this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2026
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Unfortunately that's the crux of the issue. The people who have written and signed this bill aren't either - and they weren't as big of a person as you to recognize that.
At the end of the day, 3D printing gcode is telling your printer to spit out a shape. And you simply cannot ban shapes. Am I printing a firing pin or a part for my shoe rack? There's no way to tell. Any politician that's telling you there is is either ignorant or lying to you.
Worse still, gcode is literally just telling a machine which motors to move and how much. You need something that can interpret those instructions (thousands of lines of code even for pretty simple prints) correctly and "draw" the shapes it is making. There are a lot of printers out there that do not have the hardware on board to do this.
And that is all ignoring the absurdity of recognizing shapes as "gun parts"... The hardware hurdles pale in comparison to the software ones.
You're gonna hate this, but... AI can literally do it, and for the large models it's terrifying how accurate they are. You will argue that your little ESP32 powered reprap or klipper or whatever printer can't handle it, to which regulators will go ok then, either the printer has to call out to a service with an http request to upload the gcode every time it wants to print anything, or your slicer has to do it (and we dont care that it's open source, it's illegal to operate if it doesnt make the call and you're getting fines or jail time if you get caught).
This is what AI was built for ๐
EDIT:
In case it isn't abundantly clear, I am not in favor of what I just described. I know that it is possible though and know how to architect exactly these mechanisms. If I can build them, so can they. (I won't, of course, that goes against everything I stand for).
Even AI can't do this. It is an impossibility. AI might be able to make the shape, but it will NEVER be able to interpret the intent of that shape. It will never know if a cylinder is meant for a gun or for a rolling pin. It will never know if I'm making a trigger for a gun or a replacement trigger for my hot glue gun.
If an AI can tell what's in a picture (which is a series of pixel data), it can certainly reconstruct gcode into an "image." Ive used it at work for similar tasks.
Cylinders obviously are too generic, but there are parts that are a lot more specific and could be fingerprinted.
But it CAN force your printer not to print that replacement hot glue gun trigger. After all, there's nothing in the law that says that this software has to allow non-gun related 3D printing. The only simplest way to be in compliance with this law is to simply prevent all print jobs
Yeah exactly. They're effectively banning 3d printing.
You understand that this makes it impossible to implement right? It's to vauge and will damage profitability of large companies, meaning courts will gut or kill this shit.
AI cannot be made to recognize whether a piece of gcode is intended to produce a piece of plastic that is intended to be used as part of a gun. It would need to simulate the machine that that gcode is made to run on, and then simulate the gcode running on that machine, and then analyze the simulated output of that simulated 3D print.
At best, it can arbitrarily decide to decline print jobs. Which is of course the whole point, because anyone with a printer would need to bypass this filter, and bypassing this filter would be against the law.
They have banned numbers, I mean hell go around shouting 13-12 and see how long it takes for you to get a fine/get arrested. I wouldn't say that banning shapes is far off