Hazelnoot [she/her]

Transfem demigirl with an interest in coding, gaming, and retrocomputing.

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • it was stable, up until a few years ago. But starting when MS scaled back their QA department (Windows 10 era IIRC) - and worsening when they went all-in on AI (Windows 11 era), stability and reliability has fallen off a cliff. I started tracking crashes and problems that required manual intervention, and over the last two years I’ve spent more hours debugging and fixing Windows 11 than Xubuntu. This is the first time in my life where Linux has required less maintenance than a stock Windows installation. It’s bad enough that I advised all my non-technical family members to stay on Windows 10 instead of upgrading to Windows 11, despite the lack of support.





  • Ethics and rights aside, this isn’t even possible to comply with. The law applies to additive and subtractive manufacturing hardware, and expects it to automatically detect and refuse any attempts to manufacture a firearm. But that depends on an underlying assumption that a machine can answer the question “will this command (set) result in the construction of a gun?” And that assumption is false.

    Even if you somehow designed an algorithm that could read a G-code program and determine whether it produces something shaped like a gun, it still wouldn’t be enough - because the CNC machine is just one step of a manufacturing process. The human operator controls what materials and commands go into the machine, so they also have full control over all inputs that the “oversight” program is allowed to see.

    Some simple ways to bypass this (hypothetical and perfect implementation):

    • Print the gun in two pieces, then combine them manually.
    • Print something that contains a gun, then cut out all the non-gun material.
    • Use multiple separate machines for different parts of the gun.
    • Design something that looks nothing like any existing gun, but is still capable of firing a bullet.
    • Print most of a gun, the build the rest by hand.
    • Build part of a gun, then print the rest onto the hand-made parts.
    • Print part of a gun, then run a separate program to print the rest onto the previous result.
    • A thousand variants of the above.

    So even if this was something we wanted to enforce, it’s just not possible. For the same reason why Minecraft abandoned their plans for an SMP “penis detector”, this law could never be complied with because it’s impossible to build a machine that actually meets the requirements.