They might use some kind of mask to spray something on. I tried to replicate it by printing TPU to fabric, but TPU can be hard to work with for such fine details and consistency.
I’ve actually been working on a similar thing for the SNW uniforms by printing direct to fabric. First tried TPU, but it’s hard to get a consistent pattern of some of the fine details. Some of them come out better than others. Then tried a transparent PLA–the emblems are small enough that the flexibleness of TPU shouldn’t be necessary–but it didn’t stick very well.
So they’re either using a very carefully calibrated 3d printer (and this is the first time I’ve worked with TPU), or it’s a different technique entirely, like a mask.
Some 3D printer companies tried enshittifying, like DaVinci. Fortunately, they got out maneuvered by companies making printers that were almost cheap garbage, but just good enough, like Creality.
A lot of that has to do with open sourcing the designs, and that it doesn’t take a major research arm to design a 3d printer. Getting a 2d printer to align ink to 300dpi is pretty difficult, and even more so with color. 300dpi isn’t even that impressive. That industry is tied up in patents and trade secrets, and it’s difficult for a new competitor to emerge. Conversely, I know people who designed top notch 3d printers out of their personal workshop.
Unfortunately, hitting people in their bank account is the only remediation our system has for this sort of thing. The good news is that these people only care about money, so you can legally hit them where it hurts the most. Bad news is that the real victims only get a fraction of what they should.
They did try. It was that there might be terrorist infrastructure there. They know there’s civilians there, but there might be infrastructure. They’re still looking into it, but they dropped that bomb, anyway.
Languages don’t die. That’s a misnomer. They have long tails of diminishing use and no junior programmers entering the space. If you’re one of the experts in the language left around, you can make a shit load of money.
My wife and I hatewatch house hunting shows when we’re stuck up in a hotel sometimes.
What sometimes happen is something you can’t hatewatch. One episode of “Love it or List It” had a black family where mom had to do clear the kitchen table to do the office work she brought home, the older teenage boy had a bed too short and his legs hung over the edge, and grandma moved in and had to sleep in the same bed as the younger daughter. I can’t hatewatch that. This family is legit struggling with their current housing arrangements and needs a fix.
Then the next thing comes on, and it’s a white family where their biggest problems are that the house is too far from the golf course and the kids don’t all have their own bathrooms. Thank you, hatewatching gods, I can work with this!
I don’t doubt the language has improved. I just don’t see a point when there’s a million other options. In the 90s/early 2000s, you had Perl, Python, Java, and PHP. Ruby was playing around the fringes. There had been some attempts at server side JavaScript, but they weren’t well developed or integrated with the frontend the way it is today.
We’re now spoiled for choice, and I see no reason to give PHP any of my time over Elixir, Rust, Go, or TypeScript.
If you’re going to do that, then you also have to have a community that stresses best practices.
In 1999, Perl was leading the world with a tutorial for DBI (its primary database driver interface then and now) that uses placeholders in its very first code example. The community made that the standard, and it was the first hit on “Perl SQL tutorial” on Google for a long time. Perl applications with SQL injection attacks are out there, but have been relatively uncommon.
Notice that the API doesn’t force you to use placeholders. It’s simply strongly encouraged by the community.
Also in 1999, PHP was leading the world in not having a database driver interface through a common API, but rather a thin wrapper over whatever C libraries were used for individual databases. If that database supported placeholders at all (MySQL didn’t, and guess which database was most popular with PHP?), then it often had a different syntax* for every one. (Note that Perl’s DBI uses a translation interface that can implement “?” as a placeholder for you if the underlying DB doesn’t do anything else or uses weird syntax). You could always use a filtering function, and PHP devs would routinely try to write their own rather than use the one that came with the database API that’s already vetted. Either way, there was no widespread community pressure to use safe practices, and PHP led the world in SQL injection vulnerabilities for well over a decade.
*As a side note, I was recently accused by another dev of having a Python app riddled with SQL injection vulnerabilities. In fact, it was well protected, but it was using the psycopg interface to PostgreSQL, and it has a weird placeholder syntax that the other developer wasn’t familiar with. Thanks, psycopg!