You’re posting this here on HN which is a curated social space that absolutely does not let you post annoying things that serve only to offend people and is good because it produces high signal/noise. Presumably you’re here because you appreciate that high quality discussion. Thats what Twitter used to be like for scientists, except that you also had access to smart people from industry and smart non-scientists as well and so “scientists in the academic bubble” had access to a huge number of perspectives. Now X is 4chan. 4chan is useful for its specific brand of content, it’s just not useful the way HN is or Twitter was.
It would be one thing if Bluesky were a no-politics, effortpost-only zone. It's not that though. In actuality, Bluesky is an echo chamber just like 2010s-era Twitter, but somehow even more strident.
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.
Bluesky isn't perfect, and I actually find it kind of annoying, but it's a "follow who you want" place. If your timeline is strident, that's because you followed people who are strident. The same isn't really true of Twitter, where even the "Following" timeline shows you algorithmically-recommended content and then boosts the replies of paying customers (AKA scammers.) To get the same feature from X, you need to do something complicated with "Lists", and it doesn't fix the reply ordering problem.
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.
I have 140k followers and a strong incentive to go back to X. I do check in occasionally for the reasons you state, and it’s unusable and high-noise every time I do it. There was a golden age for science on Twitter and it’s over. On BlueSky I don’t get the huge engagement (and there’s too much politics) but I can blather on about cryptography and people are enthusiastic and I don’t get weird bluecheck crypto scammers in my replies.
I find it much easier to filter out the politics on BlueSky and focus on my professional connections. I gave up on Twitter years ago precisely because I got sucked into politics all the bloody time.
Having control over your timeline/algorithm, and the absence of engagement bait, makes it worthwhile for me to be on such a platform for the first time.
The algorithm on X is intentionally less calibrated for everyone. For example replies are now ordered by subscriber status rather than time stamp or relevance. Subscribers also have preference in “For You” feeds and suggested accounts. There is also an overt thumb on the scale for certain accounts like Elon Musk or the Cat Turd guy.
It’s still an entertaining place to find memes etc, but any use as real signal for public sentiment is long gone.
As someone who was a customer of Netflix from the dialup to broadband world, I can tell you that this stuff happens much faster than you expect. With AI we're clearly in the "it really works, but there are kinks and scaling problems" of, say, streaming video in 2001 -- whereas I think you mean to indicate we're trying to do Netflix back in the 1980s where the tech for widespread broadband was just fundamentally not available.
RealPlayer in the late 90s turned into (working) Napster, Gnutella and then the iPod in 2001, Podcasts (without the name) immediately after, with the name in 2004, Pandora in 2005, Spotify in 2008. So a decade from crummy idea to the companies we’re familiar with today, but slowed down by tremendous need for new (distributed) broadband infrastructure and complicated by IP arrangements. I guess 10 years seems like a long time from the front end, but looking back it’s nothing. Don’t go buying yourself a Tower Records.
While I get the point... to be pedantic though, Napster (first gen), Gnutella and iPod were mostly download and listen offline experiences and not necessarily live streaming.
Another 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.
Please don’t worry about the emdashes, worry about the broad and inaccurate generalizations being churned out by your flawed world model. I urge you to go to some actual criminal reformers in person.
Far less than in previous generations. And just because people vaguely claim to be religious in some general sense today doesn't mean that their vague generalities provide them with communities that bring about social responsibility.
Yeah, a whole lot of Americans who still click the "religious" box on a poll are just going on habit and family tradition, or they go to a church that's become part social club and part community charity center. (Nothing wrong with charity, of course, but you don't have to be religious to be charitable.) It doesn't mean what it meant a few generations ago, when, probably coincidentally, there was less crime.
The drive for increased penalties is very deeply rooted in the human psyche because it works extremely well in smaller societies on the order of 100 people, so we’re tempted to believe that it works in modern cities with hundreds of thousands to millions of people. In real life the evidence seems to be pretty mixed. As far as I can tell, shoplifting today breaks down into two categories: (1) dumb kids, who don’t much care about your example, and (2) professionals who are monetizing shoplifting by reselling stolen goods on platforms like Amazon. If you want to deal with the large-scale problem, you’d probably focus on (2).
Summary: it's likely that you'll only be able to obtain a COVID vaccine if you're 65+ or at high risk, and it doesn't matter if you feel differently or want to pay for it in cash. This is pretty terrible.
WiFi-controlled 120V outlet plugs cost $20 or less retail (including tariff costs.) Those aren’t rated for the sorts of continuous draw an L1 charger needs, but upgrading the hardware to handle this isn’t going to make the hardware crushingly expensive. So the actual question mostly comes down to software and integration. Seems like a good ycombinator business. Think of the TAM!
I do keep joking that I've got hundreds of dollars to invest in the first restaurant that wants to be the McDonald's of EV Charging. (The early business model of McDonald's was notoriously putting one near almost every interstate exit so it became a ubiquitous staple of the driving landscape.) Could be McDonald's itself. The Sonic-style of sit-in-your car "drive in" restaurant seems almost like a preternatural echo of an EV restaurant business. It would be a beautiful irony if Cracker Barrel decided EV charging was the next great idea; sit in a rocking chair and peruse the gift shop of very analog goods while you wait for your car to charge sounds like a smart business model to me.
Some company that wants a restaurant near every interstate exit to build their brand is going to figure out that the economics of electric charging are simpler than they expect and with it they build a potentially very loyal audience of travelers with easily 30+ minutes a stop on their hands to eat, shop, what-have-you. Maybe it will be one of the old guard of such restaurants, maybe it will be a new disruptor. If someone on HN wants to start it, I have a very tiny seed fund round in the hundreds of dollars to invest.
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