5 ms·

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

by gdiamos 4mo ago

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.

gorgoiler 4mo ago
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”.
- SoftTalker 4mo ago
  Why do you suppose all those rules and policies came to be?
  - Ancapistani 4mo ago
    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 4mo ago
    Fear of everything
  - gorgoiler 4mo ago
    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, I say!
    - greenavocado 4mo ago
      This guy works in compliance!
  - johnisgood 4mo ago
    Oh brings me to the good pre-CoC era when we did not need to have explicit rules and a simple rule "don't be an asshole" worked just fine. :D You might say that it is too broad, but now with the CoC you have many more broad rules. :P
    - kstrauser 4mo ago
      > a simple rule "don't be an asshole" worked just fine. Not a huge fan of overly broad CoCs, but they arose because, in fact, that simple rule did not work fine. It repeatedly did not work fine, in many groups engaged in many different endeavors. It worked not fine so badly and so frequently that people got tired of it and started writing out the explicit rules. There's a lot of parallels between CoCs and sexual harassment rules. At first, it was a shitty free-for-all that was fun if you were part of the getting-away-with-it group but terrible for others. Then people said alright, had enough, we're going to make hard and fast rules against all this bullshit. Those first versions tended to be awful and heavy handed because they tried really hard to be comprehensive and serious about it, which is very well intended, but probably too far in the other direction. What we ended up with is probably vastly better, on average, for all involved. It's not as fun for people who enjoy treating others badly, but a whole lot nicer for everyone else.
      - deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]
      - johnisgood 4mo ago
        [dead]
  - flipped 4mo ago
    Because that doesn't improve actual security. It's for dumb nuggets who can't do real defensive work. Maybe you would also qualify for that numb job.
qwerpy 4mo ago
> 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 4mo ago
  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.
  - crtified 4mo ago
    >It was a good discussion topic about why adults get so bothered by things that look like guns. I think that's because parent-child is the strongest bond known to humanity, so anything symbolic of (or against) child safety evokes the strongest emotional responses we can ever have. Guns, when loaded, are one of the extremely few consumer objects capable of being held in a child's hand and, with a physical ease similar to changing TV channel with a remote, destroy or end a life. (and, of course, one of the first rules of guns is "always assume it's loaded") And so - especially in a country like the USA where guns are a prominent part of culture, and thus talked and thought about a lot - the conflation of the above means that for a significant cohort of parents, guns are one iconic symbol of their ultimate nightmare : losing their child somehow. The fact that the USA needs separate Wikipedia pages per decade in order to make the summary list of school shootings manageable is illustrative of why some have developed such phobias. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_school_shootings_in_t...
    - 4mo ago
paradoxyl 4mo ago
If you have the resources, you could also serve her with papers. IANAL, but that arguably is libel, defamation, harassment and so incredibly insane that it deserves a severe legal smackdown.
- derwiki 4mo ago
  Not sure I’d want to rope my kindergartener into something like that? I like GP’s approach
- greenavocado 4mo ago
  Judge will throw it out unless you're well connected. They'll say the case has "no standing" unless you shell out massive amounts of money.
- 15155 4mo ago
  What are your damages? What kind of remedy do you seek?
- pbhjpbhj 4mo ago
  So their child was accused of 3D printing a gun and taking it in to school, the parent confirmed online that, yes, their child did 3D print a gun and take it to school ... I'm not sure what you're hoping to achieve. It's not libel, it's a misunderstanding.
  - amanaplanacanal 4mo ago
    It was a gun in the same way the word GUN on a page is a gun: only symbolically.
  - goatlover 4mo ago
    Is it a gun in a meaningful sense if it can't fire a projectile? How could anyone be concerned about that? What if the kid brought toy soldiers to school? Would that be bringing guns to school?
- mort96 4mo ago
  US lawsuit culture is absolutely insane.
creato 4mo ago
I can see how something like this happens. We're talking about a 5 year old kid seeing something at school, and describing it to their parents. Who knows what the kid said? Then you have situations like the young kid that did bring a gun to school and shoot a teacher, and there were tips not followed up on, and the school getting absolutely dragged through the court of public opinion because of it. So, the adults in this situation are in a difficult position. They've got 5 year olds telling them things that are very unreliable but very concerning, and they do need to actually consider that 5 year olds might have guns. What happened to you is probably the best case scenario: kid told their parent something incorrect, that parent calls the school, the school checks in with you, you tell them they're wrong, the end. If the principal actually thought there was a problem, I doubt she would have simply called you.
- cucumber3732842 4mo ago
  >So, the adults in this situation are in a difficult position. They've got 5 year olds telling them things that are very unreliable but very concerning, and they do need to actually consider that 5 year olds might have guns. No, they don't. Because 99.999999% of the time they won't have guns and the other 00.000001% of the time well it's your ass anyway.
- warumdarum 4mo ago
  Panopticon in every class room ?
- mike_hock 4mo ago
  There's the case of a kid printing a non-functional toy weapon. And then there's the case of years of consistent violent behavior, and even when the principal was advised on the day of the shooting that the kid was in possession of a firearm, she did nothing. Hard to tell them apart.
- mptest 3mo ago
  > they do need to actually consider that 5 year olds might have guns. hilarious accidental commentary on the US > no way to prevent this - only nation where this regularly happens [0]
rdtsc 4mo ago
That boy knows what he is doing. Kids figure this stuff out they are no dummies. You don’t like so and so? Tell teachers they printed a “gun”. Or mentioned “gun” or said a politically incorrect word. It’s a form of bullying using a system’s irrationality against others. Kind of like swatting
- flipped 4mo ago
  [flagged]
- peddling-brink 4mo ago
  Not at 5. 10, maybe. Those are not the thoughts of a 5 year old.
  - rationalist 4mo ago
    Unless someone taught that concept to the 5 year old.
  - paytonjjones 4mo ago
    It's not that they are planning the sequence and understanding all the cogs in the machine. It's that they've seen the same situation play out 10 times already with other kids. All they need to do is copy it exactly.
iancmceachern 4mo ago
>I bought my son a bigger 3D printer and told him to stop playing with that boy. This is the way

by gdiamos 4mo ago

gorgoiler 4mo ago

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”.

SoftTalker 4mo ago
Why do you suppose all those rules and policies came to be?
- Ancapistani 4mo ago
  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 4mo ago
  Fear of everything
- gorgoiler 4mo ago
  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, I say!
  - greenavocado 4mo ago
    This guy works in compliance!
- johnisgood 4mo ago
  Oh brings me to the good pre-CoC era when we did not need to have explicit rules and a simple rule "don't be an asshole" worked just fine. :D You might say that it is too broad, but now with the CoC you have many more broad rules. :P
  - kstrauser 4mo ago
    > a simple rule "don't be an asshole" worked just fine. Not a huge fan of overly broad CoCs, but they arose because, in fact, that simple rule did not work fine. It repeatedly did not work fine, in many groups engaged in many different endeavors. It worked not fine so badly and so frequently that people got tired of it and started writing out the explicit rules. There's a lot of parallels between CoCs and sexual harassment rules. At first, it was a shitty free-for-all that was fun if you were part of the getting-away-with-it group but terrible for others. Then people said alright, had enough, we're going to make hard and fast rules against all this bullshit. Those first versions tended to be awful and heavy handed because they tried really hard to be comprehensive and serious about it, which is very well intended, but probably too far in the other direction. What we ended up with is probably vastly better, on average, for all involved. It's not as fun for people who enjoy treating others badly, but a whole lot nicer for everyone else.
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    - johnisgood 4mo ago
      [dead]
- flipped 4mo ago
  Because that doesn't improve actual security. It's for dumb nuggets who can't do real defensive work. Maybe you would also qualify for that numb job.

qwerpy 4mo ago

> 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 4mo ago
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.
- crtified 4mo ago
  >It was a good discussion topic about why adults get so bothered by things that look like guns. I think that's because parent-child is the strongest bond known to humanity, so anything symbolic of (or against) child safety evokes the strongest emotional responses we can ever have. Guns, when loaded, are one of the extremely few consumer objects capable of being held in a child's hand and, with a physical ease similar to changing TV channel with a remote, destroy or end a life. (and, of course, one of the first rules of guns is "always assume it's loaded") And so - especially in a country like the USA where guns are a prominent part of culture, and thus talked and thought about a lot - the conflation of the above means that for a significant cohort of parents, guns are one iconic symbol of their ultimate nightmare : losing their child somehow. The fact that the USA needs separate Wikipedia pages per decade in order to make the summary list of school shootings manageable is illustrative of why some have developed such phobias. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_school_shootings_in_t...
  - 4mo ago

paradoxyl 4mo ago

If you have the resources, you could also serve her with papers. IANAL, but that arguably is libel, defamation, harassment and so incredibly insane that it deserves a severe legal smackdown.

derwiki 4mo ago
Not sure I’d want to rope my kindergartener into something like that? I like GP’s approach
greenavocado 4mo ago
Judge will throw it out unless you're well connected. They'll say the case has "no standing" unless you shell out massive amounts of money.
15155 4mo ago
What are your damages? What kind of remedy do you seek?
pbhjpbhj 4mo ago
So their child was accused of 3D printing a gun and taking it in to school, the parent confirmed online that, yes, their child did 3D print a gun and take it to school ... I'm not sure what you're hoping to achieve. It's not libel, it's a misunderstanding.
- amanaplanacanal 4mo ago
  It was a gun in the same way the word GUN on a page is a gun: only symbolically.
- goatlover 4mo ago
  Is it a gun in a meaningful sense if it can't fire a projectile? How could anyone be concerned about that? What if the kid brought toy soldiers to school? Would that be bringing guns to school?
mort96 4mo ago
US lawsuit culture is absolutely insane.

creato 4mo ago

I can see how something like this happens. We're talking about a 5 year old kid seeing something at school, and describing it to their parents. Who knows what the kid said? Then you have situations like the young kid that did bring a gun to school and shoot a teacher, and there were tips not followed up on, and the school getting absolutely dragged through the court of public opinion because of it. So, the adults in this situation are in a difficult position. They've got 5 year olds telling them things that are very unreliable but very concerning, and they do need to actually consider that 5 year olds might have guns. What happened to you is probably the best case scenario: kid told their parent something incorrect, that parent calls the school, the school checks in with you, you tell them they're wrong, the end. If the principal actually thought there was a problem, I doubt she would have simply called you.

cucumber3732842 4mo ago
>So, the adults in this situation are in a difficult position. They've got 5 year olds telling them things that are very unreliable but very concerning, and they do need to actually consider that 5 year olds might have guns. No, they don't. Because 99.999999% of the time they won't have guns and the other 00.000001% of the time well it's your ass anyway.
warumdarum 4mo ago
Panopticon in every class room ?
mike_hock 4mo ago
There's the case of a kid printing a non-functional toy weapon. And then there's the case of years of consistent violent behavior, and even when the principal was advised on the day of the shooting that the kid was in possession of a firearm, she did nothing. Hard to tell them apart.
mptest 3mo ago
> they do need to actually consider that 5 year olds might have guns. hilarious accidental commentary on the US > no way to prevent this - only nation where this regularly happens [0]

rdtsc 4mo ago

That boy knows what he is doing. Kids figure this stuff out they are no dummies. You don’t like so and so? Tell teachers they printed a “gun”. Or mentioned “gun” or said a politically incorrect word. It’s a form of bullying using a system’s irrationality against others. Kind of like swatting

flipped 4mo ago
[flagged]
peddling-brink 4mo ago
Not at 5. 10, maybe. Those are not the thoughts of a 5 year old.
- rationalist 4mo ago
  Unless someone taught that concept to the 5 year old.
- paytonjjones 4mo ago
  It's not that they are planning the sequence and understanding all the cogs in the machine. It's that they've seen the same situation play out 10 times already with other kids. All they need to do is copy it exactly.

iancmceachern 4mo ago

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