.

You need to like…find Jesus or something. IDK. But religious or not, hate leads only to the pit.

Or, hear me out, show some maturity and end the meeting at it’s end time.

Individual action vs group action. You don’t have control over other people. You can’t force others in your organization to end their meetings on the hour. You can however set your meetings to begin five minutes after the hour.

A bedding ceremony.

A bunch of retroreflectors. Something like this. Hang them from strings in your windows. Retroreflectors reflect back light to their source. Don’t shine your own bright lights, just return some of the photos to the people that made them. And if by some miracle the cops do complain, say that they’re just decorative and meant to prevent birds from hitting your windows.

It’s so much worse than that. Algorithmic pricing represents the death of what little remains of the American dream. What’s the point of going to college, going to trade school, or working hard to improve your situation in any way? Every time you get a raise, the algorithms will figure out your income is higher, raise all the prices, and completely cancel out your salary increase. What’s the point of doing anything to better your own earning potential at that point? All jobs effectively collapse to subsistence wages, regardless of the amount you’re actually taking home. Might as well just get the least miserable job you can find and just work that until you die of old age.

The top 10% already are already, today, responsible for the absolute majority of consumer spending, total.

The future is like the present, just moreso. There is already some portion of the population that is frozen out of the regular economy. Think those poor and homeless enough to not be able to buy their basic necessities through wage income. These folks are effectively shut out of the economy. Over time, their number will grow. Fewer and fewer folks will actually interact with the consumer economy, getting by off charity, theft, and informal markets instead.

In the future, imagine an economy that’s just the top 10% trading goods and services with each other. Everything has been automated and only people lucky enough to have owned substantial stock in the transition period now manage to keep a roof over their heads. They’re all living in gated communities surrounded by massive slums. That’s the future economy.

Walmart is not understaffed. They’re staffed precisely how much they want to be. Walmart is just a dirty, filthy store that is hostile to its customers and workers.

The goal is to pair this with cameras and facial recognition. When you walk up to an item, it will display a price for you. When someone else does the same, they’ll get a different price. Your assigned price will be recorded to your profile and honored when you get to the register.

The goal is to be able to easily charge different people different prices for the same item. It has very little to do with changing prices for everyone over the course of the day.

Depends on the zombie. But most zombies as portrayed in popular media are not capable of punching you, hitting you, or even using objects in any meaningful way. A zombie trapped in a locked car will stay there indefinitely, unless they just happen to hit the unlock button through their random flailing.

Zombies themselves are never capable. It’s their durability, relentlessness, and numbers that make them a terrifying threat.

You’re just a Nazi that wants to force all Jews to move to Israel.