Is there a motorized roller skate?

The abject retardation spirals off infinitely in all directions like the blades of the time knife. I mean, just out of my own twisted head:

• they’re talking about making it illegal to traffic 3D printers that don’t have a “certified gun detection algorithm.” Okay, what part of the 3D printer are you going to control? Hot ends? Control boards? 3D printers don’t have lower receivers. If I were to disassemble my Prusa MK4S back into the ~1000 weird shaped hunks of plastic, metal plates and sticks, wires, circuit boards, nuts and bolts it came in as a kit, and then drive through California, which exact piece am I going to be arrested for carrying?

• I can’t wait until someone Man With The Golden Gun’s one of thes “certified algorithms”, prints stuff that looks like cabinet hooks, musical instruments, a walkie-talkie case, a toy dinosaur, which clip together in a certain way to make a functioning weapon. I’ve never 3D printed a gun before, this might just get me into it.

Those are also unobtainium.

Damn Small Linux:

Looks like Google livery so I’m going with ChromeOS.

Yes.

I got real into Zero Punctuation about a decade ago, so I’d watch a load of 5 minute youtube videos back to back.

It would serve me the same goddamn ad for a Mission Impossible movie between every one. The ad had this hateful nasally music that went “ready or not, here I come.”

I have not paid for a movie ticket, a streaming service, or a new DVD or Blu-Ray since then. Brain surgery with a backhoe, cut your pineal gland off at the waist. Fuck your entire sector of industry, Tom Cruise.

I am the owner of a brand new Prusa MK4S. A lot of its components aren’t open source, but it’s an i3, I can keep it running, and I can hit its wifi module with a hammer if I want to.

The 3D printing lobby isn’t as big as the NRA.

I don’t think it has anything to do with gun manufacturers, or gun violence. Someone who wants to shoot something is going to find a way.

I’m betting it’s pressure from AI companies. “We need to find a use for this product soon or we’ll lose social permission” or whatever Mr. Microsoft said the other day. And suddenly a couple of states that have big AI companies in them propose legislation that could only be answered by large amounts of machine learning power.

This isn’t in reaction to some shooting with a 3D printed gun, is it? I’d have heard about that, the America Bad crowd here on Lemmy wouldn’t have passed up a chance to blast that from the rooftops if it had happened. School shootings have faded into the background; that’s not “newsworthy” anymore because it’s become normal. A shooting with a 3D printed gun would have made headlines, and it hasn’t. Until we all got used to it and moved our attention elsewhere, there would be a shooting, the 24 hour tabloids would broadcast a liberal arts major’s understanding of the firearms used, the bleeding heart left would call for a ban on those specific kinds of guns, the childrape right would call them retards for getting the technical details extremely wrong, a governor 3 states away would sign a ban on bayonet lugs and collapsible stocks on rifles, in time for someone to shoot up an army base with a pistol. If a 3D printed gun shooting had happened, you could get another round of that cycle going.

That’s not what happened though. So what did?

The only possible way I can think of to make this work is require the firmware to only be able to print G-code files that have a cryptographic signature from some central slicing authority that users submit models to, which then analyzes the STL file with AI or some shit for approval. The only technology that can remotely go “is this STL file a piece of a gun?” is machine learning. You’re outright not going to get that done on the 3D printer locally; you’d have to increase the processing power of a 3D printer control board from “microcontroller” to “GPU” entirely for this dumbass tech. Maybe you’d run that on the user’s PC but PCs aren’t for sale to the public anymore so it will be done in the cloud.

It occurs to me that these initiatives are all popping up on the West coast where Microsoft, Google and OpenAI are based. The other day the CEO of Microsoft came out and said “We’re going to have to figure out something for our bullshit tech to actually do before the unwashed masses riot.” and what do you know, a couple states that are home to large AI firms start proposing legislation that can practically only be answered by AI out of the blue.

My main printer up until last month was powered by an Arduino Mega. Like not even an “Arduino-compatible ATMEGA 2560-based 3D printer control board” an Arduino Mega, with the infinity ± logo. Reprap style.

The email analogy just goes so far, because of mental models.

Yeah, those of us who have opinions on sudo vs doas will get it. Email is a protocol standard that allows different servers to exchange compatible data. Most people don’t conceptualize it like that; they conceptualize it like the postal service. The USPS, Royal Mail and others are one entity that most end users just handwave away as “in the mail” and their only concern is where do I go to send and receive my mail? Your mailbox is at the post office on the corner of Road st. and Boulevard ave. Your email inbox is at gmail.com. Gmail, or hotmail, or whatever, is your local post office for putting things “in the mail.”

Nobody conceptualizes social media like that. Social media is a place you go to be among other people. Back in my day we called them “Sites.” Myspace and Facebook were “sites.” Places you went. Now they call them “apps” but they’re still conceptualized as where the people participating in this culture are. Get it through the average Tiktokker’s head that you get the Loops app, and then you have to pick a server to connect that app to. “Just get me to Loops.”

Some servers are full, some you have to apply for, some are perfectly open to join. They all connect to each other, except they can choose not to, and choosing not to connect to each other is why some servers exist in the first place. We’re going to present you with a list of instances to join, you’ll be presented with the instance’s logo, which half of them left blank so you get a boilerplate image, a blue checkmark on every single one which carries no meaning it just looks social media-y, and the top sentence and a half of a description which is either default text or a description of the platform as a whole because it wasn’t explained to the instance admins what this description field was for.

So, new user who probably still isn’t sure how this works, make a decision about something that feels kind of abstract that we’ve done a really bad job of explaining.

What’s my username?

Boy I don’t need the childrape administration to declassify extraterrestrial UFO documents when I can talk to space aliens right here on Lemmy. That’s not how email works and if you were a placental mammal you’d know that.

You don’t go to email.org, click Join and arrive on a page that says “Thank you for your interest in Email: the open, federated, ethical, cage-free non-instant text messaging standard of the web! To continue, select one of these 44 providers based on a badly rendered logo and three almost identical bullet points. Don’t worry, the decision doesn’t matter…well it kinda does, for reasons that aren’t going to be explained to you up front, so pick one at random, get the lay of the land, then come back and join for real.”

No, the majority of people ended up with an email account while signing up for another service, such as gmail accounts for Android users or icloud accounts for iPhone users. You probably have an outlook account if you use Windows (or if you’re a certain age, a hotmail account). If you’re a dad, you have an email account from your ISP, or you got one from work or school. If you sought out something beyond that, like Protonmail or hosting on your own domain, you started looking for a provider with some shopping criteria in mind.

As both a Cinnamon and KDE user, you can tell you’re using an app made for Gnome because it either outright doesn’t do anything, or it does the barest least nuanced most stereotypical version of that thing. Oh great, another empty fuckpuke window that doesn’t respect the system theme with an empty hamburger menu and one button in the very top-left that says “Do Something”.

I don’t know of a package manager with a GTK filter.

hamsters do be packing.

I use metric all the time in the US. My 3D printer runs in millimeters and Celsius, I buy Pepsi by the liter, I dose every medicine by the gram, I meter electricity by the kilowatt and my lights are rated in lumens.

What I don’t do is this weird sense of superiority found in cultivated ignorance the Europeans seem so fond of on the subject.

No, dumping ice cream on the cat isn’t worth it. It’s funny for a few minutes but then you have to clean it up and cats hold grudges.

This is the internet, so obviously it means handjob.

When aren’t students treated like guinea pigs? Hank Green once pointed out that most science done on “people” were actually done on mostly white, mostly American, mostly young, mostly male college students, because that’s who signs up for “studies.”