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New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers

blog.adafruit.com

681–690 of 861 posts

Re: New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers

#681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The electoral college is a feature. It forces you to win across large and small States. Surely you want the leader that most Americans voted for? When votes are held in the senate or congress, it’s a straight numbers game. Why aren’t those votes also weighted? There wouldn’t be many who’d argue that the American political system is in good health. How would you fix it?

> Surely you want the leader that most Americans voted for? I prefer not to live in the Hunger Games world, personally. Those books are a brilliant exploration of the tyranny of urban clusters. The electoral college is an effective foil to that.

I wouldn’t call the US system ‘effective’. The US system is spiralling and it’s getting dystopian. The hunger games analogy is fitting, with The Patriot Games coming right up.

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/12/18/politics/patriot-games-an...

Re: New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers

#682
post #302

I built an 8'x4' CNC router table in 2004. I bought rack and pinion, steppers, drives, aluminum extrusion, and I had it built in one week. What would stop someone from building their own printer and building and selling printers to others who don't have the skill set? They would make it illegal to make 3D printers or CNC machinery without a license, and if you are caught it is tantamount to making guns.

> What would stop someone from building their own printer and building and selling printers to others who don't have the skill set? That it's easier with this skillset to build guns and sell them to criminals when the penalty is the same.

Except selling the printers as plain printers without any restrictive AI firmware or other has a thorny abstraction layer in between that and convicting someone of actually making firearms and selling direct. The printers are universal machines within the parameters of additive processes. Silly proposal this "blocking technology" written by people with no analytical thinking skills.

Re: New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers

#683
post #288
post #57

Hmmm... this is literally the intro of the narrative arc in the game that I'm making. Governments confiscating 3D Printers, powerful GPUs, robotic parts to prevent "simple people" the access to "dangerous technologies". For their own good of course.

[flagged]

Just to be clear, I don't think this is useful or good legislation. While the idea that the state is a shady body that's out to fleece an honest and unsuspecting peoples is a great story beat, I just don't think it's particularly accurate to reality and we shouldn't pretend that it is just because it sounds good in a HN comment.

Re: New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers

#684
post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The electoral college is a feature. It forces you to win across large and small States. Surely you want the leader that most Americans voted for? When votes are held in the senate or congress, it’s a straight numbers game. Why aren’t those votes also weighted? There wouldn’t be many who’d argue that the American political system is in good health. How would you fix it?

> When votes are held in the senate or congress, it’s a straight numbers game. Why aren’t those votes also weighted? They are weighted - the House is allocated by population, and the Senate by state.

They are weighted in how they are elected. They aren’t weighted in how the members vote.

Re: New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers

#685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do still have open source hardware but that's the last line of defense against actions like this, not the first. They'll target distribution which will affect open source and proprietary hardware equally. You need to kill this sort of legislation in its crib.

You need both, because there really is no such thing as kill it in it's crib. The people that want this will continue to want it forever, and will continue to propose it forever. And eventually it works.

Nothing is forever. This whole thing rose in the first place because a novel technology was used to make weapons.

To give another example, the whole modern anti-vaxxer movement was started by a doctor to sell bogus tests.

Re: New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers

#686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

>Of course prisoners should not be allowed to vote I don't follow. Please explain. >Instead, the electorate should be narrowed to property owning people who have an IQ above 85 (within one SD of median) and two grandparents born in the U.S. (so culturally assimilated). Yeah, just like the good old days when we had literacy tests in this country to vote down south. You're literally calling for a return of Jim Crow.

Jim Crow was bad because it targeted people in the basis of a characteristic that didn’t matter: skin color. That doesn’t mean that all restrictions on voting are bad. If the restriction is based on a characteristic that does matter, like intelligence, that’s completely different.

Re: New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers

#687

> blog.adafruit.com Your browser is out of date. Update your browser to view this site properly. Click here for more information if you care about right to repair and the ability of regular people to make a living and choose their own destiny(i.e. live independently of a mega-corp), this type of error message should bother you. HTML is a mature tech. There is no reason for this type of error

(posting this in both comments about this) i am the author of the article. the adafruit blog is not trying to block you my dude(s). we are under constant automated scraping and ddos, largely from ai crawlers, and we use cloudflare to keep the site online at all. the nature of of these things will cause false positives depending on browser, extensions, network, or referrer. the site publishs full-text rss feeds with n…

Cloudflare is ridiculous. I can't even open it using Cromite (privacy enhanced, but not over the top, android browser).

I get:

blog.adafruit.com Verifying you are human. This may take a few seconds.

blog.adafruit.com needs to review the security of your connection before proceeding.

And this hangs forever. What difference does it make if I access this site using a browser (blocked anyway) or I asked my LLM to fetch the content? I bet my LLM coukd get it anyway as I'm using basic local scraping with firecrawl for backup. So my LLM if it fails to retrieve using my basic local crawl4ai will use my paid firecrawl api and those guys can scrape EVERYTHING.

I do not understand why do you (as a site owner) care? Are these bots generating so much traffic? Can you set it up to serve text only version to them then?

Re: New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers

#688
post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the FBI comes to you, an executive at a printer manufacturer, and says “implement tracking dots or we will discover criminal images on your son’s laptop” or some similar situation the existence or lack thereof of any legal requirement is irrelevant.

I hear sentiment like this occasionally and I genuinely wonder if this is conspiracy theory stuff or if this sort of thing actually happened in the past. I'm aware of the programs Snowden revealed, Tempora / XKeyscore / Longhaul / the like, plus I've heard J. Edgar Hoover did bad things and lots of CIA meddling internationally was bad. Still, these seem qualitatively different to the explicit blackmail you're referri…

Living through all of the events of 2020 in Minneapolis of all places led me to the conclusion that when push comes to shove there is no law, only hard power and the will to use it.

If you want examples of events that could be reasonably interpreted as “this sort of thing”, the son of the guy who tried to assassinate Trump the second time was mysteriously arrested for possession of CSAM a week after his dad was arrested. I’m inclined to believe that the base rate of people being into that stuff is reasonably low so whenever I hear about someone being charged with it in relation to a completely unrelated major news story it gets my spidey sense tingling.

Re: New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers

#689
post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always been this way. According to Google 64% of the voting age population voted in 2024. In 1972 it was 56%, in 1976 it was 55%, in 1980 it was 55%, in 1984 it was 56%... you get the idea [0]. [0] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/vitalst...

Yeah, and those figures are horrible . In other Western countries the turnout is closer to 80%, with some even hitting over 90%. The fact that ~20% of the population either wants to vote but is unable to do so or is disillusioned about the democratic process to the point of not voting at all is extremely worrying. This is not what a healthy democracy should look like.

If you want people to vote at over 90% you need to make it compulsory as Australia does. IMO the problem with doing this is that the people who don't care or don't believe it matters are now going to be annoyed that they have to do it. They will vote randomly, or just pick the first candidate listed, etc. just to be done with it. I saw the same behavior in school by kids who didn't care about the standardized tests they had to take. They just filled in bubbles on the answer sheet at random.

If you don't care enough to inform yourself about the candidates or at least have a party affiliation, it's probably best that you don't vote.

Re: New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers

#690

> blog.adafruit.com Your browser is out of date. Update your browser to view this site properly. Click here for more information if you care about right to repair and the ability of regular people to make a living and choose their own destiny(i.e. live independently of a mega-corp), this type of error message should bother you. HTML is a mature tech. There is no reason for this type of error

(posting this in both comments about this) i am the author of the article. the adafruit blog is not trying to block you my dude(s). we are under constant automated scraping and ddos, largely from ai crawlers, and we use cloudflare to keep the site online at all. the nature of of these things will cause false positives depending on browser, extensions, network, or referrer. the site publishs full-text rss feeds with n…

Forget it. Every thread has these who people complain when some website doesn't open in Lynx or Amaya with Javascript disabled. Ignore them.
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