Instant-blindness lasers are really easy... but pretty much uncontrollable and unpredictable. They'd end up dazzling each other and knocking their own planes out of the sky.
Lasers that are actually lethal would be about ten thousand times worse, even handwaving the incredible technical challenges.
Corvids are smart and have some kind of active shared education, so they're always quite skittish around humans. I suspect (with no evidence or research) that they sense the cultural enmity humans have, and possibly remember the long history of "pest control" (which still happens on farms). They'll eventually learn that you're a cool human.
One way I feed them is to show them the food, then place it somewhere visible like on a post or stump, and back away to let them choose to take it. Throwing motions startle them pretty easily, even when they're very gentle.
Yeah, I tried to use it a bit for my own mid-30's MSc, and it was useful in the sense that it produced a terrible paragraph with some structure which I could then viciously edit into something new - decent at fixing grammar and finding words-for-things though. But that's not too different from my earlier method of "just mash keys wildly and passionately and then go back over to edit out the sedition and most of the swearing".
The making up sources thing was interesting however, because what it reaaaaally did was put me onto the trick of following up the sources of my enemies, which very often revealed the dishonest cherry picking and outright misrepresentation involved, even in pretty Serious Works.
As an aside I do think it's good to get some experience with an LLM's output even if - especially if - you're against them, because it gives you a sense for them. I hear a very distinct and kinda annoying "chirpy ironic" voice in my head when reading LLM output, from my subconscious doing the analysis. Not totally reliable, I'm sure, but feels helpful.
Please don't put spoilers in titles.
Various spoilers.
Yeah, it's pretty silly. His backstory was probably near or at Epic level
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if he genuinely thought he could fuck around with Karsus' Folly - that's one of the few things that would have your peer superwizards (who mostly dislike each other) joining forces to put a stop to.
I think pretty much all the character's backgrounds were a poor choice on their part. You don't need a shred of backstory upfront if the writing is up to snuff, and having theirs be so high-level kinda makes everything happening pretty low stakes - the intro cinematic with the spelljammer vs dragonriders is basically a level 20 action sequence, and then you're slogging through mud and goblins hearing about how cool everyone else used to be, having just seen how cool the stuff you don't get to do is.
Plus Elminster could genuinely solve all of it in about three hours, so he shouldn't have even been there to say:
Then teleport away without doing anything about it.spoiler
"So I hear you're an unstable antimagical nuclear weapon now Gale?".
But eh, the story and stakes are all over the place.
spoiler
It isn't even actually mind flayers! It's just mid-level clerics of the three gods who job harder than Skeletor, with a plan so intensely stupid - fucking around with Illithid - that it can only function via the power of a saturday morning cartoon villain's mcguffin.
It's... like the Battle Angel Alita movie. It likes the source material too much, so it crams in too many elements from much later and weakens itself in the process. Or perhaps the poison of escalation.
spoiler
It isn't just hints of the mind flayer space empire, it's a netherese superweapon, no wait, it's also the Dead Three! The city you'll reach in thirty hours will be destroyed - and the entire world hangs in the balance! Only your level 12 characters can save the universe!
spoiler
The griffins they partner with could easily be a source of otherwise exotic plants and crops. "I was on a long sonder, saw this big ass stick grass, think it's good for that plumbing thing of yours?"
I posted it a while ago in a thread about the wonders of bamboo, but China made amazing use of it. https://csegrecorder.com/articles/view/ancient-chinese-drilling
Damn Victorians brought back dozens of poisonous plants that instantly escaped their gardens but couldn't manage to naturalize the coolest ones...
With the comment about the natural temperature regulation inside the mountain itself, they might be able (after massive labour) to hollow out a deep-mountain internal reservoir mostly insulated from the winter, to store potable or industrial water.
Wikipedia, line 1: "Socotra, locally known as Saqatri, is a Yemeni island in..."
Oh please, please, try.
Edit: Slightly further down:
The island is under the control of the Southern Transitional Council (STC), a United Arab Emirates-backed, pro-Presidential Leadership Council (PLC), "secessionist" faction in Yemen's ongoing civil war.[5] The STC seized control of the island following a coup in 2020, ousting the local authorities and establishing its own governance.[6]
...lame, but still try.
Yeah, and they've had them for a long time, so even leaving the obvious moral argument the clear psychological danger of interacting with simulacra of real people should be well known. But perhaps Barclay's case really is genuinely unusual and (hopefully) would have prompted a wide-ranging review of holodeck ethical programming that we'd only see more about on some purely hypothetical Star Trek: San Francisco.
I could see social interaction practice with simulacra being of therapeutic value when used appropriately under the guidance of an actual therapist. Which probably should also need the consent of the person who is being simulated.
Perhaps also for command simulator practice and other tightly defined scenarios.
Snow Crash, but by Peter Watts.
I remember Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't being a good channel. A person who got really into botany in jail, wandering around showcasing local flora and often discussing the social collapse and poor urban planning in evidence.