this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2026
728 points (99.3% liked)
Technology
85245 readers
4293 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This is the problem when lawmakers write technical bills without speaking to technical people. They're going to publish standards for evaluating if your gcode is a firearm or firearm part? THAT'S FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE
It's not even that, building a firearm.....is legal...this shit going after printers makes no sense at all, it's fucking legal to print firearm parts.
BANNED
Fun time to introduce/remind people of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect: The phenomenon of a person trusting newspapers for topics which that person is not knowledgeable about, despite recognizing the newspaper as being extremely inaccurate on certain topics which that person is knowledgeable about.
Same thing goes for laws and lawmakers. It's almost as if selecting our "leaders" from a narrow band of society who, for the most part, don't know shit about anything, does not lead to enlightened laws.
Lol I was just talking to my wife about that yesterday and how it's exactly like AI.
If you read something in the newspaper about your job, you're like "these fucking idiots got this all backwards." If you see AI output of an attempt at your job, it's the same thing.
But if you read an article about someone else's job, you think "that makes sense." Same about seeing AI trying to do someone else's job.
In most cases, absolutely. There are a few jobs I can see an LLM performing as well or better. Though, then those people would be roaming the streets and do you really want your insurance claim denied while you're out walking your dog or someone yelling about paradigm shifts to align synergies when you're just having a nice day at the park?
I bet they end up using a fucking llm
Yes that's probably how you would do this. Get a bunch of data of gcode of 3d printed gun parts and not-gun parts, for different slicers and printers. Then train some transformer as a classifier. Based on how good object recognition is, i would say its possible that you would get reasonably good accuracy and precision. And because you are scanning for code the architecture will likely be similar to an llm.
Then five minutes later, someone figures out how to make a 3d printable gun that bypasses the gun detector on the 3d printer. It's not like you're printing a whole gun; you're printing parts, most of which look nothing like a gun. How hard would it be to design an algorithm that takes a gun part cad file and then adds a bunch of extraneous pieces to it that can be easily removed? Just keep adding extra crap until the system no longer detects it as a gun part.
Yes that would probably work. There could be some essential features of weapon parts that an algorithm might still be able to learn, and a printer could also keep track of previously printed parts for the classification. I think its unlikely that there are essential features of gun parts that are specific to gun parts so there would probably be a lot of false positives.
Yeah I'm thinking of an automated version of greebling. Except you design the extraneous bits so that they're only attached to the intended print like print supports - something in a non-critical location, easily torn away.
I think a problem might be that the "easily broken away" might be a feature that an algorithm might be able to learn.
just rotate the piece at different angles on the plate, which would change the positions of vertexes and generate an unrecognizable set of printer head instructions. No extra pieces necessary; and even if there were, there's no need for them to be printed attached to the main part.
Isleepinahammocks idea would probably work. But rotation and translation would not. Thats something you can easily take care of in your training data, by reusing the same training data in multiple random positions and random angles.
are you familiar with 3d printing? The print head's instructions will be completely different if you rotate the model. Unrecognizably different.
Yes i know. But this is trivially easy to get into the training data. You just slice models in random orientations and build your training dataset that way so the algortihm will recognize gun parts in every direction.
Cosplayers are going to be pissed.
That's a whole section on OnlyFans
That's the point. This is just a foot in the door to block your access to print things that might be trademarked copyrighted or affiliated with your corporate overlords.
And a foot in the door to start blocking your right to repair your own things.
Guaranteed.
The controller in my printer that was manufactured at mininum cost can't "analyze a part using an algorithm". Do they think it has any decent computational power?
Yes they have no idea what they are asking. Stl is just gcode how do you look for a gun out of coordinates.
Kinda, render a few images from the gcode, use a CV algorithm to identify the object.
On device it'll be slow or expensive.
Define gun is a lot harder then you think. For example
or
I know, but they want a solution implemented, that's a solution.
Ah yes. Another passive asshole that codes this type of thing and goes home without even batting an eye because I got mine before someone else did.
Big assumptions
Its just either completly ineffective, or effectively bans 3d printing. Then you are going to run into enforcement, and legal challenges. Oh and even if all that is done guns will still be present at a ratio above 1:1 in the states.
Anyone who has a highschool level of metal shop can also make a firearm, 3d printing is not even well suited for the task. Just look at Japan, one of if not the most restricted nation for firearms, and someone shot a leader with a homemade firearm.
Your faith in this mystery algorithm is stronger than mine. Here's a diagram of the parts in an AR-15:
So we need an algorithm that renders the gcode I'm printing, then compares it to... something?
Look, I was just saying, it could be done, train it on current real and 3d printable gun parts and there, you did your best to create algorithmic gun filtering. I wasn't saying that it would be good or accurate.
Printer: “not a hot dog”
Theres countless gcode use in the world, much of it is offline
Doesn't matter. Has nothing to do with online.
You can run OpenCV on an RPi, it's just super slow, and you could probably use a cheap GPU chip to do it faster. You store the pretrained model on the device.
You may even get away with an asic designed for the model, though with that one I'm talking out my ass.
That would makes printers more expensive and my guess is that they'll prefer to force online connectivity
100%