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Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 28, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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GCODE specifically describes the (sequential commands controlling) motions of the machine, and a natural language description of even a trivial print would be huge, but from a technical perspective it would work. STLs (or SLDPRTs/IPTs/whatever) would be more practical.

I'd... be very skeptical that a patent like that would be accepted, but not a patent expert, so who knows.

That said, it still runs into the EAR problem. The translation convertor should give a level of protection from being 'readily' convertible, but it's not like STLs themselves were genuinely ready-to-print functional code, and BIS thought they were close enough for government work. And if BIS didn't think the natural language description counted, you could just publish it directly.