It's not about free movement, but "free trade"/joint market.
Having rich countries support its poor neighbors is an ingenious solution to improving your quality of life. You impose your rules, regulations and monetary policy, they get capital for internal improvements. If there's no huge waste or theft (which sadly exists), you end up with wide, strong and stable continent-level middle class. Which is great goal, as we can see when observing Switzerland -- wide, strong and stable country-level middle class.
Last time Switzerland attempted something like this (~10y ago), it got burnt, hard (lost a lot of EU related projects and academic financing). Cutting the economical/market ties with the EU, considering its position and dependencies, is a suicide.
I wasn't precise enough, my bad.
I was referring to the comment about which says that by Switzerland restricting the moves from EU, loses the free movement to EU. My comment says that this is less of an issue -- the real issue comes from the market restrictions that EU will install against Switzerland.
I did the same after Netflix dropped movies I cared about.
First I tried playing DVDs straight from PC which is connected to TV. That was horrible quality and UX.
Then I bought a good quality DVD player with hardware upscaling. It provided better image quality and slightly better UX. But you still had to deal with the menus and buch of other slow loading stuff that comes with DVDs... Gave up on it.
My daily driver! Considering how much time I spend with these tools, it's surprising that I had relatively few iterations over the years.
I have two major use cases:
1) a TODO list
2) longer texts (project plans, travel plans, shopping lists for things to buy sometimes in the next 6 months (e.g. books to read), etc.).
The TODO list is my daily driver. As the family became larger, it became difficult to track what needs to be done the next day (including simple things, like "give a daily dose of vitamin", "clean & lube the bike chain every 2w"). For a very long time, I used pen & paper. It was OK, used it for years, but it didn't scale so well with kids. An Android TODO/reminder app with notifications and repeats was a life saver. I used BZ Reminder (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bzzzapp) which ticked all the boxes. But the author decided to downgrade the lifetime licences to periodic... It's still not expensive but I don't approve the behavior. After trying out a dozen of similar apps, I ended up with "Reminders: Todo List & Notes" (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pocketbril...). I can't live without a tool like this anymore. TBH, pen & paper TODO lists are still around.
For the longer texts I used an offline wiki (ZIM) for quite some time. Then gradually moved to Google Keep (simple, can accept text & lists, and can be shared). The Keep collection kept growing. With both lists and texts. It's pretty bad input method, but its simplicity kept me using it for years. Now I'm happy with simple txt files (syced between phone & PCs, and properly backed up).
IIUC, the Swiss German can't make a cut as there's no standard written form (and with it, not much resources), and the variations between the cities are pretty significant.
There really isn't a single "Swiss German" dialect. It is rather a family of dialects, and this family is again part of the larger family of "Alemannic German" dialects, which are spoken in most of southwestern Germany, Switzerland and western parts of Austria [0]. It is really very hard to clearly demarcate "Swiss German" from dialects spoken for example in the Black Forest, around the city of Freiburg im Breisgau, in Vorarlberg or even (historically) in Alsace. My own dialect is Swabian (also Alemannic), and I never had trouble understanding the local dialects around Basel, Berne or Zurich. It is easier for me to understand these Swiss German dialects than, for example, Bavarian dialects.
As per some folks I've met (I live in french Romandie, almost 0 variation here they just speak slower than french), for ie folks from Zurich its almost impossible to understand folks from Bern. And thise are 2 big cities pretty close to each other, not some remote mountain valley.
But they can easily switch to more modest verion or even high german if needed.
> for ie folks from Zurich its almost impossible to understand folks from Bern. And thise are 2 big cities pretty close to each other, not some remote mountain valley.
This is absolutely not true. Bern is the capital and many people travel there for work or other reasons. It's also a dialect very heavily featured on TV (e.g. I remember there was a weather reporter from Bern, don't know if she still does this), a lot of famous politicians are/were from Bern (e.g. former Federal Council member Adolf Ogi) and many famous musicians also sang/sing in this dialect (Mani Matter, Züri West, Gölä, etc.)
Almost all Swiss dialects are mutually intelligible simply due to the high level of exposure to the diversity (and also their relative similarity). There are some people who don't understand Walliserdeutsch well, because it's less represented and also linguistically more removed from the rest - but even that's something you get used to quickly.
Alemannic is still spoken in Alsace. Albeit it has some of the same issue your listed: no standard written form (Hochdeutsch was used for that) and wide difference even between close villages. In particular, Northern and Southern varieties have a different vocalic systems.
Similiar to Slovenian - we have 400 dialects, grouped in 7 larger groups based on similarity. Given that there is only like 2 million speakers that may feel like a large number, but it's a consequence of rather hilly geography.
Differences between some of them are rather extreme, especially Prekmurje dialects feel like their own language - so we need to fallback to "book" Slovenian when talking with people from different regions.
I have zero experience in sales and marketing, but I was wondering how I would start if I had to do that. After reading a bit about it and googling around, I stumbled upon Alex Hormozi and his YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/@alexhormozi
It has a lot of content & good presentation (minimalistic, but crisp). All about sales and marketing. I have no idea how an experienced sales or marketing person would rate it, but to me it sounds reasonable and useful. Give it a try (e.g. try this video: https://youtu.be/FMzKk73iUhw -- his videos have clickbaty titles, and are pretty long -- don't let that discourage you).
He also has two books (sales and marketing), but I didn't read them yet. The reviews say that they are somewhat basic. I'll still give them a try.
I was in a similar discussion some 10y ago. After a few rounds, we concluded that for a really good reliability you could do the following:
- no service is expected to last long enough or to keep your data safe,
- a physical medium is the way to go,
- create 3 backups stored in different location,
- use a different brand for each backup,
- every 10y review the backups: check the data degradation, rebackup on a new medium if the current one is getting phased away, reencode the content if the format is becoming obsolete & hard to open. [IMO, this is the key point]
Getting the old works of a predecessor on a physical medium is a really good feeling (I know how I felt when I'd discover the old notebooks from my father, uncle, etc.). Based on my experience and Internet, CD-R seems to be a good choice if the data volume allows. But it's getting slowly phased away. (fun fact: a few months ago I found the first CD I burnt -- works flawlessly (although, no checksums checked) after 25y)
What the OP is referring to requires overprovisioning of the high priority traffic and the sine-like utilization (without it, the benefits of the "batch" tier is close to zero -- the preemption is too high for any meaningful work when you are close to the top of the utilization hill).
You get that organically when you are serving lots of users. And, there's not much GPUs etc. used for that. Training LLMs gives you a different utilization pattern. The "best effort" resources aren't as useful in that setup.
Because accelerators (tpus, gpus) unlike ram/cpu are notoriously hard to timeshare and vitrualize. So if you get evicted in an environment like that, you have to reload your entire experiment state from a model checkpoint. With giant models like that, it might take dozens of minutes. As a result, I doubt that these experiments are done using "spare" resources - in that case, constant interruptions and reloading would result in these experiments finishing sometime around the heat death of the universe :)
Simple, elegant and effective.
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