> The required technology is not possible - 3D printers read code, not intent; they cannot tell what a shape is for.
"Anthropic announces Project Disarm, a new model designed for 3d printer manufacturers to quickly infer whether the intent of an stl file is a weapon. The printer first submits the job to the cloud, and only after it's approved will it print."
Not that I want this future, just that I can imagine it.
Based on the fact that Claude Opus 4.8 decided I needed a cybersecurity exemption to debug a stupid pure virtual call bug (basically virtual method called inside of destructor) that I had already found, oh boy, I sure would love to have my 3D prints analyzed by Anthropic safe guards. We should also ensure that nothing shaped like a dildo can be printed without scanning our face and genitalia and keeping it on file with Persona while we're at it.
I'm not mad at you for suggesting this, you're right, I'm just generally aimlessly angry and ready for this world to burn.
I'm getting a lot of refusals these days from multiple LLMs on multiple fronts for silly stuff, a lot more than I had for a while. If this is where things are really going, I think open weight models have a big future.
I have moderate success telling the model we are securely doing the thing I want to do, and then it seems on board because I'm saying the right words and seemingly am aligned with the guardrails. Basically, you can't express ideological opposition to the idea of security, but then proscribe what you want and anoint it as secure, and then it's happy. Then it focuses less on litigating whether or not it is secure.
"H.R. 148867 makes all large language models subject to safety certification, introduces penalties for unlicensed training and use of uncertified models"
Frankly who cares about dildos when your personal freedom and private property of you and your family is at stake.You can buy uncountable dildo models in a shop.
I recently was in Venezuela, I have been in Cuba. I am a native spaniard. There you have a group of people that took control of the weapons in the country and uses it to basically enslave the rest of the country.
When the people in power have automatic weapons and you don't there is basically nothing you can do to defend yourself from the abuses of power.
That is a real thing the people in power have wet dreams and would love to do in any country, including the US.
The future is almost certainly the terrible path: "applications phoning home to judge whether a use case is approved by the company." All writing is on the wall, and directionally that's the way software and hardware has been moving. We have unfortunately normalized the idea that users must have this ongoing tethered relationship to the product manufacturers and software developers, who measure, change, and control the user's usage at their whim.
Yes, I can imagine it too. And, if such a 'safety nanny' is enacted into law, I'm confident it will A. Refuse to print a significant number of innocent projects, or B. Be trivially circumvented by bad actors. The odds are high that it will manage to do both.
A dedicated model for this purpose could easily run locally. Recognizing shapes is not exactly cutting age AI.
The input to the detector could be not the G code instructions, but a 3D model representation recovered by simulating the G code. (That's a thing that exists.)
The requirements for a 3D printer which detects weapon shapes is actually fairly realistic.
It would likely have laughable false positives: 8-year-old Johnny not being able to 3D print a squirt pistol.
Some common tools have pistol-like form factors: spray guns, glue/grease/caulking guns, drills, hair dryers.
It is a cockamamie idea; but to claim that it is not doable seems a bit disingenuous.
Finally a llm trained on manufacturing weapons. "AI remove all the safe metal from a lower reciever so that the dangerous part can be safely destroyed without endangering the environment "
To mitigate that, and as a token acknowledgement to privacy concerns, OpenMappleSoft will introduce a device side fuzzy hashing scheme whose output it turns out you can reverse to recover the original weapon schematics.
When I was a kid I saw someone with a makeshift shotgun made out of a steel pipe, a strong spring, and and a rough striker. Not very effective, but it was working.
There are several snarky knee-jerk reactions in the comments here, but state assemblies pass things all the time that ultimately fail to pass or get vetoed. Now the public will debate it, contact their state senators to give their opinions...it's all part of the process.
California constantly passes all kinds of weird, pointless, and burdensome gun laws. There are so many of them, and they're so poorly written, that no lawyer in the state who can confidently tell you what's legal and what isn't until a court chimes in. There's no meaningful process around any of that.
The only thing that's different about this one is that it mentions a technology geeks care about. But I doubt that's enough. As another commenter noted, you can no longer hide behind "we have no technology to distinguish between guns and non-guns". We have AI that's supposedly PhD-level and will soon automate all jobs. Looking at STL files sounds like a job.
That's actually one of my fears about LLMs: they make thought policing cheap. There are profound privacy and cost barriers to having a Facebook employee review all your private messages. There are no such barriers to having a robot watch all your IMs in real time.
If this fails it'll be because the tech industry expresses disapproval too loudly to ignore.
The legislators don't care about the underlying criticism. Almost no legislators have ever used a 3d printer or written any software, beyond maybe simple assigned programs if they had a required intro-to-programming course. Few are "tech" people. The rest don't understand this technology, or any technology really, beyond it being a black box for specific purposes. They see 3d printing and plastic guns and think something must be done, because the 3d printing black boxes are producing dangerous weapons.
Describing California as "the Europe of the United States" ignores its essential narcissism -- defining California in terms of Europe would be met with contemptuous pashaws, even if the balkanized ethnic enclaves found there, at a scale larger than anywhere in the U.S. -- not even New York, resemble Europe. The Asian communities will also wonder if you can find Vietnam on a map -- would guess you think it is in the Mediterranean.
Europe favors comprehensive regulation, with laws or directives dealing with families of related issues. California does regulation in a very American way, with individual bills targeting specific issues. It just does more of that than the average state.
and I would imagine close to 100% of the US 3d printing nerds that live there have the means to easily move to another state and continue their 3d printing nerdom.
There is a reason why California is leading the nation in migration out of the state.
I tried to photo copy a dollar bill when I was a kid on a dinky inkjet printer. It printed half way then spit out something about counterfeit prevention. I scanned the bill, printed the top half, fed the paper back in, and printed the bottom half. This can only actually stop the completely unmotivated.
You managed to defeat the first layer of defense - the warning. The yellow identifying dots were present on your printed copy, should you have decided become a precocious criminal successful enough to warrant the attention of the Secret Service.
That leads into a great example of how most OS "telemetry" is anything but safe or innocent:
1. Your printer probably puts a secret code into everything you print (not just money-like things) with the time and a serial number of the printer. [0]
2. Windows and MacOS constantly sends the serial-numbers of your connected devices back to the mothership. [1][2]
3. So when you print out a flyer that somehow annoys the regime, they read out the serial number, then call a buddy at Microsoft/Apple.
4. Now there are thugs knocking at your door to talk about how your picture was criminally mean to Dear Leader.
My assumption about his involvement with Everytown is that he sees his position in society through a Marxist lens for threat modeling, and armed proles are one of the bigger threats the plutocrats face.
NY is pushing the same sort of stuff. The question to ask is how many people are actually being killed with 3D printed weapons? I don't have that info, but I would guess they are statistical outliers and would have been replaced by other homemade weapons if not available. Politicians love to "fix" problems that aren't really problems in the first place.
Sir are you a licensed chef of good standing in OnlyChef's database? That knife is dangerous. We can issue you a government approved plastic version if you need to cut something, but SoylentGreen(tm) is Ready-to-Scoop(tm)!
There is a law in California that has been interpreted to mean that all clubbing weapons are illegal. So if you by a length of pipe and keep it around (e.g. under your bed) explicitly for self-defense purposes, you have committed a crime.
IANAL, but as far as I can tell, keeping a shotgun in your home for self-defense purposes would be fine, as long as you aren't planning ahead of time to use it as a club.
[edit]
My information is slightly out-of-date; there was an injunction against enforcement in 2024 from Fouts v Bonta. I have no clue the injunction is or is not still in effect, so ask your lawyer before carrying a club.
This isn't just California. A lot of states have laws regulating the carrying of weapons, and include bats and clubs in those statutes, the definition of which often hinges on the intent of their use.
This is why many may have heard lawyers say "if you're going to carry a baseball bat in your car, make sure to also carry a ball and mitt"
I think so many people in the US are so focused on the topic of guns as weapons that we sometimes forget that we have laws regarding other weapons as well.
It's the striker strip that can be used in producing meth. The strip contains red phosphorus. Strike anywhere matches are the only kind that don't need a special strip. The strike anywhere kind were probably restricted due to their sensitivity to shock and friction which makes them more useful and more dangerous than safety matches.
I am not aware of this being a regulatory matter in any state, California included. Retailers choose not to carry them because they are expensive to ship due to their hazardous materials classification and an attractive theft / crime target due to their (inaccurate) drug association, but it hasn’t led to any blanket regulation at any state level that I know of. I do think they’re banned from workplaces in California though, but that’s because they’re dangerous, not because of meth.
That does not sound stupid, but safe? I giant truck that has no chance of stopping, controlled by a computer? Just build railways and then there are no issues, no fancy AI to control them.
You misunderstand the mechanism. Its not because states copy other states. Its because the corrosive political elements are embedded everywhere, but most prominently have a foothold in California, Washington, and New York state. There is an interstate conspiracy and agenda to ruin America. Louis Rossman covered it recently in his video "The destruction of 3D printing: Bloomberg is behind it"
It does not. The gun lobby routinely lies about California regulations to try and get their way. They're on year 13 of boycotting the California handgun market, for example; new handgun models in the state are required to adopt microstamping technology, but firearms manufacturers are ideologically opposed to this technology, so they falsely claim that it doesn't exist.
Are 3D-printed guns even remotely reliable, or is it just a moral panic? A brass tube and a pin is probably less likely to fail than 3d printed materials.
It is fearmongering. You technically can print an all-plastic firearm that works for a round or so until they explode, but only after you have already printed and tested and refined multiple times over, and best case it is still an inferior material to metal. I would put it in the same category as "Yeah you can turn a tree trunk into a cannon, tell me when not to come over when you use it." You can probably make a similarly reliable firearm out of fired clay if you put in the same effort.
Some parts in regular firearms can be printed in plastic, guns with polymer parts have existed since polymers existed, but it is only marginally simpler than machining it out of metal. After all you can buy a metal CNC machine for handful of bucks more than a 3d printer and you don't have to worry about shitty materials breaking immediately.
And there are already plenty of examples of hardware store pipe guns that if someone spent more than a day or two working on it would by far surpass anything anyone can print.
They’re not printing the metal parts. They’re printing the frame (as in “polymer framed handgun”).
The frame is the part that gets the serial number and is considered the controlled part of the gun. Rather than the trigger, the springs, the barrel, etc.
Other than the frame, which requires an FFL for transfer, especially across state lines, the rest of the parts can be ordered and shipped from anywhere and are not controlled.
Mind, that’s changing, again notably in CA, as they now talk about “gun pre-cursor” parts.
The 3D printed frames are similar to the “80% lowers” which are aluminum blocks that are “80%” complete AR-15 lowers (the lower receiver, again, the controlled part of an AR-15).
With straight forward machining and some jigs, those chunks of metal can be finished into an operational lower receiver, and the rest of the rifle can be assembled from disparate parts ordered from anywhere.
The original “ghost gun” before 3D printers enabled folks to assemble Glocks in their garage.
People normally don't make guns that are entirely 3d printed. Homemade guns often get the parts exposed to highest stresses commercially.
Fwiw, when I paid attention to my local police department's released body cam vids, maybe around 1/3 of the guns they showed as evidence were polymer80s (edit: which I mistakenly assumed were 3d printed, but it turns out they aren't so feel free to disregard that fun fact)
Polymer80 aren't 3d printed. They were injected molded as non-receivers and then the customer has to subtract some extra materials.
Polymer80 is defunct but still sold under a slightly different modified mold that someone mysterious somewhere owns and is selling through some other companies("76%" instead of 80%)
In the US I believe there's many metal 'spare parts' for guns available, including the barrel, so don't need to print the whole thing. So they're usually not talking about entirely printed guns.
A pure plastic gun seems more likely to blow the users hand off than hit their target. Especially if just downloaded and printed in PLA on default settings (few walls, sparse infill...)
I know very little about guns but know 3d printing quite well. My understanding is that a fully 3d printed gun is not reliable, you need to acquire actual gun parts for the path where the bullet fires (the barrel?). Then can use 3d printing for the rest
They're pretty damn reliable if you either use a hybrid model (FGC-9) where the barrel is "explosion proof pipe" from china that is then electrically machined (easy with 3d printed mandrel) to form a nice rifled barrel.
Or you just 3d print the "receiver" for something like an Ar-15, which isn't load bearing. If you use the right materials and the beefier designs it will lats hundreds to thousands of rounds. The rest of the parts can be bought through the mails unregulated.
As the latest affair shown, US is falling behind in drone tech. Now another key modern tech is going to be similarly outlawed.
Note that in particular banning of 3d printing severely decreases chances for bringing back manufacturing - high labor and other costs makes domestic manufacturing feasible only when it is highly automated and highly customizable.
> As the latest affair shown, US is falling behind in drone tech. Now another key modern tech is going to be similarly outlawed.
My bet is the US militaro-industrial complex is busy preparing juicy contracts to sell shitload of drones and drones-related tech to the US government now that they understood that drones in warfare were a thing (Ukraine vs Russia showed it and Iran-vs-the-world showed it too).
The US has something like 12 tech companies in the top 20 biggest companies by market cap in the world: do you really think the US is "falling behind in drone tech" because a country that has never invented anything (besides mass killings of their own citizens) since religious extremists took over managed to fly a few low-tech drones into US military assets?
That a country bent on violence (including towards its own citizens) where pick-up trucks armed with .50 cal, AK47s and explosive are the norm can slap explosive on DJI drones is resourceful but I wouldn't exactly call it "passing ahead in drone tech".
I don't gamble but I'd make an exception and bet big that the US is going to end up right next to China, at the very top, when it comes to drone tech. While I fully expect the EU to fall behind in drone tech.
> a country that has never invented anything … managed to fly a few low-tech drones into US military assets
And de-facto won the war as a result. That is reality. That is the power of that weaponry, and that is the falling behind. And that after 4 years of such a war in Ukraine.
I agree it is very possible that US would be at some point able to build up those capabilities. Though, limited to established players, it most probably would be very expensive and thus go against the key feature - cheapness - which in itself allows for the other key feature- mass scale of the drone weapons.
Why does California since Arnold left office feel the need to regulate above the average other states regulate? [in fairness gov Brown would veto some of the crazier ideas that arrived at his desk]
Why do the pols feel like they have to pick fights in so many places? I doubt there’s a majority of voters who want this.
This feels exactly like a feels good general public appeal law though. The average person doesn’t know or care much about 3D printers and is horrified by the level of gun violence in America and wants to see something done.
All they have to do if frame it as an unnecessary freedom that only conservatives and wackos want to keep and they will 100% support it.
They see their state as a sort of oasis in the country and will do whatever it takes to keep the guns out. They really believe they’re just a few laws away from solving any issue a “reasonable” American could face.
Well, from the point of view of Californian politicians, was it their anti-balance-billing AB72 that was over-regulation before No Surprises Act? Or the CCPA? Or the Auto-Renewal Law? And looking back even farther: was it CalOPPA that was overreach requiring privacy policies? Paid family leave and sick leave?
Some made life hard for Californians like the CARB gasoline blend requirement but I think if you proposed removing any of those laws you'd find yourself downvoted here and called a corporate bootlicker on Reddit - which is not a poll of all people but should give you an idea of the fact that they're not unpopular.
It seems overall that they're pretty much just on the frontier of laws that would be considered progressive - increase taxes, consumer protection, control corporations, prison reduction. I think those positions are overall popular. It just seems like you disagree with them. I also prefer many of these rules not be in place but where you like CCPA and hate the road tax, I like the road tax. Overall, the positions seem pretty coherently in-line with the politics viewpoints.
So, I suppose the answer to your original question is: they're slowly grinding forward on a progressive-politics agenda in a public and straightforward manner that's generally popular among the electorate.
The last time California Republicans had some power around 2009-12 they used it to manufacture crises and shut down the government. Since then voters have shut them out of power, including by passing 2010's Prop 25 which stripped the minority of the 2/3 veto they used to have.
This doesn’t have to be unconstitutional, just regulate the intermediary in such a way that it forces the behaviors you are trying to regulate directly
In this case you can say
“You need a license to do this activity”
[adds all the requirements in the bill to the licensing authority]
“Unlicensed activity is forbidden”
so now you can get your tiny LLMs added to 3D printers so that license holders can operate again, without specifically mandating unworkable technology or getting a freedom of expression challenge from the manufacturers you just invented court standing for
This is such a dumb law. We have millions of guns in the state, 3D printed guns are never going to be more than a blip in the statistics for gun deaths.
Lawful gun use means the guns must be registered and users need to be licensed and go through background checks. Presumably part of the concern with 3d printed guns is that anybody can print them without going through that registration, licensing and background check process.
The 10th amendment to the Constitution reads "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
I'm seriously questioning the absurdity of banning something that remains available a 15-minute drive away, behind a purely informal border. I don't think, for example, that recent abortion bans had reduced the number of abortions in their respective states to zero.
1) For the vast majority of Californians, the nearest state border is 3-5 hours away. 2) those abortion bans have definitely reduced the number of abortions. Not zero, but that's a silly goal for any ban.
Obviously the law is stupid. But states passing their own regulations isn't on its face.
A lot of rural areas don't have good transit. Even if they do, it's hours round trip. Here's an example. North Dakota has an abortion ban. Someone in Minot would need to travel almost 5 hours to Moorhead, MN or almost 7 hours to Billings, MT. Now that's not any different really than before the ban, because the only clinic in ND that provided abortions was across the river from Moorhead in Fargo. But what if that clinic in Moorhead closes? Or what if Montana bans abortion? It's banned in South Dakota, so people out in western ND, SD, or anywhere in Montana are going to have to travel even further. There are many small communities around here with no bus lines or trains coming through so they're stuck if they don't have a good car.
California has a huge influence on the American economy. When it makes a law, companies and other states pay attention. The farmers, senators and representatives in my state, Iowa, are still wringing their hands and pulling out their hair over California's law which "unfairly" manipulates the hog market by requiring all pork products sold in California to come from pigs which are humanely treated according to California's definition of humane.
US states aren't as small as you're imagining them to be. Almost everyone in California lives more than 15 minutes away from the nearest state border, and the largest urban areas are 3+ hours away.
Procedurally the US is closer to a EU style alliance of sovereign nations than a single one. Practically the federal government has long since overgrown it's constitutional role as the equivalent of the EU bodies but if you're looking at a US state and wondering why it's acting like a sovereign nation the answer is generally because it is one, on paper.
Assuming this is a sincere question from someone who doesn’t know US history:
States in the US were modeled after sovereign nations, perhaps even more loosely connected than the EU is today. They didn’t even share a currency.
Eventually the federal government became more important and powerful, and there are many federal laws now, but states are fundamentally still their own thing with the rights to do certain things that are more like a sovereign nation than a province.
Photocopiers and printers have included anti-counterfeiting tech for decades, so there is precedent for this kind of thing. And this is addressing a real growing problem:
Money anti-counterfeiting is trivial, it's just 5 dots arranged in a specific pattern. Deciding what is a gun part is impossible, even for an expert human.
I just fundamentally don't understand the idea that nobody's allowed to restrict firearms manufacturing unless they can solve complex riddles about the nature of parts. I understand that you perceive this to be a deep and interesting point, but to me it seems enragingly obtuse. Let's start with blacklisting DefCAD and iterate from there, what's wrong with that?
Like, it's true that refrigerators don't maintain a completely uniform temperature, meaning there's some philosophical wiggle room in what it means for a health department to say that raw meat must be stored at 41F. But it would be absurd for a meatpacker to declare that this means food safety is "impossible", and outrageous for them to conclude that they're just not going to bother refrigerating their meat at all.
How long until people get police showing up at their door because they tried to print something harmless but gun-shaped (like a light gun for retro games, or Nerf-style toys) and were flagged by the AI 'firearm detector'?
If you want to have a voice in how the regulation is implemented, perhaps you should offer suggestions for how to implement it better. That's how it works in most industries; legislators propose to enact regulation X, manufacturers respond that X would have undesirable consequences and Y would be better, and then they discuss to figure out how to best balance all the competing interests.
For reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, firearms manufacturers seem to think they're entitled to instead stomp their feet and say "no, no regulation, you have to let me do whatever I want!". I'm never quite sure why they think this foot-stomping would be at all persuasive to people who don't manufacture firearms. Again, I imagine you don't see things this way and I'd be happy to learn more about what I've gotten wrong here.
Again, it seems like there's a critical insight that's gone missing between the first and second lines of your post. It's unsurprising that a manufacturer might prefer to be regulated less rather than more, and there are a number of cases where I ultimately agree with some manufacturer or another on that. Perhaps it's the case that gun crime would be best resolved with boots on the ground; I could imagine being persuaded by someone who explains where the boots are going to come from and why they're not already there. Maybe I could even be persuaded that 3D printing is more important than crime reduction, although I'm less able to imagine what would convince me of that.
It's incredibly bizarre that you feel entitled to issue commands about what I or the California legislature must do instead of passing the regulations you don't like. What is your mental model of the world, where someone would read the words "Go solve gun crime with boots on the ground instead" and not become more passionate about the idea that we must regulate you whether you like it or not?
But money counterfeiting is a different proposition: the printer is blocking exactly known patterns found on real currency. In fact, many bill designs incorporate patterns that are easily machine detectable for this purpose.
Blocking the printing of parts of mechanisms is a completely different beast, because the functionality is only discernible after final assembly of the individual parts, which can be shaped in a variety of ways. Most of these parts are unique to guns or at least usable in other kinds of designs. E.g. the same trigger lever design could be used for a ghost gun or a nerf gun or a water pistol. So where would yiu draw the line of all the classifier sees is G code that combines support structures, the actual surfaces and infill of some arbitrary collection of parts?
I'm against guns in generally, but this classification problem seems particularly ill posed and I don't want it to result in tamper-resistant printers stopping people from tinkering and taking the fun out of printing. The US should just outlaw the casual carrying of guns of individuals in public. That's not a violation of the second amendment.
Yeah, if it was the UK cracking down it'd make more sense, but IIRC the US already has more guns than people.
And in places where guns are tightly regulated, most people couldn't get hold of ammo even if they did build a printed gun, so it's not a big problem. (And the bad guys just use kitchen knives)
"Anthropic announces Project Disarm, a new model designed for 3d printer manufacturers to quickly infer whether the intent of an stl file is a weapon. The printer first submits the job to the cloud, and only after it's approved will it print."
Not that I want this future, just that I can imagine it.
I'm not mad at you for suggesting this, you're right, I'm just generally aimlessly angry and ready for this world to burn.
The existence of a house resolution mean that one representative wrote a thing, not that it's on the precipice of becoming law.
I recently was in Venezuela, I have been in Cuba. I am a native spaniard. There you have a group of people that took control of the weapons in the country and uses it to basically enslave the rest of the country.
When the people in power have automatic weapons and you don't there is basically nothing you can do to defend yourself from the abuses of power.
That is a real thing the people in power have wet dreams and would love to do in any country, including the US.
You can no longer just buy a tool and use it.
Echoes of Network Neutrality problems, where BigCo is permitted to block or degrade sites about how to cancel your BigCo service.
The input to the detector could be not the G code instructions, but a 3D model representation recovered by simulating the G code. (That's a thing that exists.)
The requirements for a 3D printer which detects weapon shapes is actually fairly realistic.
It would likely have laughable false positives: 8-year-old Johnny not being able to 3D print a squirt pistol.
Some common tools have pistol-like form factors: spray guns, glue/grease/caulking guns, drills, hair dryers.
It is a cockamamie idea; but to claim that it is not doable seems a bit disingenuous.
The only thing that's different about this one is that it mentions a technology geeks care about. But I doubt that's enough. As another commenter noted, you can no longer hide behind "we have no technology to distinguish between guns and non-guns". We have AI that's supposedly PhD-level and will soon automate all jobs. Looking at STL files sounds like a job.
That's actually one of my fears about LLMs: they make thought policing cheap. There are profound privacy and cost barriers to having a Facebook employee review all your private messages. There are no such barriers to having a robot watch all your IMs in real time.
Or your literal thoughts depending on how far we're able to push neuralink type technology.
If this fails it'll be because the tech industry expresses disapproval too loudly to ignore.
The legislators don't care about the underlying criticism. Almost no legislators have ever used a 3d printer or written any software, beyond maybe simple assigned programs if they had a required intro-to-programming course. Few are "tech" people. The rest don't understand this technology, or any technology really, beyond it being a black box for specific purposes. They see 3d printing and plastic guns and think something must be done, because the 3d printing black boxes are producing dangerous weapons.
There is a reason why California is leading the nation in migration out of the state.
1. Your printer probably puts a secret code into everything you print (not just money-like things) with the time and a serial number of the printer. [0]
2. Windows and MacOS constantly sends the serial-numbers of your connected devices back to the mothership. [1][2]
3. So when you print out a flyer that somehow annoys the regime, they read out the serial number, then call a buddy at Microsoft/Apple.
4. Now there are thugs knocking at your door to talk about how your picture was criminally mean to Dear Leader.
[0] https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-d...
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.12506
[2] https://littlesnitchfirewall.com/macos-telemetry
https://youtu.be/E1B2cWEaWDw?is=xwpLZoyVSi6psztQ
Roll call: https://legiscan.com/CA/rollcall/AB2047/id/1702219
* Dr. Darshana R. Patel (D)
* Tim Grayson (D)
There is a law in California that has been interpreted to mean that all clubbing weapons are illegal. So if you by a length of pipe and keep it around (e.g. under your bed) explicitly for self-defense purposes, you have committed a crime.
IANAL, but as far as I can tell, keeping a shotgun in your home for self-defense purposes would be fine, as long as you aren't planning ahead of time to use it as a club.
[edit]
My information is slightly out-of-date; there was an injunction against enforcement in 2024 from Fouts v Bonta. I have no clue the injunction is or is not still in effect, so ask your lawyer before carrying a club.
This is why many may have heard lawyers say "if you're going to carry a baseball bat in your car, make sure to also carry a ball and mitt"
https://legalclarity.org/is-it-legal-to-have-a-baseball-bat-...
I think so many people in the US are so focused on the topic of guns as weapons that we sometimes forget that we have laws regarding other weapons as well.
Maybe they'll ban Github, too - as it hosts unregulated open source software that can power these scary tools.
A grim day for 3D printing if so.
It seems more precise to say that 3D printers sold/transferred in California would need built-in anti-firearm-printing controls?
I don't see how this directly bans students/teachers/businesses from owning 3d printers, which is what the title seems to say.
Some parts in regular firearms can be printed in plastic, guns with polymer parts have existed since polymers existed, but it is only marginally simpler than machining it out of metal. After all you can buy a metal CNC machine for handful of bucks more than a 3d printer and you don't have to worry about shitty materials breaking immediately.
And there are already plenty of examples of hardware store pipe guns that if someone spent more than a day or two working on it would by far surpass anything anyone can print.
The frame is the part that gets the serial number and is considered the controlled part of the gun. Rather than the trigger, the springs, the barrel, etc.
Other than the frame, which requires an FFL for transfer, especially across state lines, the rest of the parts can be ordered and shipped from anywhere and are not controlled.
Mind, that’s changing, again notably in CA, as they now talk about “gun pre-cursor” parts.
The 3D printed frames are similar to the “80% lowers” which are aluminum blocks that are “80%” complete AR-15 lowers (the lower receiver, again, the controlled part of an AR-15).
With straight forward machining and some jigs, those chunks of metal can be finished into an operational lower receiver, and the rest of the rifle can be assembled from disparate parts ordered from anywhere.
The original “ghost gun” before 3D printers enabled folks to assemble Glocks in their garage.
Fwiw, when I paid attention to my local police department's released body cam vids, maybe around 1/3 of the guns they showed as evidence were polymer80s (edit: which I mistakenly assumed were 3d printed, but it turns out they aren't so feel free to disregard that fun fact)
Polymer80 is defunct but still sold under a slightly different modified mold that someone mysterious somewhere owns and is selling through some other companies("76%" instead of 80%)
A pure plastic gun seems more likely to blow the users hand off than hit their target. Especially if just downloaded and printed in PLA on default settings (few walls, sparse infill...)
Or you just 3d print the "receiver" for something like an Ar-15, which isn't load bearing. If you use the right materials and the beefier designs it will lats hundreds to thousands of rounds. The rest of the parts can be bought through the mails unregulated.
(But doesn't the bill also cover subtractive manufacturing?)
https://spreadthesignal.com/files
https://guncadindex.com/search
https://defcad.com/library/
Note that in particular banning of 3d printing severely decreases chances for bringing back manufacturing - high labor and other costs makes domestic manufacturing feasible only when it is highly automated and highly customizable.
My bet is the US militaro-industrial complex is busy preparing juicy contracts to sell shitload of drones and drones-related tech to the US government now that they understood that drones in warfare were a thing (Ukraine vs Russia showed it and Iran-vs-the-world showed it too).
The US has something like 12 tech companies in the top 20 biggest companies by market cap in the world: do you really think the US is "falling behind in drone tech" because a country that has never invented anything (besides mass killings of their own citizens) since religious extremists took over managed to fly a few low-tech drones into US military assets?
That a country bent on violence (including towards its own citizens) where pick-up trucks armed with .50 cal, AK47s and explosive are the norm can slap explosive on DJI drones is resourceful but I wouldn't exactly call it "passing ahead in drone tech".
I don't gamble but I'd make an exception and bet big that the US is going to end up right next to China, at the very top, when it comes to drone tech. While I fully expect the EU to fall behind in drone tech.
And de-facto won the war as a result. That is reality. That is the power of that weaponry, and that is the falling behind. And that after 4 years of such a war in Ukraine.
I agree it is very possible that US would be at some point able to build up those capabilities. Though, limited to established players, it most probably would be very expensive and thus go against the key feature - cheapness - which in itself allows for the other key feature- mass scale of the drone weapons.
Why do the pols feel like they have to pick fights in so many places? I doubt there’s a majority of voters who want this.
All they have to do if frame it as an unnecessary freedom that only conservatives and wackos want to keep and they will 100% support it.
They see their state as a sort of oasis in the country and will do whatever it takes to keep the guns out. They really believe they’re just a few laws away from solving any issue a “reasonable” American could face.
Some made life hard for Californians like the CARB gasoline blend requirement but I think if you proposed removing any of those laws you'd find yourself downvoted here and called a corporate bootlicker on Reddit - which is not a poll of all people but should give you an idea of the fact that they're not unpopular.
That said these politicians have pushed:
The ban on disinfectant soaps
Stop Shirley bill (charge you for public records in order to suppress access to public information)
Effort to sideline charter schools by teachers unions
Reduced sentences for murderers (this isn't unarmed robbery, etc., rather murderers)
Per mile traveled tax (for a state with the highest gas prices in the lower 48)
Sanction unsafe needle litter (as if there weren’t enough in playgrounds already)
Strangers can assume custody of children without parental consent
Allow politicians to dip into taxpayer money to fund campaigns.
Leniency towards solicitation of minors(!) this was unbelievably passed.
So, I suppose the answer to your original question is: they're slowly grinding forward on a progressive-politics agenda in a public and straightforward manner that's generally popular among the electorate.
In this case you can say
“You need a license to do this activity”
[adds all the requirements in the bill to the licensing authority]
“Unlicensed activity is forbidden”
so now you can get your tiny LLMs added to 3D printers so that license holders can operate again, without specifically mandating unworkable technology or getting a freedom of expression challenge from the manufacturers you just invented court standing for
This works under every governance system
do you guys even America? catch up
All democrats present voted yes. All republicans voted no.
Obviously the law is stupid. But states passing their own regulations isn't on its face.
really? what percentage of Americans can't afford a bus ticket to the nearest city in an adjacent state?
I believe the answer to both of those is yes, which leads to my next question, which is, do you think that's also absurd?
States in the US were modeled after sovereign nations, perhaps even more loosely connected than the EU is today. They didn’t even share a currency.
Eventually the federal government became more important and powerful, and there are many federal laws now, but states are fundamentally still their own thing with the rights to do certain things that are more like a sovereign nation than a province.
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/santa-rosa-167-gun...
https://da.santaclaracounty.gov/da-task-force-seizes-ghost-g...
https://www.vvng.com/3d-printed-firearm-recovered-after-man-...
Money anti-counterfeiting is trivial, it's just 5 dots arranged in a specific pattern. Deciding what is a gun part is impossible, even for an expert human.
I will also be bringing an ergonomic grip for my camera.
My email is in my profile.
Like, it's true that refrigerators don't maintain a completely uniform temperature, meaning there's some philosophical wiggle room in what it means for a health department to say that raw meat must be stored at 41F. But it would be absurd for a meatpacker to declare that this means food safety is "impossible", and outrageous for them to conclude that they're just not going to bother refrigerating their meat at all.
For reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, firearms manufacturers seem to think they're entitled to instead stomp their feet and say "no, no regulation, you have to let me do whatever I want!". I'm never quite sure why they think this foot-stomping would be at all persuasive to people who don't manufacture firearms. Again, I imagine you don't see things this way and I'd be happy to learn more about what I've gotten wrong here.
Go solve gun crime with boots on the ground instead
It's incredibly bizarre that you feel entitled to issue commands about what I or the California legislature must do instead of passing the regulations you don't like. What is your mental model of the world, where someone would read the words "Go solve gun crime with boots on the ground instead" and not become more passionate about the idea that we must regulate you whether you like it or not?
Blocking the printing of parts of mechanisms is a completely different beast, because the functionality is only discernible after final assembly of the individual parts, which can be shaped in a variety of ways. Most of these parts are unique to guns or at least usable in other kinds of designs. E.g. the same trigger lever design could be used for a ghost gun or a nerf gun or a water pistol. So where would yiu draw the line of all the classifier sees is G code that combines support structures, the actual surfaces and infill of some arbitrary collection of parts?
I'm against guns in generally, but this classification problem seems particularly ill posed and I don't want it to result in tamper-resistant printers stopping people from tinkering and taking the fun out of printing. The US should just outlaw the casual carrying of guns of individuals in public. That's not a violation of the second amendment.
Some crimes are not worth it to eliminate, and western liberal society should just accept that the optimal amount of crime is non zero.
And in places where guns are tightly regulated, most people couldn't get hold of ammo even if they did build a printed gun, so it's not a big problem. (And the bad guys just use kitchen knives)