I was actually in college in the 1990s, but yes, a middle schooler today with python on a raspberry pi and a pretty simple GPS module could do this.

I didn't say it wasn't abhorrent or alarming. I'm presenting the scenario that this task of "defend this three dimensional coordinate box" doesn't require AI.

Yes, it did. The beacon signals weren't that good back then, neither were the sensors. I had the same problem in the fake robot battles I was involved in.

The answer turned out to be a solution not from Defense industries, but from Genie Garage Door Openers.

The robot doesn't care. The robot's job isn't foreign policy. The robot's job is "here's a box defined by this coordinate cloud, defend it"

Like I said, I programmed it for a fighting robot back in the 1990s. It ain't that complex, and with today's drone factory ships, the Navy can now output this level of AI in killbots at a rate of 10,000 a day.

Kill decisions are simple in comparison: Stay within your predefined geofence, kill anything that moves that isn't transmitting Friend beacon. We don't need AI for that, I coded a form of it in both Basic and Forth back in the 1990s.

And if they don't, some other startup will.

NRA is not the only US 2A rights organization, it's not even the most effective. GOA for example defending Pretti's "right to bear arms while protesting", as did the SAF and many others

Odd, that's not what the NRA stated, nor what any media org reported them as saying. So where do you get that so-called "quote"?

Trump was the one who said "it was a bad idea to bring a gun", and here is the NRA's actual response to trump's suggestion: “The NRA unequivocally believes that all law-abiding citizens have a right to keep and bear arms anywhere they have a legal right to be,”.

You are correct -- under federal law, it is legal to make your own firearm for personal use (PMF), though manufacturing firearms with the intent to resell for profit requires a federal license (FFL). A few states are trying to pass their own local restrictions on firearms manufacture. Some of these proposed bills, such as in the states of Colorado and Washington, also include CNC machine tool fabrication in their bans.

This specific bill proposed in California is focused solely on 3D printing

The problem here is that developers can take responsibility for the action while AI can not. Humans do make mistakes and that's ok; best practice is not to just can employees for messing up. Once is a mistake. Twice is an HR event. When someone does something dumb we forgive but we also insist that meaningful steps are taken to prevent that problem in the future. AI can't really take those steps because AI can't be accountable for "don't do it again." Taking down production because you dropped a table once is forgivable. Taking it down twice for the same reason is a different matter.

The developer can be accountable. And if HR fails to hold them to account for it, HR is accountable. And if HR isn't held accountable, leadership is. And if leadership isn't held accountable, the board is. And if the board isn't held accountable, the stockholders have some hard decisions to make. And if they choose not to make them than it wasn't really that big a deal, was it?

But with an AI the option is "we stop using AI" or "we live with the result."

Most commercial printers, copiers, and print engines, but not "all"

So it was solved not by a law, and not by software that looks for anything resembling currency, but rather by placing a simple, easily software-detectable, pattern into all currency, and ensuring that anti-counterfeiting tools treat any currency lacking this pattern as fake money.

Okay, so now we just need to mandate the (mostly anonymous, decentralized) designers of printable gun CAD files to embed these special patterns into their open-source STEP and other CAD files, and then convince the open source printer and slicer software developers to include the detection code ...

The currency detection pattern (The "EURion Constellation") was added to the design of banknotes and certain other documents to enable detection. Good luck getting the printable gun STEP/STL/GCODE people to embed a special small easily-detected feature into their files!

Also worth noting that currency detection isn't a law, and isn't in every printer. The few companies making high-quality color printer/copier internals caved to political pressure and "voluntarily" added detection for a very simple pattern to their firmware. Adobe also embedded this in their (closed source) photoshop software.

Reliable detection of anything that might possibly be a gun or a part of a gun, in any possible 3d rotation, is not a trivial problem, an effective solution would pretty much first depend on developing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

Everyone is so excited about not having to pay software engineers to write code that they've forgotten what engineers actually do. It's less common in the software world but go find a civil engineer or an electrical engineer or an aerospace engineer and follow them around for a week.

At some point, there's going to be a document in front of them laying out how something is going to be built and they're going to be asked to approve it. And when they do that they're taking responsibility for the design. If it falls down, if it catches on fire, or if it crashes into the mountains and kills people, they're the name on the form saying that won't happen. They're responsible.

Claude 4.5 Opus is very impressive, but if it writes a software application that kills people it can't take responsibility. It can't be punished. It can't even really be sued.

I just don't see how we, as a society, can trust fundamentally unaccountable entities to build systems that can do real harm if they go wrong. I suppose the alternative is that Anthropic accepts full legal liability for everything its models do. Their unwillingness to make that move tells you all you probably need to know about their own internal confidence in those models.

Or time literacy. Permanent!=3 years

Don't be so sure that Republicans aren't Communists and Democrats aren't Fascists.