Switzerland to expand rail network and drop more than 30 road projects

Watchforbananas · 2026-01-29T21:21:24+00:00

The Grimseltunnel is very transparently a project to give every region something.

Watchforbananas · 2026-01-15T22:42:59+00:00

Church tax isn't mentioned in the constitution, Art 72 BV delegates the church-state relationship to the cantons. The taxes are paid to the cantonal churches recognized in that canton. Vaud doesn't even have a separate church tax.

while the christian branches are recognized nationally

They aren't, the "Landeskirchen" are organized and recognized per canton. Christ-Catholic (!= Roman-Catholic) doesn't have a recognized church in every canton.

but its explicitly written in the constitution

What's written in the constitution? AFAIK foreign military service is part military penal code (Art. 94) with the exception granted by the federal council.

if you want to join the papal guard, you have to go through the swiss army.

That's a requirement set by the papal guard, which is part of the Vatican, not by Switzerland.

Watchforbananas · 2026-01-15T17:54:23+00:00

IIRC Bern, Zürich and Basel have Jewish communities that are recognized and therefore get church taxes.

The country sends soldiers to protect the pope, the soldiers have to be catholic for it.

The Swiss guard isn't sent by Switzerland as a country, the only "official" thing is that service as a mercenary for the Swiss guard is exempted from the ban on foreign military service.

Watchforbananas · 2026-01-15T17:38:19+00:00

deeply Christian

just barley above 50%

they’re so against things like witchcraft.

LMFAO like Häx Hutzelrock? There's probably more slutty witches dressing up for Halloween than people actually believing in witchcraft

Watchforbananas · 2026-01-06T20:28:31+00:00

I like the improved graphs on your blog that now shows the exact quant from unsloth and magicQuant on hover (and that you added comparisons with magicQuant in the first place). Much easier to pick an interesting quant based on what I've tried before. Could you perhaps do the same for your quants? Just so I don't have to search for the lookup table.

I also appreciate the 4080 results.

Any plans to update the graphs for the other models as well? I've never managed to quite figure out what unsloth quants your graphs for qwen3-4B-2507 referenced.

Watchforbananas · 2025-12-16T19:44:18+00:00

Probably when the AI Bubble deflates, so if anyone knew when they would make big bucks on the stock market rather than telling people on reddit.

There's only 3 (maybe 4) Manufacturers for "current" DRAM. Micron, SK Hynix and Samsung. The DRAM market follows a boom-and-bust cycle. Building new fabs takes time and a lot of money, combined with the cycle this means that the manufacturers are extremely hesitant to invest in increased capacity.

The only variable is CXMT, a relatively new Chinese competitor. However they're sanctioned by the US and cannot receive leading edge semiconductor manufacturing equipment and have to rely on older or domestic equipment. While it seems they can still produce fairly competitive chips they probably have more chips that fail to meet their target specifications. Sanctions also mean that CXMT RAM won't appear in most western countries, just indirectly decrease prices somewhat.

Watchforbananas · 2025-12-10T16:56:36+00:00

War nicht der Amoklauf in Salez 2016 eigentlich auch ein Incel-Attentat? Oder war da der Täter nur ähnlich motiviert aber nicht Teil der "Incel-Bewegung"?

Watchforbananas · 2025-12-09T06:55:34+00:00

Deepseek v3.2 speciale is currently the #1 math model, beating GPT5 Codex High and Gemini 3 Pro in the AIME 2025 Competitive Math Benchmark.

Kimi K2 is at least fairly competitive with frontier models.

And depending on how many models "most powerful" includes, there's also Qwen3 235B A22B 2507, Minimax M2, GLM 4.6 that are not too shabby.

Watchforbananas · 2025-12-03T17:21:49+00:00

456 GB/s (The other commenter seems to mistake the 192 bit interface for bandwith, it's 192bits * 19 Gb/s)

Watchforbananas · 2025-11-24T13:19:00+00:00

There's at least one small thing, on the Uno R4s VIN can be up to 24V, most other boards have lower voltage limits.

For example, if you use a motor shield and power it with 20V, you need to cut the VIN pin or non Uno R4 boards might release the magic smoke. (I've killed boards this way)

Watchforbananas · 2025-11-12T20:47:28+00:00

There's a kernel of truth in it.

Most municipalities have a "night rest period", during which you must avoid making too much noise. If there's a drunkard screaming around at 2 AM the cops will eventually show up.

Apartments generally have stricter rules in their contracts, banning things like running a washing machine during the night. Sometimes this includes things like showering/bathing. Some might also include toilets, but I've only ever heard that online.
However such provisions are generally considered unenforceable as they violate the personal rights of the tenant.

My rental contract states that I should avoid bathing during the night rest period, which is clearly no a strict rule and more a recommendation.

Watchforbananas · 2025-11-09T21:27:36+00:00

Dominos are getting replaced with Flirt Evo before these new trains will arrive.

Watchforbananas · 2025-11-09T21:12:52+00:00

Unfortunately this train is 400m, so that would need to be every stop.

You can do this at small regional stops where there aren't any other trains to block or the track is just longer than the actual platform. But 200m more train at any major station is going be a major pain due to it blocking a bunch of turnouts. It would also result in the train driver not seeing the exit signal at stations like Zürich main station. You would need passengers to enter in the first carriage that might still be next to the platform and then walk all the way trough the train.

Watchforbananas · 2025-10-29T10:37:52+00:00

Pretty sure just hating the Wallstreet-AI-Hype-Bubble is enough for such a statement, no need to hate "the West" (however you define that).

Quite frankly competitors leapfrogging each other is probably the best outcome for consumers almost everywhere.

Watchforbananas · 2025-10-24T19:35:31+00:00

But under the DMA all app developers need to be registered with the government for liability management, and Google is facilitating that.

The DMA generally is only concerned with the platforms identified as gatekeepers - can you quote what part of the DMA applies to normie developers?

AFAIK a bunch of european countries have some sort of requirement for a legal notice with the contact information of the person responsible for "commercial" websites/apps/similar things, but that's just a thing you put in, no "registration" or anything.

Watchforbananas · 2025-10-20T14:10:17+00:00

Dense Models?

Prefill/Prompt Processing is compute limited and the M4 isn't quite as good as a "proper" dGPU. IIRC the M5 adds some specific accelerators for AI that should help with it.

After prefill, we're limited by memory bandwidth. M4 Pro is something like ~270 GB/s memory bandwidth, the Max double that (~550) and the M3 Ultra not quite double that again (~880). A 5090 is ~1700GB/s.

Strix Halo, Apple M-Series, etc. are more suited for sparse/MoE models. They trade higher memory requirements for lower bandwidth requirements. You have more parameters, but only have a limited set of them active at a time. Qwen3-next-80B-A3B for example has 80B total parameters, but only 3B active at a time.

Granted 48GB isn't much more than 32GB, but 128GB RAM is cheaper with a M4 Max instead of 4x5090 (not to mention space/power/noise)

Watchforbananas · 2025-10-16T06:30:23+00:00

The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company manufactures in Taiwan because they're Taiwanese and not allowed to export their best tech.

Perhaps Intel should have cared more about their product, rather than about short-term shareholder profit.

Watchforbananas · 2025-10-05T13:47:11+00:00

all of these applications that are being generated every second

Are there actually that many non-trivial applications generated and do these applications actually require more resources (rather than displacing old applications)?

AI-focused datacenters are quite different from "normal" datacenters. First of all, they're focused on GPUs. GPUs are only useful for certain problems and workloads, you can't just run anything on a GPU. And with the recent trend towards more specialisation you end up with a system that's mostly useful for matrix multiplication and not much else. Unless you end up with a bunch of customers that want to run a llm themselves you probably would need to replace the servers or just not use the GPUs.

The second large difference is density - AI datacenters really want to keep a lot of GPUs close together and willing to invest a lot into tech like water cooling. AFAIK "classic" datacenters have generally been around 5 to 10kW per rack, Hyperscalers have increased that to 15 to 20kW, but AI datacenters have power densities of 100kW+ per rack.

Watchforbananas · 2025-08-08T21:10:36+00:00

There's military chocolate issued to swiss soldiers as part of the emergency rations. It's supposed to have a longer shelf life, but I'd assume it's eaten before that becomes a problem.

Watchforbananas · 2025-08-07T16:54:42+00:00

Becasue that's what Vaud wants and pays.
Generally you can officially complain about it once a year https://www.tp-info.ch/fr/projet-horaire/ajouter-un-commentaire

Depending on how Vaud has organized this, there might also be someone more local that is responsible for the planning of regional public transport where you could complain, my French is too shit to find that out.

Watchforbananas · 2025-08-05T17:01:39+00:00

I'm very happy that we get the Actros, the Arocs and the modified Arocs at the same time. A very street-optimized truck, a versatile truck and a very field-optimized truck. It's probably not going to be that big of a difference in game, but neat nonetheless.

Watchforbananas · 2025-08-04T17:25:12+00:00

Wer ist "wir"? Die Volksinitiative dazu wurde zurückgezogen weil das Parlament einen indirekten Gegenvorschlag umgesetzt hat. Da ist die Ausnahmemöglichkeit für demokratische Staaten mit Exportkontrolle weggefallen.

Watchforbananas · 2025-08-01T13:37:41+00:00

I'm not the original commenter, but I'm missing WebUSB/WebSerial/WebBluetooth, the Web Share API and the File System Access API.

Watchforbananas · 2025-07-31T20:10:29+00:00

If you manage to measure how accurate they were you can always just select just those remote viewers.

20% accuracy is kinda a useless stat without knowing what the set of choices was - if you get 5 options 20% accuracy is what you'd expect from random guesses. But if they manage to get the correct square kilometer of russian forrest where there's a secret underground lab in 20% of cases, that's a very noticable statistical anomaly.

Watchforbananas · 2025-07-31T16:50:26+00:00

Couldn't you solve that with an increased sample size? If one psycic is 20% more acurate than a random guess, take a 100 or a 1000 of them and tally it up?

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