It will be interesting to see how the people who maintain (in my opinion) one of the worst offending organizations out there for invading your privacy - and generally treating you in a manner that lacks human decency - respond to having their privacy invaded, and being treated without basic decency.
I realize you can argue whatever is done at work should have no expectation of privacy, and I get that, but as an employer myself I've always felt that schemes like keyboard and mouse tracking are going a chasm too far. Your employees are human beings not robots. In the older context of corporate productivity tracking there are far better metrics available - starting with, I don't know, maybe talking to your employee and asking them how things are going.
I wouldn't have a problem if it were opt-in, but if this were foisted upon me I would surely quit.
In case anyone's curious, my basis for comparison is an old Dell M6600 that's magnesium and has been awesome in terms of rigidity and durability. I still use it regularly even though it's going on 15 years old! (Mainly because I haven't found a newer laptop that's similarly maintainable that I actually like). Also wish it had an option for more RAM, even if the cost is astronomical at today's prices.
I guess they consider that a solved problem: when you can drop arbitrary connections without meaningful heating of stuff outside of the connection, just glue your SMD parts wherever you consider convenient and fuse lines to its connection pads.
But practical application would likely stick to more or less conventional boards (tiny ones for sure) and use those ink lines only for where it's needed. Unless perhaps there's an application where crossing over with simple fused layer printing allows something revolutionary from going 3D? But 2D boards are really, really cheap and multiple layers are already giving ever conceivable advantage 3D could give, outside of stuff like antenna geometries.
For one-off and prototyping, an integrated fused layer + pick&place + circuit fuser machine could be super attractive of course: basically bridging the gap between breadboard and production quality. But I really doubt that this device would be anywhere near hobby workshop tinkering range...
I appreciate all the replies but they all seem to involve making circuit connections by applying heat. If you have to reflow the whole assembly, then you've lost the big advantage they pitch from being able to drop traces on delicate materials without significantly heating them. e.g. If you want to print a circuit on a living bone, you can't reflow that whole creature who the bone belongs to, without killing it.
I'm not clear if their technique works for the junction of one metal trace onto something like a metal pin of an IC? Would heat conduct through to the rest of the pin, potentially damaging the surrounding tissue or whatever it's mounted atop? Did they study heating up highly conductive junctions and how well they can control how far the heat travels while still obtaining a good "weld"? I guess the idea might be they sort of "spot weld" the trace to the pin very quickly with high heat? I don't know, maybe instead of one "weld" they could do clusters of several very small ones at staggered time intervals to limit the maximum heat absorbed by surrounding material?
That's without even getting into adhesives, etc. to hold the components in place against those delicate materials before (and potentially after, depending on trace strength) they are soldered.
They say they built a circuit, but from what I can tell from my brief skim all they really did was lay down traces on exotic substrates, with the real circuitry connected to it but mounted somewhere else. I'm genuinely eager for someone to point out a counterexample.
once one can make traces in 3D as part of a case/shell/frame/structure things get _very_ interesting --- consider that one electronics designer actually worked up a 3D CAD system:
>My primary use case for 3D CAD is designing 3D-printed enclosures for my electronics projects.
So, imagine what folks like that will make when they are able to 3D print a full circuit board as part of a structure, with components place/oriented in it in novel ways (heat dissipation? LEDs to indicate status?)....
Status LED and button placement, those would be the the major benefits over conventional boards in non-exotic fields like putting circuits on plants. Would be fantastically valuable for the one-off tinkerer. But yeah, substituting home etching or milling and reflow would also be quite a dream come true.
Though, I generally like the idea of circuit traces embedded directly in mechanical design of a product, I suppose this would make devices completely and utterly non-repairable. Not that there's something new in this, but imagine, debugging a 3d volumetric circuit, where chips and discrete components baked solid into medium? And I also wonder, where such super high level of integration would be necessary, other than medical/wearable/implantable devices...
The smaller you can make things or more integral the more interesting you can do things - vape carts are a good example where it might actually reduce the total ewaste if the chip and the body were integral (though clearly would still create it)
I dont get this - you can just print with SMD paste and then reflow the whole thing at once - though you will need high temp materials to do that, but several amateurs have done it.
Afaik there are a lot more high temp UV resins you can print with.
I actually tried mixing in fine copper dust with fine SAC305 paste to create a non-liquid amalgam on re-flow, but the void/inclusion problem was worse than conventional SLS processes.
Also looked at RF and metal salt processes, but it had more problems/hazardous-material than traditional laser setups.
The core problem is making these machines safe and cheap to use. =3
If you can print small enough with this technology I'm pretty sure you can make transistors - sort of 1980 era transistors, not very dense, but if you are printing bulk materials you can build in 3D rather than 2D, make interesting numbers of transistors, cpus in everything!
I think it was the perfect adjective in the context of their comment.
The poster clearly meant it with a flavor of whimsy to it, not in a derogatory way. Maybe also as a tongue in cheek jab at how people they perceived as overly concerned about supervision would describe such kids.
I'll put my hand up as having been a joyfully feral kid once upon a time.
Maybe I'm being unfair here, but it sounds like your complicated system (involving bootstrap scripts, a remote conductor agent, and "hijacking" the terminal connection with special escape sequences for command communication) has a subtle bug. Can't say I'm surprised, complexity breeds this sort of thing, especially when using primitives in ways they weren't really intended to be used.
> iTerm2 accepts the SSH conductor protocol from terminal output that is not actually coming from a trusted, real conductor session. In other words, untrusted terminal output can impersonate the remote conductor.
If I understand correctly, if a textfile (or any other source of content being emitted to the screen, such as server response banners) contains the special codes iTerm2 and the remote conductor use to communicate, they'll be processed and acted upon without verifying they actually came from a trusted remove conductor. Please correct me if I'm mistaken.
I'm curious how well this thing works, but you need a yardstick to measure it against. The last year or two a burgeoning community of meatspace AI detectors has emerged right here on HN, it might be fun for someone to rank "sloppiness" of submitted HN articles as gauged by comment sentiment vs. this tool to see how well they align.
While your analogy may reflect the mental model held by most users, I'd argue it sidesteps the reality that the company providing the service can by definition listen in on every word you exchange. Even if they were trustworthy enough to abide by their promises (which life experience has taught me trends inversely proportional to the size of the organization*), data breaches have become routine across even the best resourced institutions.
Email carries a similar exposure (unless you run your own in-house server / both parties are encrypting). I once had a lawyer who couldn't handle decrypting a zip file, and I insisted on hand-delivery from the other party as an alternative. It boggles my mind to see legal firms increasingly rely on consumer-oriented cloud services while acting like they are retaining custody of the data entrusted to them. Might as well send your manilla folders to a third party warehouse where they're handled by staff you didn't vet who aren't strongly bound by attorney-client privilege.
Don't get me wrong, I like your analogy and found your viewpoint insightful. I do feel as we fork over more of our lives to a handful of digital cloud providers, society will inevitably craft stronger protections to bring the legal regime into alignment with most users' inherent expectations. I just feel there is a huge gap today between how people expect the systems they rely on are architected vs. how they really work.
I wonder how plausible it would be for a frontier provider to offer something like enclaved AI instances where the user held sole custody of the key (marketed somewhat like Kagi Privacy Pass). While I doubt it could be bulletproof from a technical perspective, it might act as a strong signal about their privacy commitment. Do you think such a configuration might have had an impact on this Justice's deliberations?
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*Life experience has taught me the bigger a corporation is the more likely this is a stretch - not because employees are willfully nefarious, but because the corporate culture doesn't prioritize it anywhere near as much as they do pace of growth and revenue, and because the consequences they face in practice from harming your privacy are bascially non-existent - like a year or two of credit monitoring could somehow mitigate the consequences of all your PII being forever leaked (my general advice to companies collecting PII is not to treat it as an asset, but rather as toxic hazardous material that you minimize, contain and shed at the earliest opportunity).
> It boggles my mind to see legal firms increasingly rely on consumer-oriented cloud services while acting like they are retaining custody of the data entrusted to them.
My theory is that lawyers tend to lean on the law to protect them more than others might. "I can ensure that it would be illegal for them to them to expose this data; therefore this method is safe" vs. "If they expose this data, is that a situation I want to deal with?".
So liquids are recycled but solids are still bagged and stowed. I hear human excrement is high in methane content... and certain contemporary rockets use methane fuel, right? Poop-powered spacecraft, for the win!
I realize you can argue whatever is done at work should have no expectation of privacy, and I get that, but as an employer myself I've always felt that schemes like keyboard and mouse tracking are going a chasm too far. Your employees are human beings not robots. In the older context of corporate productivity tracking there are far better metrics available - starting with, I don't know, maybe talking to your employee and asking them how things are going.
I wouldn't have a problem if it were opt-in, but if this were foisted upon me I would surely quit.
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