alt Hacker NewsLM has a whole series of videos that touches on this (as well as some related topics): https://www.youtube.com/@LoyalMoses/videos
Louis Rossman also touched on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS-9ISzMhBM
I've seen more by others but can't recall them all. Without going too far down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole, the momentum for this seems to be coming from a variety of sources:
* New York being New York and trying to make thinking about guns a thought crime
* There's European company (forget the name) that makes specialized software that can do this. They're lobbying so they can inject themselves for some tasty rent seeking.
* A variety of companies that see right-to-repair (and thus home 3D printers, CNC-milling, etc.) a threat to their bottom lines.
* General ignorance by our law makers
Replies
cgannett • yesterday at 9:26 PM
Literally giving children the means of production is way out of line. To the corporate owned gulag with you! /s
> we should be giving EVERY kid who wants one a free 3D Printer so they can learn to tinker, be creative, and build things
Totally agree. Ironically, I think it'd do a lot more to reduce gun violence than any of these laws given the primary factors in gun violence are 1) being poor and not having good options out of poverty and 2) being a man between the ages of like 15-25
I'm just young enough that I had a high school teacher who was able to get some level of support from the district to run an elective engineering course and had a few of the very early consumer-grade printers that were terrible compared to a modern printer. I was already down the programming rabbit hole at that point, but it was absolutely foundational in me realizing that "you can build things" didn't only apply to the digital. I really wish we'd have similar in just about every school. So many of my peers think that the ability to fabricate basic things and work on anything physical is substantially harder than it actually is (to the level of thinking they'd need similar effort it took them to learn to code to learn to work on their car), and so never do it.
If you can reason about a C compiler, you can definitely learn to do a brake job on a car or 3d print a basic coupler for a home project.