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> He says that it wasn't very hard to find people who were breaking the law,

I sure bet it wasn't! I accidentally happened to spend the fourth of July in LA last year, and that city's commitment to fireworks abundance was unparalleled. I have never experienced such a glorious, nonstop, 360-degree rumbling fireworks spectacle before, and I loved it.

It's interesting to ponder whether people equipped with large, powerful mortars launching explosive projectiles might find any way to disable loitering drones meant to spoil their fun.


I think the mortars are fucking ridiculous in densely packed suburbia.

They weren't always this big either. If you want to fire increasingly larger bombs out of a tube in the middle of the night, I think at some point the authorities will need to start pushing back.


It's a classic social problem.

Group A want to have a huge fireworks display.

Group B want a quiet undisturbed evening and no risk of their house accidentally being set on fire by an untraceable firework.

The two are incompatible. Society needs to decide which groups needs are more important.


Many years ago, I knew a family who named the three squirrels who regularly visited their back yard "Bubonic", "Pneumonic", and "Septicemic". The squirrels did not respond to these names, but the family sure did find it amusing to use them.

> For motorbikes maybe just exclude accidents from coverage.

From personal experience, this is de-facto true regardless of what anyone thinks the law says.


> it might be as low as 30mg in humans.

That seems quite unlikely given that there are many 30mg dose trip reports, going as far back as TiHKAL.



Alternately, have a robot control the motion?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNC_router


There is genuine value in having it all set up out of the box, and not having to figure it out yourself.

I have been using Linux since the '90s and haven't used anything else in at least a decade, but I struggled to understand what all the pieces were and what I was supposed to do with them when I wanted to play a Steam game with my kid several months ago. I'm still not sure I did it right; I think I probably did install Lutris, maybe, but I have no idea what problem it is meant to solve.


NASA once tried a little something along those lines:

https://pwg.gsfc.nasa.gov/Education/wtether.html


I think it is quite the opposite: what is novel is that this has come before the court at all. Nobody would have dreamed of expecting children to stay inside and be quiet all day during my childhood, nor that of my parents, nor their parents; rather, we were often made to go play outside.

Of course: this kind of thing has happened over and over.

Reality will settle in, the giddiness will fade, the market will overreact, fortunes will be lost, people will lose their jobs, and attention will move along to something else. At least a handful of solid new businesses will survive, though, and even thrive. Twenty years from now, whatever it is that the new technology is actually good for will seem obvious in retrospect, and the present breathless excitement will seem comical.


> How do you trust the recipe without context?

Well, I just read it. The stakes are not that high!

> have you ever gotten a recipe exactly as you outlined — zero context – and gave a damn to make it?

Of course: there are a great many useful cookbooks written exactly this way.


The book is the context! It was published, it has a presumably influential vetted author.

Maybe I am coming off too flippant. I'm just trying to say there's a spectrum between fluff and context. If the AI's literally just gave us answers and list of recipes, it wouldn't be as useful as with the context backing up where it came from, why this list, and so on.


Well, that's a reasonable point!

Perhaps it also depends on one's approach to cooking. I often read recipes not because I intend to follow them, but to understand the range of variation in the dish before I make my own version. "Somebody liked this enough to bother writing it up" is enough context for that use.


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