Distillation, when done improperly, can result in very toxic substances. It requires care and craft and since alcohol is not only a drug but a transformed product (like LSD or meth), it is perfectly fine that some state-level supervision apply: anything ranging from plain interdiction to controlled production. Note that the level of control usually depends on potential health issues and culture, it is not usually strictly bound to the product itself, since we can observe variations from region to region.
By that logic it would be acceptable for the state to regulate all sorts of common culinary techniques. Note that those are regulated in a commercial setting. I'd have no objection to similar regulations pertaining to restaurants that wanted to serve alcohol that was distilled, brewed, or otherwise prepared on site. In that context it's equivalent to the regulations pertaining to the handling of raw meat.
Similarly, perhaps the state ought to regulate the use of refrigerators in a residential setting since various failure modes there can easily land you in the hospital.
Enough people have contracted botulism poisoning by storing chopped garlic under oil in their fridge that the FDA has a warning about it on their website. So I suppose that would also be acceptable to regulate? Or perhaps just cooking oil in general? After all, it's quite flammable and people commonly start house fires when frying things.
While we're at it, perhaps canning things at home ought to require a permit?
The standard that "thing could pose a hazard therefore regulation is acceptable" is far too broad a criteria as it applies to approximately everything that exists and entirely disregards individual freedoms.
> It requires care and craft
A fine whiskey? Sure. The equivalent of vodka? Don't be ridiculous.
> alcohol is not only a drug but a transformed product
It most certainly is not. Distillation concentrates something that is already there.
Alternatively, fried eggs are a transformed product but at that point the term as used is so absurdly broad as to be rendered entirely useless.
> A fine whiskey? Sure. The equivalent of vodka? Don't be ridiculous.
Given the variability of quality and flavor among vodkas, this is not quite true. Water mineralization, number of distillations, type of filtration, terroir and remaining "impurities" from the specific mash used. All of these affect the character of the vodka just as they do any spirit. That's why no one takes vodka distilled a million times seriously, if you can even call it vodka.
(And that excludes things like barrel-aged vodkas, like the venerable starka, or a well-made bimber which cannot be accused of lacking character.)
The pure process of Distillation does the concentration of something that is already there. But is it always pure when amateurs do it? Can you guarrantee that nothing goes wrong, that the product is tested for contaminations every time?
Do you swab your pan fried chicken and culture to test for salmonella after cooking it? Or do you just follow the recipe and basic food safety guidelines? Perhaps you judge doneness by a combination of fillet thickness and cook time? Or perhaps you go to the trouble of using a digital thermometer just to be safe?
Yes. Arguably, because amateurs are not cost bound, they tend to make a less "containinated" product due to the way the collection and blending works.
You discard the foul flavors and harse volatiles that commercial folks keep for cost.
>Can you guarrantee that nothing goes wrong, that the product is tested for contaminations every time?
Life isn't about that kind of guarantee. You don't practice the same level of food safety at home as you're required to maintain in a professional environment.
People frequently get blind or just die from home made booze when distilling and not checking for methyl alcohol. Quite common on poor parts of the world but also ie eastern Europe and russia.
Misinformation. Unless you happen to own a GCMS you don't check for methanol. Rather you discard the heads and the tails from a fractioning still because that's where stuff that isn't ethanol comes out. In the modern era you'd use a digital thermometer for this task.
Someone suffering methanol poisoning from DIY distillation is equivalent to someone landing in the hospital after failing to cook his chicken all the way through. It's simple incompetence, likely due either to blatant disregard for safety or else to attempting to wing something based on only the most topical of knowledge.
Isn't the remedy for methanol ingestion... Ethanol? Just keep drinking?
I have two distillers and I've never distilled alcohol. I do distill water in my eletric one. I turn it on and leave the condenser part off until bubbles form, I blow the steam off to ensure it steams again, place the top on, set the timer for 3 hours and shut it off then. The pre-boil ostensibly let's the petroleum and the like escape, and the stopping before dry prevents anything with a higher phase temp than water from distilling.
I use it for coffee machine, kettle, and ice machine, just to cut down on maintenance.
Ten years ago I bought 3 copper five gallon distillers, and gave two to my in-laws and kept one for myself. I tried to distill water in it but it was not coming out clean, so I packed it away till I had time to use it outside on a propane burner after purging it with alcohol or some non-copper eating acid.
> Rather you discard the heads and the tails from a fractioning still because that's where stuff that isn't ethanol comes out.
This is also incorrect. It comes out throughout the distillation process, with a higher % concentration in the tails, but an over all reduced volume due to lower % distillate.
> Someone suffering methanol poisoning from DIY distillation is equivalent to someone landing in the hospital after failing to cook his chicken all the way through.
It's more like taking raw packs of chicken and rubbing your eyes. That has to be intentional.
This gets repeated a lot but doesn't actually stand up to any scrutiny.
If you go and look, you will find that cases of blindness are caused not by "improper" distillation, but rather by the adulteration of the finished product- that is, extra methanol being added after the fact.
If you can find a verifiable case of a person going blind from home distillation, I would be interested to see it.
I would disagree, but on,y considering I think this is not the right prompt to test against. Hence not the right question.
While you're asking to find creative ways to get rid of the player, I think what LLMs are unable to do (at this point?) is to come up with the idea of an aging mirror, let it sit for a while and only then get back to it when they met its attached character.
The dungeon master did not follow a track of events but rather picked interesting somewhat random contents and moments from the campaign and picked them up to create new story lines.
That doesn't seem like something an LLM would do easily.
Its not something an LLM would do with simple chatGPT type prompts, but it's something I can imagine building an agentic system to do. It's not trivial but seems feasible with current day LLMs.
If you design the system to have this exact quality (among many others), where clues are dropped earlier in the quest line for later quests. It's a matter of breaking up the prompts and iteratively refining the outputs.
Who in 2025 does NOT see the "tsunami of burnout"? It seems to me that everybody is talking about it since at least the stabilization (not "end") of the COVID pandemic.
I've only skimmed through the article, so apologies if I missed some important bit of info.
Employers generally refuse to openly discuss it with anyone who isn’t a retention risk, which made interviews unattended very weird when I would give perfectly honest answers to the candidate about “why is this position open?” (a question that most candidates don’t ask because they’re desperate for employment).
The anecdote doesn't strike me because your friend the pastor said it, but because it's a rule as old as times that every high-schooler was taught.
- The introduction should announce the thesis and its development
- walk your way towards your thesis
- The conclusion should summarize your thesis (and hint at openings towards new grounds)
But somehow, everyone seems to forget it and is in awe whenever someone recaps it.
And every high schooler, TedX speaker, and Malcom Gladwell impersonator gets this wrong: It only works if intro and conclusion present a different view on the information, otherwise it's simply boring the audience to death.
Excellent point. I do Platform Engineering in a B2C business, our budget is very thin despite demonstrated the economy of scale provided by proper use of the platform.
No, they made an order of magnitude mistake. Fairly common, it happens.
However, in this case it has taken it from “ordering bacon and avocado on my burger” to “two tickets to my local sports team including beers and chili cheese fries”. So not enough to be exactly punitive, more like a mild inconvenience. The point still stands.
For the uneducated, law engineers are members of the Congress / Parliament / Bundestag / [add for your own country]