falaki

6 ms·

31.
by falaki 2y ago
This article is conflating language and ancestry. The seed of the confusion is in Reich’s research but the WSJ journalist blows it up to preposterous levels. Take India as an example. Most of the population is speaking some variant of an In
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by falaki 2y ago
How much money does Google make in Mexico?
33.
by falaki 2y ago
I haven't read the papers in detail, but can someone explain how genetics can be used to trace spread of languages? For context, you don't need population movements for a language to spread (it is similar to religion). See this ar
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by falaki 2y ago
"The Collapse of the Eastern Mediterranean" by Ronnie Ellenblum, whom I believe was a student of Richard Bulliet covers this topic as well.
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by falaki 2y ago
Late Mary Boyce attributes lower outbreaks of pandemics among Zoroastrian communities to the strict purity laws and practices. For example, it was unacceptable to pollute water, considered one of the sacred creations of Ahuramazda. To avoid
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by falaki 3y ago
In Iran, pregnant women are advised to significantly reduce Saffron consumption. Note that the base level consumption is much higher in that country.
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by falaki 3y ago
Thanks for digging it up. I can shed more light on the meaning of the original word for Saffron. The article mentions Saffron comes from Arabic az-za’faran. That word is the Arabicized version of an older Persian word: Za-paran (Zayesh-para
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by falaki 3y ago
SF Chronicle journalist, Roland Li, has a thread with some more related events. Notably, Westfield is divesting its U.S. properties. In this case, they could not even find a buyer. https://twitter.com/rolandlisf/status&
39.
by falaki 3y ago
As a former Apple employee working on Siri, it is safe to say many Apple employees hated Siri even 10 years ago. Many tried to introduce new ideas to improve it, but, at least while I was there, nothing changed.
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by falaki 3y ago
> "dominant influence" does not mean "exlusive" or even "majority", but "that which has the greatest overall impact in a specific area" The burden of proof for "high impact" is heavy. I r
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by falaki 3y ago
You may also enjoy Tajikestan. You should have no political restrictions to travel there.
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by falaki 3y ago
100%. As I said in another thread, it took many centuries for the majority of the Persians to convert to Islam. Most of the population were not even Muslim during the "Islamic Golden Age." A good parallel is the Mughal Empire in I
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by falaki 3y ago
Another shocking historical fact: cuneiform script was first deciphered using the Behistun Inscription, which has the same text in three different languages. But then, Persian texts were completely ignored by historians and all the attentio
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by falaki 3y ago
That "Islamic Golden Age" is a complete misnomer. It hides the religious diversity of the geography. Many don't know that it took many centuries for the majority of the population of the Iranian plateau to convert to Islam. F
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by falaki 4y ago
We plan to continue working on it and invest more.
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by falaki 4y ago
We don't expect this to be as good as the latest OpenAI GPT release. This is just to demonstrate that developing a conversation agent using an existing foundation model is not as hard as some may assume. Take a foundation model that is
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by falaki 4y ago
We also open sourced the Dolly model itself with a license that allows commercial use.
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by falaki 4y ago
This is the blog post with more details and background: https://www.databricks.com/blog/2023/04/12/dolly-first-open-... Disclosure: I work at Databricks.
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by falaki 4y ago
Probably no one else cares.
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by falaki 4y ago
I would say both. Early Judaism didn't have the concept of a "source of bad" (Satan, etc). Similarly, early Judaism didn't have the concept of paradise and hell. Zoroastrianism is the first known major religion that intr
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by falaki 4y ago
Thanks for all the pointers. How common are Persian names among Indian Zoroastrians? There was a recent thread by an Iranian historian on how Achaemenid king names were forgotten in Iran. Is Proshat a common name? < https://en.
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by falaki 4y ago
@yazaddaruvala are you following the Indian branch of Zoroastrianism or the Iranian? How different are the traditions?
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by falaki 5y ago
There is some truth to this argument: https://sigops.org/s/conferences/hotos/2021/papers/hotos21-s...
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by falaki 5y ago
Apple is a big Deltalake (and Databricks) customer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFeBJxI4Q98
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by falaki 5y ago
To be fair Apache Spark, which started long before either company existed, was built on the assumption that compute and storage should be separate. Unlike Hadoop, Spark did not come with any storage system and could read from any source.
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by falaki 5y ago
That is exactly the role of tpc.org.
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by falaki 5y ago
Linking to the discussion on the follow up from Databricks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29232346
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by falaki 5y ago
tl;dr: The data warehouse company used a pre-baked TPC-DS dataset and claimed they have similar performance to Databricks. Turns out if you use the official TPC-DS data generation scripts, you get much worse performance.
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by falaki 6y ago
Spark community put a lot of effort into a feature-rich CSV data source. Often times the most challenging part of ingesting CSV is parsing it. There are many flavors each with different corner cases for NULLs, comments, headers, etc.
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Databricks Invests 100 Million Euros in Amsterdam(databricks.com)
2 points by falaki 7y ago|0 comments

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