jimwhitson

I suppose similar things exist in the US?

You're right that it doesn't get discussed much, I think largely because the explanatory material is dense and rather turgid, so would-be critics don't get far enough to make meaningful criticisms; that's certainly the case for me.

Indeed, but I think we're talking about language in two different ways: all your points are completely correct, but mainly of value to those who understand the language fairly well; my points were implicitly from the POV of a foreign learner trying to pick the language up.

As a native Anglophone, I love our freaky language, orthography and all. However, I try to keep reminding myself how horrible it is for new learners.

It's certainly preferable to identify a substance before tasting it, but it's not too late - spitting the paper out and rinsing the mouth out is likely at least to reduce the absorbed dose.

A perhaps more pressing problem is the risk of anxiety due to an innocently-bitter piece of blotter - I imagine a borderline-bad trip could be made much worse by a persistent fear that it would last >24h.

Of course, real caution would mean not eating anything cooked up by criminals in an illicit lab...

The point about bitterness is absolutely correct though, and certainly any purported LSD blotter that tastes bitter should be suspect.

Interestingly, at least one non-psychedelic has been found distributed on blotter paper: alprazolam (See http://www.justice.gov/dea/pr/micrograms/2008/mg0508.pdf), for which I'd tentatively expect the bitterness rule also to work.

In my experience in more 'agile' firms - startups, web dev shops and so on - it would be very hard to make a scheme like this work well, because of all the grinding bureaucracy, fiddly spec-matching and endless manual testing required, as well as the importance of controlling - and deeply understanding - the whole stack. Nonetheless, for infrastructure projects like Redis, I can see value in having engineering effort put explicitly into making 'prettier crashes'.

Thank you, Thomas, for saving me writing a much less eloquent comment along the same lines. As a startup founder way out in the wilderness, I'm often equally amused and saddened by SV tales of woe. We must all keep reminding ourselves of the '48-year-old employee of a midwest factory being shut down', and try to keep a proper perspective on values.

The risky learning curve came when I had to revise all the stuff I'd half-forgotten, taking a few weeks out to do nothing but maths, in the hope that my hunch would pan out. It did pan out, and now I'm settling down to the long hard slog of exploiting it properly.