The question is whatever time period people discuss, somehow the indigenous people is whoever was there exactly before the time they mean. But people have moved around all through history and killed each other the whole way through so it's always strange. Almost as a rule the "original" indigenous people were killed by the "current" indigenous people sometimes not that long ago before the period under discussion. It think it's better to just use the terms for both groups. Also because it's a bit weird to relegate the conquered group to just "the indigenous", they have a name too.
I understand using the shorthand for encounters of two groups with very disparate technology knowledge like for example during the Discoveries period but when it's so long ago and people had access to "same" stuff it's a bit weird. My comment isn't a slight on the less powerful people it's weirdness with the term.
Why Databricks would do this (rather than IPO) is obvious. When you can raise privately, it’s way easier than IPO. The real question to me is why the investors (new and previous) are going along with it?
You'd think previous investors would want some actual liquidity though at some point. The early investors have had plenty of chances now but surely not everyone's been able to cash out. But hey, they have lots of funny money now I guess?
I'm not doubting that the finding is there, I'm expressing scepticism that it means very much. If you randomly sample uniformly from the set {"a", "b", " "} repeatedly, the "word
"ab" will appear much more often than the "word", "aaaaaabbbbababa". Doesn't say very much about language itself though.
You got me interested in the question, and one of the first things I found out is that there is Zipf’s Law, and then there is Zipf’s Law of Abbreviation.
Monkeys-randomly-typing is one of many processes which will indeed generate sequences conforming to the former, and it is perhaps the exceptions which are most interesting.
The latter law observes that the former generally applies to sequences generated for communication, having semantics and usually a grammar. While this may be the expected finding, there is value in having this expectation empirically verified.
I agree with you, but a few slight caveats to your point that I think are worth noting.
> Not just because of the countless counterexamples of anthropology to everything you can think of in human affairs
A lot of anthropological research is done on non-agrarian societies. The author limited himself to peasants here, so that limits some (far from all) of the variation.
> I found far more even-aged or women-older marriages than I'd expected
The author also limits himself to age at _first_ marriage; I’d expect a lot more variation in age at remarriage. And even if divorce was rare compared to today, death of a spouse was much more common. So you’d expect to see quite some remarriages in the family tree
People who don't "over engineer" also don't track errors. So you might be losing a bunch of users because your website is broken on their devices, and you'll never know. You can't repro it because your locale doesn't match theirs.
Where I live they say it’s “so everyone can make the bus in time” and it’s always made sense to me. Running to arrive at a bus stop just in time, only to find it passed two minutes ahead of schedule, is way worse
