You can use wet wood or pressure treated lumber or even foil coated acrylic - but the key is that you need to be expecting this, and you put the saw in to by-pass mode.

At that point, it's just another dumb saw that will chop your finger off, but it won't trigger the cartridge, and you can make what ever cuts you need.

The way it tries to determine if it's wet wood / a body part is the capacitance change. Slightly different profile which they can use to make an educated guess (obviously erring on the side of caution).

This is why for some time they would give you a free cartridge if yours triggered on flesh - they wanted the data on there from real-life flesh contact to improve their calculations.

1) it can’t really tell reliably.

And

2) correct.

You can manually disable the auto—trigger mode in those situations though (bypass mode).

It also doesn’t like anything conductive - so anything coated with Mylar, any kind of conductive dust or debris, etc. is also a crapshoot.

Very much edge cases though, unless you’re dealing with a lot of randos. A workshop I used to share had a wall covered with sawstop ‘trophies’, due to people doing weird stuff.