On Hacker News? Someone has probably already tried it. Possibly even more than one person — I mean, the linked paper isn’t even the first time I’ve seen research into the idea of anti-mosquito lasers, so anti-mosquito water cannons have probably been tried too.
Plain water doesn't work. They just bounce droplets off [0]. My experiments with garden hose and some mosquitoes during watering my garden confirm those findings. Maybe water with soap will work better (due to lower surface tension, droplets will envelop mosquitoes) but I did not try this.
I didn't think it worthy of a write up. The ML part that made it a bit more interesting was to keep the bees alive but to get the wasps (I'm allergic to wasps), and I couldn't get it to reliably differentiate between the two so it never hit 'production'.
