Onihikage

3D-printed shoes could be a great idea given how different everyone’s feet can be. It could save on transportation and logistical costs, and everyone could have shoes perfect for their feet, created much more locally than Vietnam.

However, the cynic in me says that’s not what Nike is doing, or why - they’re doing this because it lets them cut workers. Traditional shoe manufacturing involves human hands at many process steps, often with machine assistance or other tools. This lets them cut out all of those workers and all of that equipment in favor of one machine that makes an entire generic shoe for them to shove onto shelves next to all the other generic factory-made shoes. This is not the future.

This is an entire category of proteins known as Crystallins. Crystallins of one kind or another seem to be used when pretty much any living species needs to grow a lens. They aren’t exclusive to lenses, either; many crystallins are found elsewhere in an organism’s metabolic pathways, such as the nervous system.

I found this paper from 1996 titled “Lens Crystallins of Invertebrates” which I’d say is exactly what you’re looking for. There wasn’t much for arthropods, but it mentions Drosocrystallin for the Drosophila fruit fly’s corneal lens, and antigen 3G6 as “present in the ommatidial crystallin cone and central nervous system of numerous arthropods”.

I believe current understanding is that quantum shenanigans mean you can’t truly make a perfect quantum duplicate of something without destroying the original at the same time, so what you’re describing (destroying the original after making the copy) would only be possible for imperfect duplication - e.g. manufacturing a clone and syncing its memory with the original.

Windows 11 won’t install if it can’t find a TPM chip, so disabling it means you won’t get stealth-upgraded to 11 when you’re least expecting it.