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This reminds me of Ken Thompson’s speech on trusting trust. The recursive/meta nature of it all has helped me explain to those unfamiliar that this is such a waste of time. Education is where it’s at, but I’m preaching to the choir here on HN.

Did you mean this one (PDF)? https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...

Not OP but yeah that's the one!

when offspring are forbidden, only outlaws will have in-laws

only when they start printing ICs

Well, you can print out of conductive materials.

Trying to restrict the non-printed ICs you'd connect to your 3D printed parts would be even dumber. There's a zillion things that can slam out bits and control a stepper motor.

you can build a 3d printer out of general-purpose electronic bits, anything they tried to ban would send ripples into countless other industries that are completely unrelated to each other or 3d printing.

By "general-purpose" I mean that there's no components that are 3d-printer specific; motor controllers and microcontrollers and voltage regulators and all the various jellybean parts. And even if there were any, they could easily be replaced with general-purpose components.

Like the printers that won't do prints of money that's money-size