On all flights I have taken the flight attendants count the passengers on board before taxiing and check the lavatories. This method wouldn't have worked even with available free seats.
Zopf means “braid” and it also denotes a medium-size bread type, made with some milk and glazed with yolk, shaped like a braid, traditionally eaten on Sunday.
Note that the model is based on RoBERTa and has only 125m parameter. It is not competing against any of the new popular models, not even small ones like Phi or GeMMa.
For German there is an international body. Regional language differences are officially acknowledged. For example, Swiss High German has no Esszet and in Austria January is spelled "Jenner" instead of "Januar".
For those who may not know it: SPJ was employed at Microsoft Research for a long time. He recently moved to Epic Games, where he co-developed the Verse language.