Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We can still stop California's 3D printer surveillance scheme

eff.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 208 posts

Re: We can still stop California's 3D printer surveillance scheme

#41

Post by VortexLain »

jatora wrote: post #30
asveikau wrote: post #26

California voters, write to your state senator. I'm in San Francisco, and I wrote to Scott Wiener, who recently voted to pass this out of committee. Before that when it was still in the assembly, I wrote to Matt Haney, which didn't do much good because he voted for it both in committee and for passage. But, I feel like bay area legislators need to know many of their constituents know this bill is misguided and are pa…

[flagged]

It is better to at least do what can be done instead of accepting a defeat without even trying.

Re: We can still stop California's 3D printer surveillance scheme

#44

Post by jacobolus »

jatora wrote: post #30
asveikau wrote: post #26

California voters, write to your state senator. I'm in San Francisco, and I wrote to Scott Wiener, who recently voted to pass this out of committee. Before that when it was still in the assembly, I wrote to Matt Haney, which didn't do much good because he voted for it both in committee and for passage. But, I feel like bay area legislators need to know many of their constituents know this bill is misguided and are pa…

[flagged]

Each congressperson's staff gathers all of the comments they get, counts them up, and reports back to the congressperson, passing along anything they think would be useful information; if you write a clear and careful letter about an obscure topic there's a decent chance the congressperson themself will see it. Congresspeople typically have local ties in their area and caring what their constituents think is their job.

It's a serious problem that there are some congresspeople who don't do any local events, send all comments straight to the trash, etc. You should vote those folks out.

In the longer term, we should push for significantly increasing the size of the US House of Representatives to 5–10x the current size and implement serious campaign finance reforms. In combination, these will help make congresspeople more responsive to constituents and less reliant on donors.

Re: We can still stop California's 3D printer surveillance scheme

#45

Post by userbinator »

deet wrote: post #10

Imagine if you couldn't buy a lathe unless it refused to make a baseball bat (which could be used for hitting people). Or if you couldn't buy scissors (because they could cut brake lines). Or if you couldn't buy a car (because it could be used to run someone over). And if all of those checked with the government before functioning. It's almost like maybe instead you should just ban the undesirable end action, enforce…

enforce that law

Califoria would not be a sanctuary state if they actually cared about enforcing laws.

Re: We can still stop California's 3D printer surveillance scheme

#47

Post by asveikau »

jatora wrote: post #40
asveikau wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My letter opened with the fact that I generally favor reasonable gun laws, then elaborated how this is not that. It's possible that nobody reads it and captures the nuance, but I did spend time to consider the framing. Nobody who actually reads it will think I am an extremist or that I haven't carefully considered the topic.

99% chance your letter ends up in the shredder without being read

By the way I also know for a fact that Scott Wiener's staff reads San Francisco's subreddit. Commenting about Wiener's vote in there will reach his staff. Given the bay area presence here it's also possible somebody "who knows a guy" will even see this thread name-drop him.

Re: We can still stop California's 3D printer surveillance scheme

#49

Post by wyrdcurt »

brianleb wrote: post #24
Barbing wrote: post #4

The Take Action link only took 30 seconds: https://www.eff.org/3DPrintCA (did choose to edit the letter but otherwise really, it autofills and takes no time)

I share your hopeful optimism, but here's the reality of the mass-email campaigns targeting congress: [email received 6/18/26 from the office of Steve Scalise, majority leader in the house, who is one of my representatives. I have trimmed for brevity.] >> Due to advancements in technology, many third-party organizations use their mailing lists to send advocacy letters like this on your behalf. With the increased volu…

This is exactly why I had an LLM customize the letter as I said in my other comment; I've had a similar response from another of my representatives. It might not help much if they're filtering based on where the email is coming from, but on the off chance that they are filtering based on identical content, changing the content might make a difference. With LLMs, the effort needed to customize the content has gone down significantly (otherwise, I would agree with the more cynical commentators that such letters are a waste of time and energy).

Re: We can still stop California's 3D printer surveillance scheme

#50

Post by azov »

arjie wrote: post #39
encom wrote: post #11

[flagged]

California is just a population that tries to solve problems with maximal regulation and selective enforcement. So you get to see the effects. Here are some laws that I think the HN community would be hugely in favour of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48652773 Yeah, I'd prefer to have an offline 3d printer but it seems I've made a mistake with my Bambu P1S.

What was the mistake? Can’t P1S work offline? I thought they can print from SD card, and there’s also LAN mode?..
Post reply on HN