falaki

Yes exactly.

Also they suggest every company should build their own benchmark and repeat these tests with new models instead of relying on the SWE bench.

1) Many models are now competitive at the top tier, including open source. 2) GLM 5.2 in particular was a major step forward in open source coding agent performance, 3) Harnesses make a huge difference in cost-performance. 4) Cheaper per-token does not imply cheaper per-task.

The paper has some insights that may apply to AI coding: 1. The first companies that benefitted from the Dynamo were electrical light manufacturers. They were more intimately aware of the potential benefits and since they were new, they built the factories to take advantage of Dynamos. Think who is benefiting most from AI coding these days.

2. Existing manufacturing operations didn't realize that their factory layouts and processes were unsuitable for Dynamos. They would replace the power source but see no benefit from it. It took many years for old pipelines to depreciate and be replaced with new ones that were able to benefit from distributed mechanical power generation.

Absolutely worth reading.

I worked at Siri (post acquisition) 13 years ago as one of the early data scientists. Let's just say I am not a bit surprised.

There are a lot of Iranian-Americans in Silicon valley, and the broader tech. These people have family and relatives in Iran and not being able to contact has been extremely hard on them. If you have an Iranian colleague, please understand that they may not be able to perform and work as their usual. Hopefully this collective nightmare will end.

Some personal observations as I am in touch with a few folks inside Iran through Starlink.

1. The jamming/disruption is local to large cities most notably the capital, Tehran.

2. Even in Tehran it is not complete and my friends are able to send and receive messages. Uploading videos is harder.

3. The regime is now raiding homes that they suspect have Starlink terminals. I don't know how they identify them but I do wonder if they are using technology to locate them.

Some personal observations as I am in touch with a few folks inside Iran through Starlink.

1. The jamming/disruption is local to large cities most notably the capital, Tehran.

2. Even in Tehran it is not complete and my friends are able to send and receive messages. Uploading videos is harder.

3. The regime is now raiding homes that they suspect have Starlink terminals. I don't know how they identify them but I do wonder if they are using technology to locate them.

I left the comment on starlink on that thread. I should note some personal observations as I am in touch with a few folks inside Iran through Starlink.

1. The jamming/disruption is local to large cities most notably the capital, Tehran

2. Even in Tehran it is not complete and my friends are able to send and receive messages. Uploading videos is harder.

3. The regime is now raiding homes that they suspect have Starlink terminals. I don't know how they identify them but I do wonder if they are using technology to locate them.

Except that in the common law system of the United States, a judge can throw out the regulation.

Yes, there are NGOs and organizations that sponsor these and pay for them. Here is an example: https://www.forbes.com/sites/cyrusfarivar/2024/12/18/inside-...

I hear after the Ukraine war, Starlink became very good at thwarting jamming. I am confident the Iranians are not as sophisticated as the Russians in than front.

Fortunately, the government cannot enforce complete blackout because thousands of startlink terminals are active inside the country. They have been complaining about it [1] to no avail. Using these terminals activists and journalists continue to upload videos of demonstrations to social media which has enabled analyses that show demonstrations are very wide spread [2] and continue to grow.

[1] https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-R/conferences/RRB/Pages/Starlink....

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cre28d2j2zxo

In recent years they have been trying to build a nation-wide Intranet that can function while international gateways are blocked. It is not perfect and every time they block the Internet, many issues happen but for the most port critical network services (such as payments) continue to function.

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=...