This first bill allows the state of California to regulate and oversee all 3D prints in the name of public safety.

  • Crozekiel@lemmy.zip
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    1 day ago

    Worse still, gcode is literally just telling a machine which motors to move and how much. You need something that can interpret those instructions (thousands of lines of code even for pretty simple prints) correctly and “draw” the shapes it is making. There are a lot of printers out there that do not have the hardware on board to do this.

    And that is all ignoring the absurdity of recognizing shapes as “gun parts”… The hardware hurdles pale in comparison to the software ones.

    • Semperverus@lemmy.world
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      23 hours ago

      You’re gonna hate this, but… AI can literally do it, and for the large models it’s terrifying how accurate they are. You will argue that your little ESP32 powered reprap or klipper or whatever printer can’t handle it, to which regulators will go ok then, either the printer has to call out to a service with an http request to upload the gcode every time it wants to print anything, or your slicer has to do it (and we dont care that it’s open source, it’s illegal to operate if it doesnt make the call and you’re getting fines or jail time if you get caught).

      This is what AI was built for 😟

      • Crozekiel@lemmy.zip
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        3 hours ago

        Those cheap printers that don’t have onboard hardware to do this also generally don’t have any networking either. You’re lucky if you can get them to connect to a computer with USB - most of the print jobs exclusively get sent via a physical SD card.

        The slicer is in a better position to do this draconian business, but they aren’t aiming this bill (from what I have found) at slicers at all (probably because they are all open source and, unless the law gets passed world-wide, they would just get forked and hosted by someone else in a place where they are still legal to be “dumb”). They are aiming at hardware. It is effectively a complete ban on cheap 3d printers, and turns the models “legal” to sell to a white-list style of control. The manufacturers that play ball get to continue business in the state, others do not.

        All of this to stop a very tiny and difficult avenue for someone to get a gun, when there are much easier and more reliable options available and being used orders of magnitude more often. This has nothing to do with gun control, or guns. This is absolutely a play against 3d printing, at home manufacturing, and right to repair in general. The end goal is DMCA on 3d printing.

      • MrQuallzin@pie.eyeofthestorm.place
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        23 hours ago

        Even AI can’t do this. It is an impossibility. AI might be able to make the shape, but it will NEVER be able to interpret the intent of that shape. It will never know if a cylinder is meant for a gun or for a rolling pin. It will never know if I’m making a trigger for a gun or a replacement trigger for my hot glue gun.

        • Semperverus@lemmy.world
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          4 hours ago

          If an AI can tell what’s in a picture (which is a series of pixel data), it can certainly reconstruct gcode into an “image.” Ive used it at work for similar tasks.

          Cylinders obviously are too generic, but there are parts that are a lot more specific and could be fingerprinted.

        • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
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          22 hours ago

          But it CAN force your printer not to print that replacement hot glue gun trigger. After all, there’s nothing in the law that says that this software has to allow non-gun related 3D printing. The simplest way to be in compliance with this law is to simply prevent all print jobs

          • HertzDentalBar@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            20 hours ago

            You understand that this makes it impossible to implement right? It’s to vauge and will damage profitability of large companies, meaning courts will gut or kill this shit.

      • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
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        22 hours ago

        AI cannot be made to recognize whether a piece of gcode is intended to produce a piece of plastic that is intended to be used as part of a gun. It would need to simulate the machine that that gcode is made to run on, and then simulate the gcode running on that machine, and then analyze the simulated output of that simulated 3D print.

        At best, it can arbitrarily decide to decline print jobs. Which is of course the whole point, because anyone with a printer would need to bypass this filter, and bypassing this filter would be against the law.