Comment by hn_throwaway_99

> Every year or so there's a new article about some new spectacular storage medium. Crystals, graphene, lasers, quartz, holograms, whatever. It never materializes.

Of course, wouldn't you expect that for a fairly mature technology that you'd get tons of false starts from competing tech before eventually getting one breakthrough that completely changed everything? I mean, you could have written a comment that was perfectly analogous to your paragraph above about how AI and neural networks never really amounted to much for about 50-60 years until, all of the sudden, they did (and even if you think AI may currently be overhyped, it's undeniable that in the past 5 years that AI has had an effect on society probably much greater than all the previous history of AI put together).

I prefer to read this academic paper as "Oh, this is a really interesting approach, I wonder what its limitations are" vs. interpreting at as a "this new storage tech will change the world!!!" announcement. I feel like the first approach leads to generally more curiosity, while the second just leads to cynicism and jadedness.