• Lawmakers “ban 3d printers!”

    Us “we’ll just something else then”

    Lawmakers ban owning things!

  • Violence is only the last resort, but Americans should learn to make DIY weapons in case another civil war breaks out, because it is unlikely that Donald will concede power when the time comes.

  • 13 hours

    Finally i can print m’y own rpg and play half life in real life

  • 23 hours

    This is the same kind of thing the local Airsofters were building with an arduino and a few hats a decade ago. It’s not a functional “weapon” it’s just a hobby rocket with fins (that admittedly looks real fun to shoot)

    • 17 hours

      There’s an anecdote that comes up in software about people working on missile software not caring about memory leaks because it’s going to explode anyway before that becomes an issue.

      Who cares about bugs in your software if it’s a hobby project that’s going to blow up anyway.

      Also, including Claude doesn’t inherently mean vibe coded, it can be for writing tests, small components, or debugging.

        • No matter how mad this makes people, its still true.

          What makes the code actually useful in most cases however, is enough understanding of the program to modify as its needed. That’s where LLMs fall flat. Even when the code works, its terrible at adjusting the code to fit a specific use case. Dont even get met started on usable documentation or maintenance.

        • 16 hours

          Wikipedia says:

          Vibe coding involves accepting AI-generated code without reviewing it,

          If you are using LLMs to write e.g. small components, then you are typically understanding the structure of the program, and reviewing it.

          • There’s nothing inherent to small components to suggest that you have to review them. If they’re small, it’s easier to tell yourself that the LLM probably got them right and you’re justified in not checking.

            • 13 hours

              Listen to me. I do code for a living. Nobody want to write HTML

    • 24 hours

      Good then that they haven’t put explosives in it yet.

      • 1 day
        spoiler

        Because Australia is Australia I’ll preface this with: this is a joke. Any depictions of high profile/high net-worth individuals in my area are strictly fictional and any resemblances are merely coincidental.

        Anyone got some high profile/high net-worth individuals in my area?

  • Great… can’t wait for politicians to use this as a way to pass “common sense” legislation banning 3D printers.

    • 13 hours

      3D printers are even less useful here though. The rocket bit can be replaced with a cardboard tube and some balsa fins. The important parts are the active control and circuitry.

      But I guess logic doesn’t really enter into the conversation anyway.

    • 2 days

      Aren’t they already doing that due to their hysteria over “ghost” guns?

    • And just like age verification it’s useless because one can build a 3d printer out of an old VCR and a hot glue gun.

    • They can try, but the parts that make up a printer are used in tons of other applications. It isn’t hard to build one from scratch.

    • They already are over 3d guns, this will send them ballistic. They want every printer to keep a record of everything they’ve printed. Model legislation, I think CA tried and so far failed to pass it.

    • They’re already trying that in New York and California, unfortunately. “Any 3D printer capable of printing parts for firearms” was the verbage, from what I recall.

    • You don’t need to ban 3D printers. Restrictions and licensing requirements for making, using, owning rockets and guidance software are enough.

      • His guidance is just wifi cameras talking to it. Not sure it even is using gps.

        To ban stuff like this you have to ban a lot of useful tech

      • This already would fall under an FFL for legal citizens anyway. As is the nature of the internet though, this open design will be preserved and available for those who seek it.

        • Being in that category just prevents it from being sold. It’s not illegal federally to build your own weapon without a FFL.

          • Is that the same rule for destructive devices? Genuinely curious - I know privately made firearms have different rules.

            • 1 day

              No, for a destructive device you have to file a form 1.

              • Ah, thanks for the clarification. Granted I live in a state where this is unobtanium officially anyway.

        • Yes. I am actually surprised we haven’t seen a major terrorist attack in a western country using remote controlled or autonomous drones for example. The technology has been available for years now.

          3D printed home made guns like the FGC-9 and Urutau have been around for a while now, but remain marginal in gun crime.

          As you say, the cat is out the bag and on the internet forever. However homemade guns and instructions on how to make them have been around for decades.

          • The lack of simple attacks on soft targets is proof that the threat is overstated and that a statistically overwhelming portion of humans simply don’t want to put bombs on busses and rig them to explode on bridges or in tunnels.

            • 13 hours

              There is also survivorship bias. Who knows how many attacks have been prevented that we do not know about.

          • Most western terrorist attacks are by opportunistic losers who don’t have the knowledge or motivation to do something like this.

            They’d rather drive a car into people who make them angry and use a gun they already own.

            As for organized groups until recently there have been any good reason for an attack from any centrally organized group.

          • 2 days

            Ukraine and Russia are western countries. Narco cartels have started using fpv drones, too.

    • LOL. Like they “ban” some guns?.

      Printers are not hard to assemble from parts.

    • I wonder if there is some archive or torrent for STL files, like an archive of thingiverse or something. Would be nice to archive that just in case.

      • Is that even necessary? Anyone with a CAD tool can recreate the 3D printed parts from a glance and a few specs.

        It’s literally a tube. Which—to be fair—is a “weapon of mass destruction” according to President Bush (the other war criminal president).

  • If I’m understanding this correctly, this is more valuable to underfunded military forces but not for the 3d printed ghost gun types. This doesn’t include propellent or explosives, which are the controlled parts. That’s awesome though.

  • Notably absent… the explosives.

    But sure, if you are wondering how folks out in Yemen or Gaza managed to retaliate against their oppressors for so long, this is a textbook example of how and why. What’s being proposed is collection of technology we’ve had since at least the 1960s that’s slowly made its way into civilian circulation.

    Also…

    Khojayev’s just-launched prototype has no effectiveness track record

    I mean, we’re seeing what “just-launched prototypes with no effective track record” have accomplished on the Ukraine-Russia front-lines and it’s a decidedly mixed bag.

    I think a harder question to answer is “Who would be interested in putting one of these into practical use?” And that gets to the real value-add of a Stinger MANPAD. Namely, the humans willing and practiced enough to use it.

    Also - and again, this cannot be overstated - the model above has no explosives installed. Idk how confident I’d be around one of these things if it was actually armed.

    • I synthesize energetics. I can make a primary explosive that is stable enough for cap usage with a solo cup. I can synthesize secondaries like RDX above (one of the more complicated common ones) in short order with a basic chemistry set and the internet to order basic reagents. None are controlled substances.

      It is trivially easy to make effective shapes charges and energetics at home.

      Synthesis is federally legal in the US so long as you do not assemble into a device or transport. You can do both with an SOT as an FFL.

      If I wanted to, I could make a shaped charge that was point imitated and base detonated for the above projectile and it would punch through about 1.5 feet of homogeneously rolled steel.

      The limit to threat is not the access to explosives, as the chemistry and processes are published freely online as easy to replicate. The drone parts and control surface actuation is by far harder and I say this as someone who has a professional background in computer science and software engineering.

      • 18 hours

        I don’t know why I feel the need to let everyone know the US trained birds to guide bombs in WWII. It seems relevant.

      • It is trivially easy to make effective shapes charges and energetics at home.

        Safely?

        If I wanted to, I could

        You’ve got enough information to try to execute the above formula. Okay. And you’ve still got all your fingers after attempting this… more than zero times?

        The drone parts and control surface actuation is by far harder and I say this as someone who has a professional background in computer science and software engineering.

        Absolutely. We invented gunpowder centuries before we invented airplanes.

        That said… as an anecdote, I had a friend who had a janitorial position. Cleaning a particularly stubborn toilet and dumped a bunch of bleach into the bowl. His coworker came in behind him and proceeded to piss in said boil, creating a toxic miasma that forced them to exit the restroom quickly and heavily ventilate it before returning.

        “I could cook up some blasting caps with the trash from a frat party” is a theoretically believable claim.

        “Every time I clean up a frat party, I add a dozen shaped charges to my inventory” is not.

        • Safely? Yes.

          Keep the reaction stirring under ice and if you see the temp rise above 15 C you dump the whole thing in a water bucket or you get a runaway exothermic reaction that is never good with a high explosive forming crystals in the solution.

          If you are stupid, don’t ventilate, or are stupid stupid it will light your shed on fire and potentially kill you.

          That’s why you work at lab scale, and why you always keep your reactions under the temp limits with acids added slowly.

          Basic chemistry safety covers all the bases here.

          My preferred blasting caps are nickel guanidine based. I can play with the crystal morphology to produce small more friction inert powder and it is an extremely simple synthesis.

          You can use reloading press combined with highly suggested lexan sheet as a blast shield and wooden block to gently press the powder into caps. China sells packs of 1000 electrical ignition assemblies for $40 that you can then set off with a COTS or a clacker.

          I cannot emphasize enough that working at small scale and knowing what you are doing are important, but in faster time than it takes to print the parts for that drone you can absolutely complete the reaction, do some recrystalizstion, dry your product,and be ready to mix with plasticizer.

        • I had a friend who had a janitorial position. Cleaning a particularly stubborn toilet and dumped a bunch of bleach into the bowl. His coworker came in behind him and proceeded to piss in said boil, creating a toxic miasma that forced them to exit the restroom quickly and heavily ventilate it before returning.

          Lol, I’ve done that before in my apartment. Guessing it’s the same thing as an ammonia-bleach reaction.

        • Oh the ones from BPS space are even more impressive with adjust on the fly tracking to 3D points and launched from a VLS he made himself.

    • It’s not a MANPAD really.

      The sensor package has no IR sensor (or radar unit) and no way to proximity fuse.

      It has GPS, accelerometer and barometric pressure. It’s more like a rocket powered artillery shell than an anti-air weapon.

      Or, given the lack of payload, it’s more like a high speed burrito delivery device.

    • Notably absent… the explosives.

      https://xkcd.com/651/

      Not my area of expertise, so please tell me if the idea is complete garbage. With that being said: Theoretically, could the LiPo Battery that’s already in there anyway be turned into an explosive payload by intentionally overheating and puncturing it on impact?

      • Not my area of expertise, so please tell me if the idea is complete garbage.

        Turning a laptop battery into a weapon is a non-trivial endeavor. The absurdity of TSA was more their attempt to police based on weak science than the real danger of an airplane full of lithium battery powered devices.

    • You don’t need explosives. It has a spot in the front for a camera. One of the new microcontrollers with AI accelerators can do face recognition extremely quickly. It would be possible to use it as an assassination tool.

      Even if you changed nothing about the design, the speed and mass of the thing hitting a person in the face could kill.

      • As the bps space YouTube channel has shown, reliability is paramount in any launch, especially a guided launch.

        That and people duck when shit flies at them, unless it’s supersonic, which again, as bps space has shown, control of a supersonic flight is extremely difficult to get right.

        This is a guy who landed a hobby rocket like a tesla booster.

        But at $100 a pop, you could have backups. (or payloads)

      • It would be possible to use it as an assassination tool.

        Khojayev’s just-launched prototype has no effectiveness track record

        :-/

        I think

        it’s more like a high speed burrito delivery device.

        Is a more accurate assessment.

    • 2 days

      Plastic explosive triggered by electrodetonator is quite safe.

    • You can deploy a lot of $96 semi-effective hardware and improve it vs something that might be thousands or even tens or hundreds of thousands to deploy.

      • You can deploy a lot of $96 semi-effective hardware

        Khojayev’s just-launched prototype has no effectiveness track record

        :-/

        I mean, time will tell. To date, this particular iteration of technology has a 0% success rate in doing anything but farming clicks.

        • We got another scary 3d printer headline for dumbass politicians to use as justification for regulating them!

          • There isn’t much there that can’t be done with PVC and bent aluminum sheeting.

            Hamas famously uses water pipes for their rockets (no idea about the propellant, payload or control systems though)

            • Don’t expect a bunch of moron politicians to understand that though. They’ll see this and think it’s a golden opportunity to “PRoTEcT tHE chILdREn!”

              • Unless they’re going to ban heating elements and stepper motors I’m not too worried.

                It probably wouldn’t be too good for Bambu Lab so I wish them luck in their lobbying effort. They could buy a veto from Trump for a few hundred thousand USD in the worst case.

                • 19 hours

                  I mean, yeah, that’s why regulating it is stupid. But it will still cause problems for a lot of people if they start fucking with them. Not everyone has the time/talent to build their own 3d printer. It took me months to get mine working back when I did it and it was a kit. Trump can’t veto state laws.

      • The United States has a variant of the AGM-114 Hellfire missile that replaces the explosive warhead with six scimitar blades. Because fuck That Guy, the whole That Guy and nothing but the That Guy.

        • Which would come as a surprise to hundreds of dead Iranian schoolgirls.

          Turns out the military under Trump is more a “fuck that town in particular” affair.

          • You know, I’m still struggling to believe the story I’ve been told about that. “The US bombed an elementary school.”

            For my entire life, the US has demonstrated precision munitions. The AGM-114 Ginsu is an air-to-ground laser-guided rocket that can kill an individual passenger in a car. We can fly a Tomahawk cruise missile into a specific window of a building. I’ve seen a bridge in Iraq bombed seconds after the last car crossed. Not saying GI Joe is a paragon of virtue, I’ve seen the pictures from Abu Ghraib, but…That shit sounds a lot more like Israel than us.

            Even in the “no kill like overkill” “We don’t target coordinates, we target grid squares” “enemy fire is coming from that way, destroy that way” United States, that shit sounds a lot more like Israel than us.

            We’re certainly attacking Iran because Israel wanted us to.

            • One of the stills from one of the videos that the BBC showed identifying it as a Tomahawk showed it at a very un-cruise-missile way up, so it could just have malfunctioned during terminal guidance or been clipped but not destroyed by air defence, and then hit the wrong target. It could also just have been a governmenty-looking building close enough to an intended target that whoever was checking it didn’t notice it wasn’t the target. It’s a lot easier to get everything right when the whole mission is to hit one person with one missile when everyone’s got enough time to do their job perfectly and everything’s been rehearsed than when there are thousands of targets and people are doing things in a rush, especially if orders are coming from people who don’t care about international law.

            • Lol. And that one village in Afghanistan you leveled, looks like who did it?

    • I have this idea: Scientists some time ago, discovered they could knot light into loops.

      Would it be possible to make a curved laser for laser artillery?

      • Certainly possible. But you’re still stuck on the r2 problem of diminishing returns at a distance. Light doesn’t like staying in a tight beam. The vortex loop is typically not much bigger than the wavelength. I don’t see much of a solution for transmitting energy long distances through air.

    • Atomize* some propelant, boom, explosive.

      * english choose the dumbest word for “zerstäuben”.

      • Atomize* some propelant, boom, explosive.

        The trick is to get the atomized propelant to “boom, explosive” at the target and not in your backpack.

        Also, you probably want a “boom” sufficient to accomplish whatever demolition you’re planning, which - again - raises the stakes regarding what’s in your backpack.

        There’s a classic little film called “The Wages of Fear” that explores the hazards of amateurs transporting high explosives over long distances.

          • Tannerite comes to mind. It explodes from a high impact, and little else. I’m not sure what sort of yield you’d get. That stuff mostly just makes a pop and smoke.

            I have heard of people using it on stubborn tree stumps, but that’s several pounds of the stuff.

        • I mean, spray the leftover fuel into the oxygen-filled head only on target? It wouldn’t stay atomized for long anyway. And for the boom, the shell needs only be strong enough. Wouldn’t that work?

          Sure, there’s more effective explosives.

          • Wouldn’t that work?

            Idk, you wanna find out?

            Listen, if you’ve got the specs for military ordinance and want to say “We’ve done this a thousand times, it works fine” that’s one thing.

            But it’s very much another to just wave your hands and announce “you know, the boom-boom juice goes here and the detonator goes there and it’ll probably do something.”

      • Atomize, from the original Ancient Greek adjective atomos, meaning “uncuttable” or “indivisible”.

        Seems pretty apt to me. You have rendered it into its smallest constituent pieces through physical means, any further reduction requires chemical processes, or high energy physics. Coincidentally, a simple spark provides both.

      • 1 day

        Does that literally mean “make dust”? I think “powderize” might be a better translation in this context, if it’s a solid, or “aerosolize” if it’s a liquid. I’ve never been a big fan of the word “atomize” in any case.

        • I’ve never been a big fan of the word “atomize” in any case.

          Mate, I’ll have you know some of my relatives are made of atoms

  • Satomune@lemmy.worldBanned from communityEnglish
    13 hours

    Hi, I’m an AI engineer based in Japan, and I’m expanding into the U.S. market to work with more long-term clients. I’m looking for an American collaborator who can act as a communication bridge between me and U.S. clients.

    I will handle the technical side myself, including project planning, AI development, and software implementation. Your role would be to join meetings, help with smooth communication, and support the client relationship side.

    If this sounds like a good fit, please send me a message.