EURion marks are a feature you must include on your banknote for it to even be considered real. And it's _one_ feature. It's relatively trivial to make a chip which can detect their presence.
On the other hand, if I need a replacement part for something, it's unlikely I will find the manufacturer giving me models for it. And if a manufacturer is giving me models for it, they probably do so with the explicit expectation that I might end up using them to manufacture a replacement.
In most cases either me or some other volunteer will need to measure the existing part, write down all the critical measurements, and then design a new part from scratch in CAD.
Even if somehow you are able to fingerprint on those critical measurements, that's just _one_ part.
The only way this kind of nonsense law could work is if you mandate that 3D printers must not accept commands from an untrusted source (signature verification) and then you must have software which uses a database to check for such critical measurements, ideally _before_ slicing.
Except that still doesn't work because I can always post-process a part to fit.
And it doesn't work even more because the software will need to contain a signing key. Unless the signing key is on a remote server somewhere to which you must send your model for validation.
This is never going to work, or scale.
There are even more hurdles... I can design and build a 3D printer from scratch and manufacture it using non-CNC machined parts at home. A working, high quality 3D printer.
Where are you going to force me to put the locks? Are you going to require me to show my ID when buying stepper motors and stepper motor drivers?
What about other kinds of manufacturing (that these laws, at least the Washington State ones, also cover)?
Will you ban old hardware?
What about a milling machine? Are you going to ban non-CNC mills?
These are the most ignorant laws made by the most ignorant people. The easiest way to ban people from manufacturing their own guns is to ban manufacture of your own guns. But again, this is a complete non-issue in the US where you can probably get a gun illegally more easily than you can 3D print something half as reliable.
But that's the point. DRM works at all (in terms of causing inconvenience, not preventing copying, for that it will never work of course) because the people producing the data have an interest in applying the DRM.
But the people producing 3D printable gun parts are _not_ interested in applying the DRM.
If you want to draw an analogy to media, this is more like if the government mandated porn detection software on your computer which would prevent porn from being able to be displayed on your screen. Or mandating HDCP between your monitor and your computer so that your computer could implement restrictions on what you could view on the monitor.
Except that computers are extremely difficult to DIY from basic components (I mean raw chips and metal). Meanwhile I can literally buy aluminium extrusions, or even bits of wood, some stepper motors, some gears, some belts, some pulleys and some stepper drivers, an STM32 devboard and get PCBWay to make me a simple PCB, or just use a prototyping board. And at the end of it, I would have a high quality (maybe a bit slow) 3D printer. I can tell you with absolute certainty that it could print gun parts because I have personally taken a trash-tier prusa i3 mk2 clone and turned it into a machine which could probably rival the mk3 at least.
How exactly are they planning on stopping me from designing a part, slicing it, and then putting it on a DIY 3D printer?
They could maybe achieve this by restricting the sale of certain components such as hot-ends, extruder gears (although you can get away with generic gears), or stepper motors and stepper motor drivers. I just don't see it happening. Maybe they could ban open source slicers and CAD programs?
But I guess I better start stocking up on high quality stepper motors and stepper motor drivers and buy a milling machine and a lathe so I can manufacture the other parts myself. You never know when the UK government will steal another wonderful authoritarian idea from another country.
As an European I'd say any USAnite can almost get a gun with breakfast cereal boxes. But weapons' culture in the US it's obsolete. Militias can't do shit against tyranical govs because once they send drones it's game over.
> But weapons' culture in the US it's obsolete. Militias can't do shit against tyranical govs because once they send drones it's game over.
Pretty sure those 50 thousand or so civilians killed on the street in the recent Iranian protests/riots would have been a lot less, if all those Iranians had easy access to guns, and not just the government.
Drones are not enough, you still need boots on the ground for you to claim control over a territory, and boots on the ground think twice about signing up for service if that includes facing armed mobs with guns on a daily basis.
This isn't really accurate. The Northern Alliance entered into an agreement with the US to secure the country. An insurgency sprang up and we fought it for 20 years before giving up. Since this is now after the fact, we can safely say the Taliban ran the insurgency the whole time.
The Taliban are a military and political group compromised of an ethnic minority in Afghanistan. It's not even that the US lost to "goat herders with guns". We failed to secure a small country against a well organized, armed minority.
No. Pakistan supported an insurgency group for 20 years.
No insurgency like that can exist without foreign support in some form, usually from governments but it can be from resource export.
And the reality is nobody has ever defeated a foreign sponsored insurgency. Some have ended because the sponsor quit sponsoring them, but that is not the same thing as defeated.
Nobody has ever defeated a foreign-funded insurgency, other than by the funding going away. It's no surprise we didn't accomplish what nobody else has, either.
Afghanistan is a landlocked country on the other side of the planet, the soldiers didn't grow up with knowledge of the terrain, they had no knowledge of the language, culture, customs or social networks, no one locally (with few exceptions) wanted them there, and crucially they only lost once they left, and when they left, there were no penalties for the people who started the war; no US politicians were in any danger whether the war was won or lost, no land was lost, and no truly important geopolitical goals failed.
On the flip side in any domestic insurrection, the soldiers know the terrain, language, customs and culture of the people, the supply lines are nothing (rather than having to airlift materiel and people thousands of miles, you drive them on regular roads), the infrastructure supports espionage, most people support the regime and will collaborate to return to stability (since they voted for it), the regime never leaves (you can leave Afghanistan, you can't leave your own country or it ceases to be a country), and if you lose, you lose territory and/or politicians run the risk of violence. The stakes are why these comparisons are never relevant.
But at the same time a domestic insurrection means your enemies have direct access to all of your most important infrastructure and logistics and supporting economy. It might be expensive to fly or float materials and people over to the middle east, but you don't gotta worry about 1000+ miles of pissed off insurgents potentially around every bend and tree or mixed into your own military or logistic personnel.
Let's do some napkin math: Iran has about 94 million people. Iran's IRGC alone has a personnel count of 125.000 [1], of which about 2-5000 are estimated to be the elite of the elite ("Quds Force"). Together with the Basij (anywhere from 100-600k) that alone is a sufficient amount of force. And on top of that come maybe 400-500k of the regular Iranian Armed Forces [2], as well as about 260k active police+100k police reservists.
So, if one sees the whole of IRGC plus Basij as the "commandos", they alone form an active elite of about 0.5%, if one sees the entirety of the military+police we're looking at easily 2-3 million units, so up to 2%.
The Iranian guards, along with most of the armies in the second and third tier powers don't have elite anything. Please see Desert Storm, etc. Most of them ran. The ones that didn't were destroyed.
It’s not obsolete. In a country where your military is farm boys, the important thing is being able to start the war. Eventually chunks of the military will defect. We saw this happen during the Bangladesh independence movement. The revolutionaries got lucky and knocked over a weapons depot early in the conflict. They started fighting and a large number of the Pakistani army that was of Bangladeshi ancestry defected. I am confident the same thing would happen if the government in DC tried to oppress Iowa or Texas.
Drones cut both ways. You’re correct that it allows a small number of people loyal to the regime to asymmetrically oppress a large population. But drone technology is in theory accessible to the populace in an industrialized country.
The 2A crowd has been really quiet this past year. Hell, Trump even said in response to the Pretti shooting that only criminals walk around carrying guns in public. I guess no one cares about government tyranny unless they're asked to respect someone's pronouns.
Why would the 2A people say anything? Conservatives aren’t libertarians. They think government has legitimate functions and draw a distinction between government performing those functions (which isn’t tyranny) and the government exceeding its scope (which is tyranny). Removing foreigners here illegally is a core function of the government. Social engineering is not.
> Hell, Trump even said in response to the Pretti shooting that only criminals walk around carrying guns in public.
If you were paying any attention at all, you'd see pretty much every 2A community, advocate and lobbying group was outraged by that statement and made statements against it.
Having said that, it is actually illegal to carry a firearm to go commit crimes like destroying government property, assaulting federal officers and obstructing them in carrying out their constitutional duties.
There is video of him kicking light the tail light of a federal law enforcement vehicle, which is definitely a crime. And that’s just what we have video of.
Drones may be good against foreign adversaries, but you can't bomb your own population and cities into being productive economy. A war between two well funded and supported militaries is far different than an insurgency.
1) That's a mischaracterization of the FFL purchase process if I've ever heard one.
2) The weapons culture of the US is so obsolete that there are government officials parroting lines about it not being legal to carry a concealed weapon during a protest in Minnesota when it is, actually, very much legal. That is to say, it's not obsolete at all. Given the prior public stances of the Trump administration on firearms, this is incredibly telling, and all the more reason why you can't trust people like them.
Talking and typing feels far more productive that staring and thinking, and there is a cumulative effect of those breaks to check Reddit while something is generating.
Humans are notoriously bad at estimating time use with different subjective experiences and show excessive weighting of the tail ends of experiences and perceived repetitious tasks. Making something psychologically more comforting and active, particularly if you can activate speech, will distort people’s sense of time meaningfully.
The current hype around LLMs is making me think about misapplied ORMs in medium scale projects... The tool is chosen early to save hours of boring typing and a certain kind of boring maintenance, but deep into the project what do we see? Over and over days are spontaneously being lost to incidental complexity and arbitrary tool constraints. And with the schedule slipping it’s too much work to address the root issue so band-aides get put on band-aides, and we start seeing weeks slip down the drain.
Subjective time accounting and excessive aversion to specific conceptual tasks creates premature optimizations whose effects become omnipresent over time. All the devs in the room agreed they want to avoid some work day 1, but the accounting shows a big time commitment resulting from that immediate desire. Feelings aren’t stopwatches.
[Not hating on ORMs, just misusing tools for weeks to save a couple hours - every day ain’t Saturday - right tool for the job.]
Yes, that's true, because as developer you have to check if "generated" code meet your standards and if is handling all edge cases you see.
When you are an experienced developer and you "struggle" writing manually some code this is important warning indicator about project architecture - that something is wrong in it.
For such cases I like to step back and think about redesign/refactor.
When coding goes smoothly, some "unpredicted" customer changes can be added easly into project then it is the best indicator that architecture is fine.
It's even simpler than that. "Reading code is harder than writing code" has been repeated for decades and everyone agrees.
When you use AI to generate your code, instead of you writing it and then someone else reviewing it, there are two people reviewing it (you and the reviewer), which obviously takes longer.
The article they are referring to is 404, but based on the URL was published bit more than year ago. That's quite long time in a field that is evolving so rapidly and which even the pioneers are still figuring out.
Obscurity is a delay tactic which raises the time cost associated with an attack. It is true that obscurity is not a security feature, but it is also true that increasing the time cost associated with attacking you is a form of deterrant from attempts. If you are not at the same time also secure in the conventional sense then it is only buying you time until someone puts in the effort to figure out what you are doing and own you. And you better have a plan for when that time comes. But everyone needs time, because bugs happen, and you need that time to fix them before they are exploited.
The difference between obscurity and a secret (password, key, etc) is the difference between less then a year to figure it out and a year or more to figure it out.
There is a surprising amount of software out there with obscurity preventing some kind of "abuse" and in my experience these features are not that strong, but it takes someone like me hours to reverse engineer these things, and in many cases I am the first person to do that after years of nobody else bothering.
Rocking the boat so much as to get fired, fail to find another employer before the visa expires, and be sent back home? A terrifying perspective for many.
Just to clarify that the parent may have edited, but wrote "non-H1B" workers, so they would be speaking about domestic / citizen employees, not ones on visa.
So I can tell you don’t use these tools, or at least much, because at the speed of development with them you’ll be knee deep in tech debt in a day, not a month, but as a corollary can have the same agentic coding tools undergo the equivalent of weeks of addressing tech debt the next day. Well, I think this applies to greenfield AI-first oriented projects that work this way from the get go and with few humans in the loop (human to human communication definitely becomes the rate limiting step). But I imagine that’s not the nature of your work.
Yes if I went hard on something greenfield I'm sure I'll be knee deep in tech debt in less than a day.
That being said, given the quality of code these things produce, I just don't see that ever stopping being the case. These things require a lot of supervision and at some point you are spending more time asking for revisions than just writing it yourself.
There's a world of difference between an MPV which, in the right domain, you can get done much faster now, and a finished product.
I think you missed the your parent post's phrase "in the specific areas _I_ work in" ... LLMs are a lot better at crud and boilerplate than novel hardware interfaces and a bunch of other domains.
But why would it take a month to generate significant tech debt in novel domains, it would accrue even faster then right? The main idea I wanted to get across is that iteration speed is much faster so what's "tech debt" in the first pass, can be addressed much faster in future passes, which will happen on the order of days rather than sprints in the older paradigm. Yes the first iterations will have a bunch of issues but if you keep your hands on the controller you can get things to a decent state quickly. I think one of the biggest gaps I see in devs using these tools is what they do after the first pass.
Also, even for novel domains, using tools like deep research and the ability of these tools to straight up search through the internet, including public repos during the planning phase (you should be planning first before implementing right? You're not just opening a window and asking in a few sentences for a vaguely defined final product I hope) is a huge level up.
If there are repos, papers, articles, etc of your novel domain out there, there's a path to a successful research -> plan -> implement -> iterate path out there imo, especially when you get better at giving the tools ways to evaluate their own results, rather than going back and forth yourself for hours telling them "no, this part is wrong, no now this part is wrong, etc etc"
I mean, there's also, "this looks fine but if I actually had written this code I would've naturally spent more time on it which would have led me to anticipate the future of this code just a little bit more and I will only feel that awkwardness when I come back to this code in two weeks, and then we'll do it all over again". It's a spectrum.
And greenfield code is some of the most enjoyable to write, yet apparently we should let robots do the thing we enjoy the most, and reserve the most miserable tasks for humans, since the robots appear to be unable to do this.
I have yet to see an LLM or coding agent that can be prompted with "Please fix subtle bugs" or "Please retire this technical debt as described in issue #6712."
If you're willing to purchase enough tokens, you can prompt and agent to loop and fuzz its way to "retire* this technical debt as described in issue #6712". But then you still need to review it and make sure it's not just doing a "debt-swap", like some kind of metaverse financial swindler. So you're spending money to avoid fixing tech debt, but adding in the need to review "someone else's code". And to take ownership of that code!
*(Of course, depending on the issue, it could be doing anything from surpressing logs so existing tests pass, to making useless-but-passing tests, to brute-forcing special cases, to possibly actually fixing something.)
The video explains how the gas based mass spectrometers he had (indirect) access to don't normally pick up nonvolatile compounds like tannins. It was a big breakthrough that since he didn't have cocoa leaf extract, and he basically nailed everything else, he couldn't really understand what he was missing until he realised the extract would likely contain tannins.
So there may be other nonvolatile compounds which nevertheless impact the flavour profile. While a lot of flavour is in your nose, not all of it is...
On the other hand, if I need a replacement part for something, it's unlikely I will find the manufacturer giving me models for it. And if a manufacturer is giving me models for it, they probably do so with the explicit expectation that I might end up using them to manufacture a replacement.
In most cases either me or some other volunteer will need to measure the existing part, write down all the critical measurements, and then design a new part from scratch in CAD.
Even if somehow you are able to fingerprint on those critical measurements, that's just _one_ part.
The only way this kind of nonsense law could work is if you mandate that 3D printers must not accept commands from an untrusted source (signature verification) and then you must have software which uses a database to check for such critical measurements, ideally _before_ slicing.
Except that still doesn't work because I can always post-process a part to fit.
And it doesn't work even more because the software will need to contain a signing key. Unless the signing key is on a remote server somewhere to which you must send your model for validation.
This is never going to work, or scale.
There are even more hurdles... I can design and build a 3D printer from scratch and manufacture it using non-CNC machined parts at home. A working, high quality 3D printer.
Where are you going to force me to put the locks? Are you going to require me to show my ID when buying stepper motors and stepper motor drivers?
What about other kinds of manufacturing (that these laws, at least the Washington State ones, also cover)?
Will you ban old hardware?
What about a milling machine? Are you going to ban non-CNC mills?
These are the most ignorant laws made by the most ignorant people. The easiest way to ban people from manufacturing their own guns is to ban manufacture of your own guns. But again, this is a complete non-issue in the US where you can probably get a gun illegally more easily than you can 3D print something half as reliable.
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