A 3D printer, at least of the Prusa variety, is really just a bunch of stepper motors and a dumb motor driver executing a series of effectively "rotate by X steps" commands, which is what the gcode file is. It doesn't know what it's printing. It doesn't even know that it's a printer.
If they wanted a gate on designs it would have to happen in slicing software, not the actual printer.
Yup. Wait till our genius lawmakers figure that out! Then we'll have all software that can be used to do that job require registration and inspection to certify that it "won't print gun parts." Or maybe "all software" for good measure, in case any sneaky so-and-sos try to make an IRC client with a secret "slicing easter-egg." Better yet, all software of any kind has to be sold through an App Store so we can have Google, Microsoft and Apple gatekeep. That'll work. Gun problem solved.
Indeed. I grew up in a a machine shop than ran both manual and CNC machines and spent my summers in front of mills and lathes running jobs. I now do industrial automation and machine repair. With that being said, yeah, no way will this work. Ever.
And software? My Bridgeport and Logan were built before computers were available to the home consumer. Good luck stopping someone like me.
Unable to find the article quickly, but, I read a compelling perspective recently: DoD vendors seeking to restrict use of 3d printed replacement parts that they would normally supply. There was some speculative tie-in with the recent wave of consumer level regulation.
“We’re basically saying, ‘Hey colonel, hey general, you have to make the decision. If a door handle is broken on an ISV, you need to get it into the field. If you think that replacement door handle is sufficient, send it out.’
“A lot of howitzers are down right now for very simple pieces that we could 3D print and have known how to 3D print, and actually have the design files to 3D print, but we haven’t done it,” Driscoll said. “So we, the Army, have kicked off a very aggressive approach to that.”
> They also talked a lot about how handwriting is super important for cognitive development.
Is it possible that there are alternative ways than handwriting for cognitive development?
Probably in 500 BC they said you had to hack at stone with a chisel for cognitive development, and then someone invented the pen and paper.
The difference is the task had to change as well. People were able to write thousands of pages (rather than a few stone blocks) over their education, and making full use of that ability in order to "keep the brain CPU close to 100%" was a necessary concurrent change in order to preserve cognitive devolpment.
At least around 370 BC, in Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates expresses a strong opinion against writing of any kind through a conversation between the Egyptian gods Theuth and Thamus discussing the invention of writing.
Thamus:
> "For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."
> Probably in 500 BC they said you had to hack at stone with a chisel for cognitive development, and then someone invented the pen and paper.
You are forgetting that in 500 BC literacy rates were well under 10%. Nobody optimized for anyone’s cognitive development.
The only cognitive development people cared about was for the rich (aristocrats, royalty, some merchants, etc). Much of that happened orally through hands-on tutoring by an army of people specifically employed to create the next generation of leaders.
Anyone would thrive with that much resources thrown at them. And I’m pretty sure many of them considered reading and writing beneath them. They got people for that.
>Is it possible that there are alternative ways than handwriting for cognitive development?
there are countless of ways to develop fine motor skills, but handwriting replacing a chisel was not a step down because handwriting is a demanding task in contrast to the, by nature, impoverished interaction with digital rather than analog devices. I help in a maker-space and you can literally tell young people apart who only ever interacted with a phone compared to kids who play an instrument, work with tools etc.
Additionally a pen and paper come cheap compared to a tablet. It was always the perfect example of a kind of "digitalism". "oh we're so cool, we use technology, let's give everyone tablets, we're a modern country". Just expensive nonsense in the absence of educational standards and physical development.
Maybe not that early, but writing did eventually undermine the ability to memorise things. It used to be common for people to memorise long works - it is one reason why epic poetry was popular and designed to be memorable. Memorising even a few hundred lines is unusual now.
> Memorising even a few hundred lines is unusual now.
Memorizing a few hundred lines of epic poetry probably is indeed unusual. But I bet most people have more than a few hundred lines of poetry in the form of song lyrics memorized (along with the tune of the song).
Is it possible that the inherent inefficiency of handwriting in recording information is what facilitates cognitive development? Writing information by hand requires the writer to parse the information being written and become skilled in understanding the most important aspects of the information to write since it is impractical to handwrite everything verbatim as it comes to mind.
You're Amazon. You give OpenAI $50B cash investment, they then hand you back the $50B over time because they buy $50B worth of Amazon AWS services (they would use AWS or other equivalent compute anyway). OpenAI pays an additional $1-5B in sales taxes on top of their $50B compute purchase. Now let's say you have $25B opex for said compute. You then have $25B profits, you pay 21% corporate taxes on the profits, so you too owe the government about $5B. Government collects around $6-10B on this whole transaction.
Situation B:
You're Amazon. You let OpenAI use your services by handing them API credentials that unlock what would normally cost $50B worth of services, but no money changes hands. You have zero revenue from the transaction, write off the $25B opex as a tax loss on your other profits elsewhere in the company. You thus pay ~$5B less tax on your other income as a company, and OpenAI also doesn't have to pay sales tax because they didn't actually purchase anything.
It depends how you defined “consumers”. If you mean “those who consume the good subject to the tax, rather than people who resell the good”, yes, ideally.
If you mean “not businesses” or “individuals but not corporations”, then, no.
> Ie companies reverse charge sales tax or omit it entirely.
Generally, the theory of sales taxes is that people (including corporations) pay sales tax on things they consume as a final good rather than use as an intermediate good in production or simply resell. The exact way in which that is determined varies somewhat between jurisdictions with sales taxes, but generally (assuming paper is subject to sales tax in a jurisdiction), if you are buying paper to print books that you sell, you don't pay sales tax, if you are buying paper to print internal documents that you use in running the business, you do pay sales tax.
That’s interesting, that’s not the case in the EU. Here, as long as you can argue that it’s a business expense, you don’t have to pay sales tax. Eg the internal documents are a necessary expense / cost of doing business.
My understanding is that EU nations all have VAT, not sales tax; both are broadly consumption taxes, but they function rather differently (VAT charged at each stage of production vs sales tax only at final sale to consumer, among other differences.). VAT is sort of opposite of sales tax for businesses as payers; they pay VAT on goods bought as production inputs (and collect it on behalf of government on items they sell downstream on the chain of production), but do not pay it on what they consume for internal operations (in effect, to the extent thise internal operations contribute to the value added to the product, that is what the people downstream in the chain of production are paying VAT for.)
If they wanted a gate on designs it would have to happen in slicing software, not the actual printer.
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