Truth. Unfortunately, so many people don’t do 5 seconds of research unless you count “I’ve seen basically every youtuber that 3d prints talking about how awesome this one is” as research.

I wish more people would see that a company being a sponsor everywhere or a product being advertised A LOT is a huge red flag and probably not where you should spend your money. I’m basically at the point that I don’t trust anything I see ads for at all - oh, you are wasting a ton of money on advertising? Your product is either markedly worse than the competition who isn’t wasting that money, or you have the same product and are way more expensive. Either way, that’s bad.

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.

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.

I am feeling bad for all the people that bought Bambu.

Not all legal firearms are registered anyway already. Not to mention it is completely legal to build your own gun in the US. So long as you aren’t building something NFA regulated (full auto, over .50 caliber, short barrel shotgun, silencer, etc.) and you are not distributing them to anyone, you are allowed to just build a gun. There are places online that sell “receiver blanks” with plans for how to finish them with very basic machining, and then you can buy all the rest of the parts off the shelf at any gun store without any registration at all because only the receivers are regulated even a little bit.

This has nothing to do with gun control. The entire concept of “ghost guns” has been a scare tactic to get enough public on-side to pass draconian surveillance and manufacturing control laws like this. The goal of this is to monitor “at-home manufacturing” (of anything, nothing to do with guns anymore than it has to do with warhammer compatible miniatures) and restrict the practice.

Where’s that community meme when you need it…

The name sounds worse than the place.

I still have PTSD related flashbacks to working at geek squad when the stupid fucking dinosaur cursors (absolutely chockablock with viruses) were all the rage… I use the default one build into KDE.

Yea, “we” the people are not okay with it. “We” the profit driven corporate vampires are okay with it because “profits”.

It honestly makes me think if Hell is real, it is by far the more reasonable place to want to end up. Heaven is only getting the people that not only believe that but think it’s good. Hell is getting a shit load of normal people and babies (who grow up in hell…? probably adapt pretty well and can teach us the ropes). Like, sure we get the non-religious terrible people and assholes… But we have those on earth. At least a large chunk of the assholes we normally deal with would be in heaven.

It feels like you’re just gate-keeping Linux because you apparently had a bad experience. It doesn’t sound like you’ve used an Arch-based distro in a while (or if you have, it was Manjaro - there has been a host of problems over there that will take a lot of time and effort to rebuild community trust, imo).

We’ve got 2 desktops and 2 laptops in our house all running Arch-based distros, the oldest being a little over 4 years old without any “breakage”. Two of the users had not even seen Linux prior to this, and one of them is not at all what I would consider “computer savvy”.

I can’t speak for vanilla Arch, but all of the “Arch with helpers” distros I’ve ran had pretty simple buttons to deal with system maintenance. Additionally, I’ve seen firsthand the difference a rolling-release distro can make over a “stable” release for game and hardware compatibility. It’s generally much easier to get (and keep) all the hardware working correctly on a gaming laptop in one of those arch-based distros than Debian or Mint, especially if it has an nvidia gpu. I couldn’t in good conscience recommend anything debian based to someone in that boat personally.

The use of the system matters A LOT when recommending a new distro. For some grandparents that just browse facebook and send e-mails - yea I’d probably just put Debian or LMDE on their system. I’m not sure I would make the same recommendation to anyone else though.

I feel like the answer is different if I am just resurrecting them as they were when they died, vs if I am magically in charge of the brand with funding to start “fresh”…

I know I will get hate for this… Breaking Bad. Everyone I know was hyping it up as the best series ever and how much of a complete bad ass Walter turns into - “it starts slow, but give it a chance and it gets so good”. It really set my expectation for what the show would be to something… else entirely I guess? I watched the entire series thinking I was still in the “give it a chance” phase and any episode now it will get proper good and I’ll stop hating Walter. Then the end happened and I was left so confused.

For the record I loved Better Call Saul. And I think it’s possible that in an alternate timeline where someone just told me “you should watch it, it’s decent”, I’d might have really liked it. But it was built up so much, and Walter was built up to be such a “cool bad-ass”, which he basically never is, that it just ruined it for me.

I don’t understand how anyone can keep a straight face when they hear an AI company crying about another AI company “stealing” from them while they go before lawmakers and argue that if they weren’t allowed to steal stuff, AI wouldn’t exist… I immediately picture the Always Sunny meme “oh, did someone get addicted to crack” Crying motions.

I feel like you can’t just look to see if a piece of software is on the list and immediately decide it’s the devil. Having spent a lot of time reading the list, and reading the links provided as sources for several of the bits of software I use, the barrier to get your project on that list is pretty low. As an example that I can remember, one dev basically said “I can’t police with 100% accuracy if someone used an LLM or not. I expect every submission to be able to be explained by the human that submitted it fully and it’d be nice if people disclosed when they use an LLM.” The list marks that project as “Permissive AI Policy”.

I don’t love that this is where we are, but if you think you are going to use a computer and do anything particularly useful with it and avoid 100% anything that may have ever been touched by an LLM, you are unfortunately going to struggle significantly. I appreciate the list greatly, as it does link to its receipts. It allows us to look at a project and read their policies and decide a little bit quicker than doing all the work ourselves. I don’t think I can legitimately stand up and say “if it is on the list, I won’t use it” however.

My favorite was “not having a valid boat registration”. It is such a great addition of insult to injury. “Oh look, this dude thinks his ‘truck’ is a ‘boat’. Guess we have to cite him for not registering his ‘boat’. What a shame.”

The news story linked said that the scammer told the police she was shot and killed.

And if the company does it again, every shareholder goes to jail for an amount of time proportionate to shares owned. Or something, I dunno, I just feel like if we only hold CEOs accountable, companies will start just using the position as fodder so long as it is still more profitable to break the law and accept the punishments.

That’d also be good to know.

It’s kinda weird how society just decided we were only going to teach one generation of people how the fuck to use a computer and no one else gets to know.