if someone wants to make a gun... they can. It's not complex to manufacturer simple firearms - we managed it as far back as the freaking 10th century.

So why freak out over this, for example, and not CNCs? Or Power tools? Or forges (CHF barrels are a thing too!)?

So no - not buying it. Hell, there's not even a real price difference. I can get a Nomad3 from Carbide 3D for the same approximate cost as an H2D from bambu labs.

And I can get super cheap temu versions of either for under 500.

So can many, many other things. Hell - something like this will do SO MUCH BETTER than anything I can print:

https://www.mcmaster.com/products/pipe/carbon-fiber-1~/?s=pl...

It's weird because 3d printed plastic is WAY down the list of things I'd prefer to trust handling the explosion from ammunition.

Frankly - even the hobbyist CNC I have is a MUCH better method of creating a plastic gun. FDM printing is not something I'd want to trust in this case, neither is SLA printing in most materials (some of the very high end ones like nylon in a formlabs printer... maybe?).

But my point stands - guns aren't that hard to make, and we aren't trying this legislation with any of the other myriad manufacturing methods. Hell - compare to a potato cannon... (also a plastic gun, btw...)

So what's different about 3d printers?

My hunch is this has fuck-all to do with guns, and a lot to do with something else, because 3d printers ARE different in that they let me manufacturer all sorts of other, much more complex, goods much more easily and cheaply at home.

I own several 3d printers. If I wanted to make something resembling a firearm I'd go to home depot WAY before I bothered 3d printing parts. You basically just need a metal tube, and well... a pipe from home depot does that much better than trying to 3d print something much less reliable.

So given we don't do this regulation for any of the much more reliable ways to create unregistered firearms... what's special about 3d printers?

So my assumption is immediately that some relatively large lobbying group feels threatened by 3d printing, and is using this as a driver to try to control access and limit business impact.

Either way, this is bad legislation.

He said he worked with their hardware, not that he worked for Boston Dynamics.

Entirely possible to be working with a platform provided by Boston Dynamics at a company that is not engaged in weapons development.

The payload that implements your crypto cannot be delivered over http, because any intermediate party can just modify your implementation and trivially compromise it.

If you don't trust TLS, you have to pre-share something. In the case of TLS and modern browser security, the "pre-shared" part is the crypto implementation running in the browser, and the default trusted store of root CAs (which lives in the browser or OS, depending).

If you want to avoid trusting that, you've got to distribute your algorithm through an alternative channel you do trust.

Even a decade ago, seniors could easily be pulling 120-150k in markets like Houston/Atlanta/Miami/etc... The relatively cheap markets.

I'm in Atlanta and I'd actually say 150k is a lowball offer for a senior in this market at this point. I'd expect 175k+.

Now - the flip side of this is that current competition is fairly insane with all the recent tech layoffs. So it's possible we're seeing some market correction. But I don't really think it's going to come down much. Between inflation and rising costs... 150k just isn't what it used to be. If it comes down... it's going to be because we're entering a real depression.

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The amount of money the US government has printed in the last 7 years is... insane. And while it was starting to taper back down in 2023 and early 2024... then we got the GOP, and the GOP is objectively bad with money (not that the dems are that much better...). So m1 supply is rising at a relatively steady rate again.

We going to feel the consequences for a LONG time (or very, very badly for a medium time... with unknown results).

I don't really see generators ever crossing into mainstream usage in the same way as the other features you've compared them to. Most times... you just don't need them. The other language tools solve the problem in a more widely accessible manner.

In the (very limited & niche) subset of spots you do actually need a generator, they're nice to have, but it's mostly a "library author" tool, and even in that scope it's usage just isn't warranted all that often.

To go back to your biology point:

Figures like Andreessen or Musk (or, at least in my opinion most billoniares) can be directly compared to cancer. They are EXCELLENT at extracting value from the environment they're in. If you limit your moral judgement to just that... then you clearly think cancer is wonderful, since it does the same thing!

Cancer is a group of cells that chemically signal the body to provide resources and spread themselves without restraint, avoiding internal systems that would regulate it via things like apoptosis or other signaling. If you judge a cell by how many resources it can accumulate... Cancer is wildly successful.

But the problem is that extraction without introspection, success with insight, moving without care... eventually actors like this destroy the system they operate within.

Ex - Andreessen should perhaps spend some introspection on the fact that ultimately "dollar bills" are literal cloth (or more likely... digital numbers) that he can't eat, won't shelter him, and can't emotionally satisfy him.

They strictly have value because of the system he operates within that allows exchange, and if he acts without care of that system... he might destroy it. Or it might destroy him.

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So directly to your point: There is clearly a need for more introspection than "zero". And suggesting otherwise is unbelievably conceited. It is cancerous, and should be treated as such.

Why make this point?

Address my actual content - I believe we can do better than modern copyright (personally - I think "no copyright" is likely a better and more ethical solution than the modern incarnation, but that's a real discussion, and there are FAR too many leeches (excuse me - vested interests) for this reasoning to gain traction in western countries).

I think modern copyright is at the root of an absolutely incredible amount of rent-seeking behavior, and I think we both agree on that point.

You state: "The money-making schemes around education are downright criminal, and it is disgusting that universities abet and enable them."

But copyright enables these exact money-making schemes, and it does so on a level far beyond the damage done by universities alone. We see this across huge swathes of the economy.

Again, my opinion is that current copyright laws have become a tool that facilitates stagnation, enriches middlemen rather than funds authors or creatives of any type, and are largely harmful to society.

That's NOT a condemnation of copyright as a concept, I believe there are implementations that can be much more fruitful. But what the US promotes is, well, a steaming pile of horse-*&^% that reeks so bad we'd be better off washing it away entirely.

So to your points:

> 1. The actual labor of an author. Writing a book requires a nontrivial amount of labor. This cannot be ignored. You cannot categorically say that you have a right to the labor of an author and the publisher.

I entirely agree, work should be compensated. I don't believe that work entitles you to a revenue stream for eternity, or functional eternity (ex: life of author plus 70 FUCKING YEARS). We don't pay the skilled workers who build houses for every month someone stays in them. They do work in exchange for a set payment. They don't get payment forever in exchange for one-time work.

> 2. The dishonest business practices of publishers (and some authors). I agree that university textbooks often follow this model, but that is largely a flaw with the American university education system which has long abandoned education as its primary aim. The money-making schemes around education are downright criminal, and it is disgusting that universities abet and enable them.

We both agree, no argument here.

> 3. The distribution of books where this is a problem. Most published books do not go through successive bogus editions that only reorder the exercises in the back. W.r.t. university texts, I've had professors who use old books published decades ago (e.g., Dover, which are cheap) and these tend to better than the glossy tomes many professors seem to prefer for some reason. There is absolutely no reason for a 30th edition book on basic number theory or the foundations of Newtonian physics.

Yes, people can and do act ethically at times, all on their own. Those people are great, but we're not referring to them, we're referring to the systemic problems of copyright that enable the opposite behavior. The world could be so much better if more people acted in this manner, but human nature implies we're not dealing with that world.

Fixed costs, exact model pinning, outage resistant, enshittification resistant, better security, better privacy, etc...

There are just so many compelling reasons to be on-prem instead of dependent on a 3rd party hoovering up all your data and prompts and selling you overpriced tokens (which eventually they MUST be, because these companies have to make a profit at some point).

If the only counterbalance is "well the api is cheaper than buying my own hardware"...

That's a short term problem. Hardware costs are going to drop over time, and capabilities are going to continue improving. It's already pretty insane how good of a model I can run on two old RTX-3090s locally.

Is it as good as modern claude? No. Is it as good as claude was 18 months ago? Yes.

Give it a decade to see companies really push into the "diminishing returns" of scaling and new models... combined with new hardware built with these workloads in mind... and I think on-prem is the pretty clear winner.

In that case... Fuck yes. Screw the author's "labor". Arguably, screw the whole damn system.

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Copyright rarely helps small authors who actually need it.

It usually gets employed by conglomerates that own distribution and are already screwing authors as hard as they think they can get away with.

It's genuinely a pretty terrible system in its current form.

We can do better.

Our grid infrastructure isn't cheap. We need a huge amount of equipment to do the voltage conversions to make power lines semi-sane. We also need a ton of space, maintenance and equipment to run the wiring, install the transformers, handle substations and distribution, etc...

My suspicion is that if you account for that, local storage is cheaper. But I think we're still finding out where battery tech is going to settle.

I'd be having a very different conversation if we hadn't introduced LiFePO4 (LFP) batteries, and realistically - these have only been on the market ~15 years now, and only really generally available for 5 or 6 years.

These are already pretty incredible batteries. A bank them the size of a washing machine will power most residential homes for days, cost under 10K, and be very safe. Prismatic LFP cells run ~$100/kwh (not theoretically, right now: https://www.18650batterystore.com/products/eve-mb31-grade-a-...)

If we see a similar upgrade with Sodium (and it's looking more and more real, multiple commercial products have hit the market last year) - then I think a decade from now we'll really start to wonder why we're wasting so much land and spending so much on grid equipment if you can just install a small bank of batteries for a couple thousand dollars and call it done.

Will you still have economies of scale with storage? Probably. Will those outweigh costs to transmit that to where it needs to go? My hunch is no.

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On a darker note - individual generation and storage is WAY more robust to military disruption. No central location to bomb to knock out power for a whole city.

I did my own battery backed installation. When I'm underproducing I can shed load (I turn off my AC - almost always that's enough, and it's automated by relay). When I'm overproducing (ex - my battery is full and my load is still not enough to consume input) I just don't let the panels generate more current than I can consume.

Managing grid scale power is different concern, and not particularly relevant to small household generation. Especially not relevant in the 800W category for "balcony solar" (which is much smaller than what I'm working with).

Solar is fucking coming, whether you continue to shove head into the ground or not.

It's just way more affordable. Getting easily more affordable as batteries continue to improve.

I honestly doubt I'll still be connected to a local utility grid for electric 10 years from now, and I live in a region of the US that has considerably cheaper grid power than most areas.

There are "shitty" ways to do piracy (usually the sketchy streaming alternatives). But the media management and playback tooling is genuinely great right now.

I still buy most of my media, but I pick up cheap physical copies of things and put them on a NAS for playback through jellyfin.

It's... MILES better than netflix/amazon/hulu/etc. No ads, no bullshit, no marketing, no "self-promotion that's totally not an ad, wink wink". Just your media.

Playback is per-user, it keeps all your stuff just fine, you can resume later from wherever you left off, I can shuffle series (great for kids shows like Arthur or magic school bus), and it's never offline, down, or unavailable.

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Basically - you're very confused. I have "streaming" it just comes out of my own equipment, playing my own content. All the affordances are there and it has none of the bullshit.

Sure - self hosting takes a bit more work. It usually pays for itself in saved costs (ex - if you weren't doing this work, you're paying money which you needed to do work for to have it done for you.)

Cloud costs haven't actually gotten much cheaper (but the base hardware HAS - even now during these inflated costs), and now every bit of software tries to bill you monthly.

Further, if you're not putting services open on the web - you actually don't need to update all that often. Especially not the services themselves.

Honestly - part of the benefit of self-hosting is that I can choose whether I really want to make that update to latest, and whether the features matter to me. Often... they don't.

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Consider: Most people are running outdated IP provided routers with known vulnerabilities that haven't been updated in literally years. They do ok.

They may not come after all the niche companies, but they definitely come after the most successful markets, especially those with low effort moats.

Same goes for relying on the Apple/Google app stores (ex - Apple literally got slapped in court for copying successful apps and then pushing their offering to the top of their stores... talk about wildly abusive behavior).

I may still choose to use AWS/GCP/Azure while trying to find product-market fit as an immature startup, but I'd look real, REAL hard at ditching them as soon as possible afterwards.

Unless you have particularly bursty workloads, they aren't even a good cost saving measure anymore.

> Although nominally civil, traffic infraction proceedings retain every substantive hallmark of criminal prosecution...

Is going to matter here. A moving violation (ex: red light) is quite different from a non-moving violation (ex: parking) in how they're handled, and often how they're classified.

Ex - my in state, a moving violation is a criminal misdemeanor, while a non-moving violation is entirely civil.

Then it's the wrong solution. Period.

There are plenty of annoyances with spreadsheets, but part of what makes them so robust and powerful is that they don't take a ton of specialized knowledge, and they remain incredibly flexible.

An expensive, complicated, static, "right" solution for a small business is folly (honestly - this stays true up to medium/large business). It's a ton of time and energy focused on the absolute wrong thing. When a spreadsheet can reach the same result in a fraction of the time.

Especially given the result may not actually be that important, and they pivot to something else entirely in the very near future.

I've worked at several startups. I'd caution even software startups from assuming that custom solutions are the right approach. They usually aren't. They're a waste of time and effort that ends up saddling you with a brittle, expensive solution designed to solve problems from last year.

There are only a couple of relatively niche spaces where things like cpu performance are really the bottleneck right now.

Hell - RPi 5 is perfectly fine for a huge range of development tasks. The 8gb version is very reasonable $125.

Can you find things that these boxes can't do? Absolutely. Do most developers do those things? ehhhh probably not. Especially not in the webdev space.

Would I still pick a nice machine if given the chance? Sure, I have cash to burn and I like having nice laptops (although not Apple...).

But part of the "AI craze" is that hardware genuinely is commoditized, and manufacturers really, REALLY wanted a new differentiating factor to sell people more laptops. There's not much reason to upgrade, especially if the old machine was a decent machine at time of purchase.

I have 8 year old dell XPS laptops that do just fine for modern dev.