I'm sure the idea here was a physical quine, although since it only contains 2.5% of its own G-code it's not really a quine, any more than a "Hello World" program is a quine since the string "Hello World" is in the program text. It would be trivial to generate something like this depending on which part of the G-code you pick.

• LeifCarrotson

  today at 4:54 PM

  Many G-code dialects contain subprogram calls, loops, and conditionals that seem like they'd permit a physical quine. The standard RepRap firmware breaks the rules by taking input:

  https://reprap.org/wiki/G-code#M98:_Call_Macro.2FSubprogram

  but Fanuc and other dialects allow M97 to call a subroutine chained to the end of a program.

  • Fwirt

    today at 5:48 PM

    G-code is like assembly language for CNC. It’s human readable, you can write it by hand if necessary, most machines will compile it internally to machine instructions, and there are a million different flavors with incompatible macros, etc. The flavor I’m most familiar with is Klipper’s interpreter, which will let you write macros, but that would technically be cheating since you could just stuff an entire program into a macro.

Is anyone else confused by thier cookie consent banner? The switches start out gray and become black when toggled. which position means consent? It feels intentionally misleading.

• albert_e

  today at 3:49 PM

  This is how you get statutory warning labels and nutrtion information labels on packages.

  Because these folks always want to do the least legal thing allowed by law.

• Terr_

  today at 5:31 PM

  > The switches start out gray and become black when toggled.

  Rant: That type of slider-switch is an inferior usurper of the classic tickbox, that rode in on a wave of touch-screen-ification. Oh, it can be done well, sometimes, but it's just far-too-easy to do it badly.

  In this case (useless colors, no other labels, etc.) I think the remaining rule/clue is "Move the dot-nub towards whatever you want." So moving right is indicating you like the "We track you" text, while moving left indicates some kind of disagreement.

  _____________________

  > It feels intentionally misleading.

  The "Accept All" button is worse:

  1. It abuses UI conventions of position and color which ought to belong to a "Proceed with the configuration shown" button.

  2. It uses ambiguous language to trick you as well. It could mean "Accept all of the choices I've made on the screen", but it actually means "Reset every choice choice to an 'accepted' state."

  3. When it does reset your choices, it does so in a secretive way by also dismissing the dialog. The user never has any opportunity to see that it just erased the work they did.

  One might be a mistake, but all three sins simultaneously is a dark-pattern.

Cool idea for printing braille. I bet I could vibe code a program to convert .epub files to braille then to printable copies.

• yjftsjthsd-h

  today at 5:49 PM

  I've also been idly contemplating 3D printing braille. Somewhat annoying that that's the cheap+easy option, but if it works...

• ramity

  today at 5:49 PM

  :)

> Manual contains only 2.5 percent of its own G-code in its first version. That low figure is part of the point. Current FFF 3D printing resolution and text scale place limits on how much code can fit onto the object while also describing the volume of the object itself. A fully self-contained version would enter an endless loop, since every printed mark would add more data to be described.

The fact that quines exist means that it must be possible to print a fully self-describing book of this sort, though it's possible that you'd require a more expressive language.

• trumpdong

  today at 3:52 PM

  There's probably a way to make an xz file that decompresses to g-code for itself. But plain g-code is not powerful enough because it's just a list of movements due the tool head to perform - no computation.

  • serf

    today at 4:19 PM

    `M98` allows for essentially function calls (nested or not.)

    If you had a part of a machine that could save state (say.. turning on a coolant pump..) I wonder how much more of a turing machine you could wrastle into it.

    (or you could just cheat and use one of the hundreds of gcode variants that have computational stuff stapled into them like the Fanuc equivalents, but that's sorta dishonest for the exercise)

    • WillAdams

      today at 4:47 PM

      _If_ one is using a firmware which supports that.

      Grbl, which many of the 3D printer firmwares are based on, does not (and no variables, or loops, or branching).

      • myself248

        today at 4:54 PM

        And weirdly, neither does Klipper, despite having all the resources in the world to do so. Just not a priority since slicers don't produce code like that, and 99.999% of Klipper's job is to eat whatever a slicer sends it.

        So suppose I attached an extruder to a Haas mill or something...

• philipallstar

  today at 3:43 PM

  It's fascinating how revered people are who talk in metaphor and implication like this about relatively simple things, when far more complicated things are happening all the time inside their devices.

• izonu

  today at 3:56 PM

  G-code by itself only describes the series of motor movements over time, though I think it would be practically feasible to have a book contain an executable script, which would generate the same g-code as the one used to print the book. It would be really interesting to see how large the resulting book is.

• isoprophlex

  today at 4:26 PM

  "This prompt, when fed to a sufficiently capable LLM, will generate the G-code to produce a 3D printed model of a book containing this quote, verbatim, in raised letters."

• NegativeLatency

  today at 3:32 PM

  Compression could be interesting

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