> 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.
"H.R. 148867 makes all large language models subject to safety certification, introduces penalties for unlicensed training and use of uncertified models"
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.
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 "
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is also a great reason that OS "telemetry" is inherently unacceptable.
The tracking dots that some printers put in everything (not just suspicious stuff) can contain the timestamp and the serial number of the printer. So if the regime doesn't like your printed flyer, they call a buddy at Microsoft and now they know exactly which computer and IP address checked in as having that printer attached at that time.
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.
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.
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)!
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
>managed to fly a few low-tech drones into US military assets
And de-facto won the war as a result. That is reality. This 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.
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
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 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."
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.