Yeah, especially in peace time. When war heats up and resources get scarce, you use the cheapest thing that does the job. But in peace time you feed your military contractors to keep them happy and to keep them researching and developing so you don’t lose out on modern technology development.

(For clarification, with “war time” I mean “being in a war that actually threatens the country”. The US hasn’t been in a war like that for a very long time. They’ve essentially being in “peace time” while having military training and testing facilities in the middle east.)

You can not change history for any published changes - like I said, doing so makes your repository incompatible with any other clone.

That’s the same on Git.

10 years ago I got into RC planes for a summer, and me and the guy were talking about how ridiculous it is that the milirary is spending so much money on simple drones, when they could just strap some explosives on a cheap hobbyist RC plane/drone for a fraction of the price, and just create swarms of them.

The technology had been widely available for some time already back then. Turns out, it was just lacking a war to do so.

(Just to be clear, we were all anti-war in general, this was just idle speculatiok back then. But if our country was attacked at that time, I’m sure some of us would have ended in a newly created drone force like what happened in the Ukraine.)

Looks like Mercurial can change the history just fine using the hg command. You just need to enable it first.

https://book.mercurial-scm.org/read/changing-history.html

Git can also be configured to disable history rewrites.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2085871/strategy-for-preventing-or-catching-git-history-rewrite

So the difference between git and hg really just comes down to the defaults.

I got weirdly invested in this, and by the end I was kinda happy that it was “just” a bug in the tooling and not anything actually malicious.

As always with plastic recycling. The whole concept of plastic recycling is only a “don’t think about it, just buy it”.

Let me be clear: I wasn’t arguing for the law, only explaining how it will be likely used.

Depending on the exact content of the law and the first few precedences in court, what you are doing might or might not qualify.

Since you seem to only make attachments/utilities for commercial guns, it would be likely that that kind of activity is not covered by the law. Your guns are no “ghost guns”, they are commercial guns, legally purchased from a seller, with a registration number and everything. (I guess you purchased them legally.)

The gun is specifically targeting “ghost guns” that are created “at home” without registration numbers and stuff, so I don’t think that applies to you.

But who knows how exactly this is going to be applied.

Banning 3D printers for the purposes of stopping ghost guns is stupid, for the exact reason you named (lathe, mill, welders, …), especially because all of these tools are used for all sorts of stuff and creating guns isn’t their main purpose. The same cannot be said for the design files, no matter whether they are for a 3D printer, CNC machines or just a manual on how to build a gun the conventional way. The purpose of such design files is to create a gun, and that can be made illegal.

Whether it should or whether it would even help to stop ghost guns is another story.

Same as shock, so don’t hammer them in either.

I wish my printer was consistent enough between two prints for proving that two parts came from the same printer.

Many people here seem to misunderstand how a law like that will be used.

Police will not go knocking on doors trying to find out whether you downloaded a gun STL.

What they will do is (a) take down anyone advertising or publically speaking about the fact that they DIY guns with 3D printed parts and (b) if they catch someone who is also making guns they have one more thing to prosecute that one for.

And yes, known file hashes will also be blacklisted on places like Google Drive and secret services/police will get automatic notifications if someone uploads any of these known files to a service like that.

Fully 3D printed guns are nonsense, at least of you are using an FDM or resin printer. Filaments and resins are just not tough enough to take the pressure and even when using tiny bullets combined with extremely short barrels to reduce the pressure (which will make the shot extremely weak) it’s a 50:50 chance on each shot to blow up the gun.

And if you have access to a €50k metal SLS printer, you likely have access to much cheaper tools for conventional gun building.

What is a thing though is combining conventional gun building (for the barrel and the other main components) with FDM/resin printing (for things like the handle grips) to remove the need for skills like woodworking.

And yes, the STLs for that are just a google search away.

My Ender 5 has a modified E3D Toolchanger and MGN rails. Not very original either.

Android runs an only slightly modified Linux kernel, and yet the OS requires much less from the user than e.g. Windows or MacOS.

Chromebooks run a bog-standard Linux kernel and the target audience is kids.

My car’s entertainment system runs a standard Linux kernel, and the UX is so cut down that PC expertise really doesn’t matter when using it.

MacOS and iOS, two systems known for their ease of use, both stem from BSD, which comes from Unix.

The kernel has nothing to do with this.

In fact, the only mainstream kernel used in user-facing operating systems that doesn’t “come from Unix” is Windows. Everything else is derived either from Linux or BSD, which both are derived from Unix.

There isn’t even a phone OS anymore that doesn’t “come from Unix”.