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Comment by franciscop | Hacker News Reader

I've touched all sorts of things in my "Maker" years, but one of the things I'm never going to touch by far is lasers. I know how bad they are, and I also know how woeful unqualified I'm for messing with lasers. Heck, I've even left a couple of dancefloors in clubs that I heavily suspected were firing actual lasers at the people, wonder how many of those were actual lasers vs light pointers and how many people got unknowingly injured, but it was just not worth the risk.

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> Heck, I've even left a couple of dancefloors in clubs that I heavily suspected were firing actual lasers at the people, wonder how many of those were actual lasers vs light pointers and how many people got unknowingly injured, but it was just not worth the risk.

It is not really clear what you are saying here. What do you mean by "actual lasers" vs "light pointers".

Whether or not a light show is safe has nothing to do with the light source being an "actual laser" or not. What matters is what kind of laser and how it is used.

Last year I went to a karaoke dance floor club thing in NYC k-town and I saw literal burn marks on the wall. A spinning laser disco thing continuously traced across the burn mark. I got our group the hell out of there but they only agreed to leave because it was too loud

They are actual lasers and they're fine. Assuming you're talking about the light shows and not just random people.

I mean the light shows. Why do you say they are fine? It'd depend on who sets it up, right? If it's professionals I'd be a bit less worried, but in my country and many others def-not-professionals handle things that they shouldn't be handling, including setting up official shows.

Are they building homemade laser rigs or something?

They are buying equipment that is supposed to be pointing to the sky and set up by a professional and setting up haphazardously by themselves.

Even better is when the dancefloor wants UV lighting, so they just buy some cheap UV-C bulbs

Funranium has a post about that, too: https://www.funraniumlabs.com/2023/11/ultraviolet-rant/

> We do not want to share space with a UV-C air sterilizer because we like to see with our eyeballs

This was a good read.

https://kotaku.com/bored-apes-nft-blind-eye-pain-uv-light-pa...

most famous example of that.

What are the implications of that choice? Safety?

UV-C light is used for disinfecting, because it's very good at killing biological things

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