Readit NewsAnother major difference, is we're near the limits to the approaches being taking for computing capability... most dialup connections, even on "56k" modems were still lucky to get 33.6kbps down and very common in the late 90's, where by the mid-2000's a lot of users had at least 512kbps-10mbps connections (where available) and even then a lot of people didn't see broadband until the 2010's.
that's at least a 15x improvement, where we are far less likely to see even a 3-5x improvement on computing power over the next decade and a half. That's also a lot of electricity to generate on an ageing infrastructure that barely meets current needs in most of the world... even harder on "green" options.
Not so great for getting cars out of NYC and pedestrianizing more of the city/moving towards more “low traffic neighborhoods” as I imagine Waymo and other similar companies are going to fight against these efforts.
Edit: Lots of people talking about human drivers taking advantage of self-driving cars being more cautious/timid. Good news is that once you have enough self-driving cars on the road, it probably slows down/calms other traffic (see related research on speed governors).
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Academics who insisting on their colleagues moving to Bluesky aren't deleting noise. That's a pretext. What these academics are really doing is trying to use their social power to enforce singular answers to questions that divide the public. They're tacitly asserting that nobody can be a legitimate intellectual and disagree with them on social issues having nothing to do with their field.
I'm not going to waste my time on people who can't tolerate divergent perspectives. X has plenty of tools to help people prune distractions from their timelines. This isn't a signal to noise ratio thing so much as a contamination taboo. Frazer would be proud. The problem these academics have with X isn't that it's noisy channel, but actually that it lets the wrong people participate.
These academics think they have a monopoly on knowledge production, but they don't. Close-mindedness bleeds from the social to the professional domain with terrifying speed. Censorship is anathema to discovery. When academics try to use ostracism to build echo chambers like Bluesky, they're only accelerating the ongoing divorce of academia and scholarship.
The rest of your comment tells me that you don't really spend a lot of time with scientists, but you do spend a lot of time developing your opinions from social media. I wish you could do the opposite! Academics are great and funny and sometimes wrong about social issues just like other people, but they also work on some of the coolest problems we have.
There is no point in creating an account there, even the Elon Haters have gone back, they keep the BSky account as a backup.
Sad, but if you want to feel the global pulse (however weak) X/Twitter is still the place.
Also X/Twitter is an insane name.
We're clearly seeing what AI will eventually be able to do, just like many VOD, smartphone and grocery delivery companies of the 90s did with the internet. The groundwork has been laid, and it's not too hard to see the shape of things to come.
This tech, however, is still far too immature for a lot of use cases. There's enough of it available that things feel like they ought to work, but we aren't quite there yet. It's not quite useless, there's a lot you can do with AI already, but a lot of use cases that are obvious not only in retrospect will only be possible once it matures.
Err, BlueSky is enthusiastically complying with that one (as you read by clicking through to their corporate statement),
> "We work with regulators around the world on child safety—for example, Bluesky follows the UK's Online Safety Act, where age checks are required only for specific content and features... Mississippi’s new law and the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) are very different. Bluesky follows the OSA in the UK. There, Bluesky is still accessible for everyone, age checks are required only for accessing certain content and features, and Bluesky does not know and does not track which UK users are under 18. Mississippi’s law, by contrast, would block everyone from accessing the site—teens and adults—unless they hand over sensitive information, and once they do, the law in Mississippi requires Bluesky to keep track of which users are children."
https://bsky.social/about/blog/08-22-2025-mississippi-hb1126
It's bold of them to attempt to shift the Overton Window in this way ("OSA is actually moderate and we should hold it up as an example of reasonableness to criticize other censorship laws against"). That happened fast.