falaki

Alcohol, tobacco and many other products have age restrictions, so do cars and many other products of the modern society. Social media can and should have age restrictions.

I really hope other nations, including the United States, copy this. Australia proved that it is possible. I think the results will be so overwhelmingly positive that others will take notice. Good job Australia!

Reading "Anxious Generation" is a must for all parents in this day and age.

Every government program should have an expiration date attached to it when signed into law.

Many in the west wrongly assume the symbol they know as Farvahar is a representation of Aura Mazda, the Zoroastrian great god. Some even call the symbol Ahura Mazda. The real story is much more fascinating.

When I was hired at Apple/siri more than 10 years ago as a Data Scientist, I was SHOCKED to find that the system beyond speech recognization was rule-based. My team and I attempted multiple times to introduce statistical learning models to siri, so it can improve it with more data. After one year, I was disillusioned and I left Apple.

Several years later former colleagues told me the system was still rule-based! I would not be surprised if it is still that way. That organization was like a mini-dinosaur. There was very little flexibility or openness to new ideas. I am supper happy I left.

This article's confusion is where it states "half the human beings alive today are descended from the Yamnaya." He thinks because half of the world population speaks an Indo-European language, and because the original speakers of the Proto-Indo-European languages were the Yamnaya culture (as Reich's research suggests), then half of the world population are descendants of the Yamnaya culture.

Is the logical error clear now?

And interestingly Iranians are mostly not the descendants of the so-called Indo-Iranian steppe nomads (genetically). But they speak various Iranian languages.

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 Indo-European (Indo-Iranian to be more precise) language but only a minority is genetically traced to Indo-European steppe people [1]

[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/where-did-india-s-pe...

How much money does Google make in Mexico?

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 article for a logical explanation: https://medium.com/incerto/a-few-things-we-dont-quite-get-ab...

"The Collapse of the Eastern Mediterranean" by Ronnie Ellenblum, whom I believe was a student of Richard Bulliet covers this topic as well.

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 polluting water, Zoroastrians would not wash their hands directly in rivers or bodies of water. There are hundreds of examples of these strict purity laws. [1]

[1] A History of Zoroastrianism, The Early Period by Mary Boyce <https://archive.org/details/AHistoryOfZoroastrianismVolI>

In Iran, pregnant women are advised to significantly reduce Saffron consumption. Note that the base level consumption is much higher in that country.

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-paran), which means "causes abortion" (zaa/zayesh --> birth).

The most common source of Saffron in Iran is area in southern Khorasan called Ghohistan (from Kohistan) meaning mountainous.

Both of these facts corroborate the Akkadian sources.

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/1668356986256375808?s=...

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.

> "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 recommend reading some of the articles by the Inarah Institute <http://inarah.net/publications> on how shaky the dominant Islamic history narrative is.

To clarify: It is unclear what the direction of the influence is. Was it Islam that impacted/influenced what happened in Persia, or was it the Persian/Syriac/Nestorian culture that created something called "Islam."

You may also enjoy Tajikestan. You should have no political restrictions to travel there.

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 India. The rulers where Muslim but the population was not.

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 attention shifted to other Mesopotamian tablets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behistun_Inscription

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. For a good part of what is referred to as "Islamic Golden Age" Islam was not the dominant religion.

Similar story applies to India. Up until 17th century, India was ruled by "muslim" rulers. Should all the cultural and scientific achievements of that period be attributed to "Islam?"

We plan to continue working on it and invest more.

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 not capable of Q&A and tune it with a fairly small Q&A data and you get your in-house ChatGPT.

Disclaimer: I work at Databricks.

We also open sourced the Dolly model itself with a license that allows commercial use.

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.

Probably no one else cares.

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 introduced the conflict between a good God, Ahuramazda, and an evil spirit. Humans have a choice in this conflict and that's how the morality is defined. Based on their choice they can end up in Pardise (a Persian concept <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise>) or hell <https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/hell-i>

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.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parysatis> among Indian Parsis?

@yazaddaruvala are you following the Indian branch of Zoroastrianism or the Iranian? How different are the traditions?

There is some truth to this argument: https://sigops.org/s/conferences/hotos/2021/papers/hotos21-s...