My kindergartner has a 3D printer.

I got a call from the school principal. She said “another parent called and said your son 3D printed a gun and brought it to school”.

I looked at the print history. It was a tiny toy mandalorian figurine holding a blaster pistol in his hand.

I bought my son a bigger 3D printer and told him to stop playing with that boy.

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qwerpy 37 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> I bought my son a bigger 3D printer and told him to stop playing with that boy.

I can't think of a better response to that situation. I'm going to use it when appropriate for my own kids when the time comes.

Also - your kindergartner is autonomously searching for 3d printer models and executing prints at that age? That's awesome. Curious what 3d printer and what mechanism he uses to search and initiate prints.

	▲	gdiamos 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		He started with tinkercad and thingiverse. I tried basic elegoo and bambu printers. He can’t read very well but he likes dragging shapes around on a tablet. He would ask me to find shapes using the search engines then he mixes them together or reshapes them. I would add them to his history. This is why I was surprised to hear about 3D printed guns. I was quite sure there wasn’t anything like that in the history. It was a good discussion topic about why adults get so bothered by things that look like guns.

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gorgoiler an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Good for you. Over-enforcement absolutely needs to be penalized. One of my biggest weaknesses is refusing to let people get away with the kind of lazy thinking you encountered.

Hands up if you’ve ever been told you can’t do something because of potential SOC2 audit non-compliance. Or it’s against GDPR. Or legal won’t allow it. Or it’s against IT security policy. Or just against “policy”.

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SoftTalker 44 minutes ago | parent [-]

Why do you suppose all those rules and policies came to be?

	▲	gorgoiler 31 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The rules are well intentioned. The policies stem from not standing up to bullies. In my experience: 1/ Some top-level authority writes down a rule saying “as of 2021, it is forbidden to have red pencils”. 2/ The authority might prosecute one or two cases, but most enforcement is largely farmed out to certification bodies: the lawyers, auditors, inspectors of this world. 3/ No auditor or auditee ever wants to be the first to fall foul of PNCL21 regulations. The expense one would incur of being a test case incentivizes every regulation to be widened in scope, unreasonably, to try minimize risk. 4/ Moreover, there is a purity spiral incentive as an auditor to maintain the illusion you know what you are doing and therefore justify your $500-a-day fee. No widening-of-scope is too much! No one ever got fired for buying IBM, and no one ever got fired for banning pink crayons “just to be safe”, even though no normal person would call them either red or a pencil. Cylindrical graphite rods stored in the same building as red paint? Audit failure risk. Orange pens on your desk? Audit failure risk. Office within 1000 yards of a stationery shop? Audit failure risk. You are single, own a traditional twig-broom, and you like black cats? Audit failure risk!
	▲	Ancapistani 35 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Because of a problem that all those rules and policies don’t solve, while introducing new ones and creating an entire bureaucracy dependent upon keeping them in place regardless of their efficacy?
	▲	xeromal 34 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Fear of everything