The article says that the use of CZT is not new, but now the material has become much more affordable, due to improved production techniques, which has opened up a lot of application fields for it, which were previously prevented by its scarcity and cost.
There are plenty of materials that have been known for a long time to be better than those normally used in certain applications, but which still do not replace the inferior alternatives due to excessive cost, so discovering any new process that can make them cheaply is as important as knowing the properties of the material.
I suspect I can get a larger variety of ethnic food of very decent quality in 1 hour in NYC than in 99% of suburbs.
Shopping for large items, or large quantities, definitely tends to use suburban land because it's cheaper, and a shopping center uses a lot of it. The cost for the customers is the time to drive there.
I can't speak to NYC - best case it would take me 4 hours to get there (.5 to the airport, 1 hour security, 2 hours on the plane, .5 from ny airport to the city). Meanwhile I can get to nearly anywhere in my entire MSA in less than an hour, both city and suburbs (and even a few farms). Within that the majority of ethnic food is in suburbs, though the largest concentration is still downtown.
I live in Baltimore, and if you ask after Chinese, Korean, Indian, or Vietnamese, without specifying city limits, you will be directed to a place in the suburbs with a parking lot (I think this is essentially true of DC as well).
Well, there are some rural staples like BBQ, and Mexican to a degree.
But, yes. The sort of ... enduring narrative is that rural areas and suburbs have chain restaurants, diners, and fast food, because immigrants go to cities and open restaurants from their native cuisine, and that suburbanites think black pepper is spicy and sushi is gross.
In actuality I think immigrants are increasingly (a) enamored of the American big-car / big-house lifestyle (makes sense, they choose to come here) and (b) bought-in to the notion that cities are dangerous, with bad schools. So immigrants rent a place in a strip mall near the suburban school district some other immigrant said was good online and start restaurants there. Google maps exists, suburbanites think nothing of a 25 minute drive, so they ask around online after the best examples of a particular ethnic cuisine, and they drive there.
In Maryland, where I live, it's certainly true that the highly-regarded Chinese and Korean dining is in suburbs. Latin Americans, specifically Guatemalans and Salvadorans, are the only immigrant group moving in to Baltimore (where I live) with any sort of enthusiasm.
While it’s true that there is food and shopping in suburbs, I think it’s also true that suburbs are still food and culture deserts, since the food and other amenities is typically far away from most houses.
Not really. Get in a car and you can be at all. For many in the city walking it is about as long to get to those things - the distance is less, but the time is similar and time is what counts.(which isn't very many!) the city is the food desert - there are bars and restaurants, but zero grocery stories. If you want to cook a meal you have to get to the suburbs to buy the supplies.
True. One other people you find in cities in the old world is people who are not in that weird place between college and kids where they can afford to eat out all the time and alcohol hasn't started catching up to their health
For me it was a ream of printer paper and a mug full of random writing implements.
IMO the platform is unmatched at rapid on-demand WYSIWYG visualization.
Not so great for a productivity app, though. Too easy to lose important information when it's on the same sheet of paper as a drawing of a graph algorithm that turned out to be wrong, and trying to remember whether x cross y positive implies x right or left of y.
I bet you could rig up a webcam, hook it up to a multimodal LLM, that can then instantly scan, sort, and archive all of the separate ideas on each sheet.
That would make it easier to not lose information, but I don't think it makes it any easier of a productivity app.
It's satisfying to hear that Microsoft engineers hate Microsoft's AI offerings as much as I do.
Visual Studio is great. IntelliSense is great. Nothing open-source works on our giant legacy C++ codebase. IntelliSense does.
Claude is great. Claude can't deal with millions of lines of C++.
You know what would be great? If Microsoft gave Claude the ability to semantic search the same way that I can with Ctrl-, in Visual Studio. You know what would be even better? If it could also set breakpoints and inspect stuff in the Debugger.
You know what Microsoft has done? Added a setting to Visual Studio where I can replace the IntelliSense auto-complete UI, that provides real information determined from semantic analysis of the codebase and allows me to cycle through a menu of possibilities, with an auto-complete UI that gives me a single suggestion of complete bullshit.
Can't you put the AI people and the Visual Studio people in a fucking room together? Figure out how LLMs can augment your already-really-good-before-AI product? How to leverage your existing products to let Claude do stuff that Claude Code can't do?
Anyone involved in government procurement loves AI, irrespective of what it even is, for the simple fact that they get to pointedly ask every single tech vendor for evidence that they have "leveraged efficiency gains from AI" in the form of a lower bid.
At least, that's my wife's experience working on a contract with a state government at a big tech vendor.
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