I have a good friend who relies upon Starlink for connectivity for his home in southeastern Ohio (USA).
We've worked through all of the other alternatives there, including using cellular modems with directional antennas mounted up high on a mast pipe and multi-carrier aggregation tricks like Speedify. There is no local WISP serving the area, no fiber, no coax for DOCSIS, and xDSL is either a bad joke, basically basically abandoned, or both in much of the US in 2026.
So far, Starlink is the win.
(I'm pleased to hear that things are better than that for you in your neck of the woods.)
Indeed. On a long-enough timeline, people will adjust to whatever it is that the sun is doing regardless of what the clock on the wall says. That's the way it has always been.
So when we're talking about one second every once in awhile, I'm not sure that [effectively] giving up by adopting leap hours instead of leap seconds isn't the right option -- as long as we agree to do it uniformly.
Shifting to a leap-minute feels close-enough to me: We might get one every 50 or 100 years. A lot of us reading this today will never live to see a leap-minute, but it's close enough that we'll still have it collectively in-mind when it it needs to happen. (And if we screw it up at that time, the outliers will only be off by a minute. Not so bad.)
A leap-hour, meanwhile: That kicks the can so far down the road that we'll probably lose track of it completely. ~6,000 years is a very long time; society will be a very different thing by then. Leap-hours seem to me to be moral equivalent to the "fuck it, let's just give up" option.
edit: accidentally a word, and fixed an off-by-an-order-of-magnitude error on the approximate years required for a leap hour
I used to use 4 of those with that same branding, Simmverter, on my first Pentium system.
There were 4 variations of the ones I had, for each combination of Tall/Short and Forward/Backward. This way, 4 such adapters could be nestled together in a single set of 4 72-pin sockets without physical interference.
Each one accepted 4 30-pin SIMMs, for a total of 16 per 4-slot system.
It was not amusing trying to get all 16 SIMMs to work correctly at the same time, but it was inexpensive to get spares and I eventually got better at being deterministic about which module to swap out to attempt to improve reliability.
(Things got a lot better when sticks of 72-pin EDO became cheaper.)
I didn't realize that I was on trial and that there was a requirement that I back up my personal anecdotes and observations with working examples to prove their worth.
In reality, there's no reason for me to do so, because I'm not on trial here at all. Please keep your accusations to yourself, comrade.
My willingness to prove to you that a bot uses a word in a strange way is approximately zero.
Owning an EV doesn't necessitate spending a few grand to have a fast charger installed. They charge fine from a regular 110v US wall outlet -- they just do it slowly.
And by "slowly," I mean: Somewhere in the realm of 2-5 miles per hour. It's not fast at all.
But that's compatible with many lifestyles, wherein: The car is probably just sitting there at home for 12 or more hours per day, anyway.
If the round-trip commute is 30 miles, and the car gains just 3 miles per hour while plugged in, and it gets plugged in for 12 hours per day, then: It gains 36 miles per day, and the daily-commute part of driving it is completely covered by a regular outlet.
(Which still doesn't address the conundrum that many apartment dwellers face, but it would've helped me at most of the apartments I've lived in: Ground floor, and parking right outside of my place. I'd have just used an extension cord and the landlord wouldn't have said a word, except maybe to have a chat about how I like the car.)
I use the $20 plan, but I don't code all day every day.
With Codex, it is my experience that I can churn through a 5h window in no time with newer models -- especially when they're new. So I tend to use fancier models for planning, and the less-fancy models for writing code based on that plan. I switch to the fanciest model if any part of this gets stuck.
If I've got a something big-ish to work on, I pay attention to the reset timers so I can get more of it done in one chunk.
Models seem to slowly get better/relatively less-expensive as they age. (It isn't clear to me if that's because the cost actually goes down, or if the allotment goes up, or if things get more efficient in unseen ways, or what. OpenAI is vague AF about what we get for the $20 that we pay.)
That's not how the bot uses the word, though -- at least in my experience. The bot uses "gate" to describe a thing that only blocks, and can never open.
The tomato is native to places like Peru and Ecuador, and eventually was moved to [what is now known as] Mexico as we kept bringing it further north.
The tomato is Ohio's state fruit[1], but it does not belong in Ohio. The only reason we have tomatoes growing in Ohio is humans; nature has nothing to do with it. They wouldn't be here without people dilly-whacking with things.
(And I'm glad they did so. Tomatoes are delicious.)
[1]: Seems weird but it be that way anyhow. Ohio also has a native state fruit, which is the paw paw.
I think it's hard to generalize whether vertical farms are good or bad; efficient or inefficient. It seems that whether it works or not relies very heavily on the locality.
In my part of Ohio, we have lots of farmland -- and plenty of water that just falls out of the sky. We've got reasonably-long, generally-hot days during our growing season and we get some serious crop production done here while it lasts.
The rest of the year? The days are short. It's dark and cold outside; frozen, even. We can't grow crops outside here in the winter.
But vertical farms (eg, fancy greenhouses) can just keep going. With artificial light and/or supplemental heat, they're still producing even in the depths of winter.
Thus, I can go to the grocery store near my house and buy a locally-grown tomato in February. It's expensive to get this done, but the alternatives include paying someone to drive it up here from thousands of miles away or just going without a tomato until after things have warmed up again and stayed that way for awhile.
I was thinking about gated communities earlier today, in fact. We don't have many of them around here.
But where we do have them: At a given time, the gate might be open or closed; passable, or impassable. The presence of a gate is implicit, but the status of that gate is not known without advance knowledge or direct observation. And even when it is closed (even if it defaults to always being closed), there's generally a cromulent way for a person to get that gate to open and then move beyond it. It is designed to be opened and closed.
Gatekeeping: Sure. I've run across a ton of artificial gatekeepers online in my time. I've bypassed countless scores of them. Those are easy: Just ignore them and keep moving.
These aren't examples of the hard-blocking, impassable lava moats that the bot is fond of using "gate" to describe.
One thing I did recently with the bot definitely involved actual smoke tests, though: I was working with real hardware that can blow up in real ways, with the bot doing all of the circuit design work and coding based on my goals while I just distantly commanded the show from On-High and plugged shit into a breadboard.
(The project works well and I consider it to be Good Enough; I might go back and polish it more later. There was no smoke, but there could have been.)
That hasn't broadly happened yet, and it's even less likely to happen in the future with encrypted comms and locked-down firmware increasingly becoming the rule instead of the exception.
"That's such a clever way to see things! Let's delve into that!"
The bots (all of them) seem to show patterns of overuse of specific phrases, words, and punctuation.
Some of those are the ones you mentioned. Another that I've been seeing lately is overuse of the term "gate", wherein: As a human, I know what a gate is. A gate is a thing that can be open, or that can be closed. It might be locked or unlocked. The path beyond the gate may be passable or impassable or nonexistent. The gate is just a gate, and the presence of the gate doesn't imply whether it is open or closed.
But in bot-speak, a gate only refers to a hard block -- an impassable construct. Like a fence or a wall, or even a lava-filled moat.
But while a lava-filled moat is intended to be impassable, the bot uses "gate" -- a thing that is designed to be passed -- to describe that same kind of obstacle.
That's misuse of the term, I think, based on decades of dealing with gates in reality: Usually when I encounter a gate that is closed, I just open it and walk through.
I do have instructions that tell the bot to avoid that usage of the word and it ignores them sometimes anyway.
But "gate" is just today's problem-word that comes to mind as I write this. Yesterday, it was something different. Tomorrow, it will be something else entirely.
The overall pattern here is that of gratingly-repetitive bullshit-grade jargon that doesn't fit to begin with.
We've worked through all of the other alternatives there, including using cellular modems with directional antennas mounted up high on a mast pipe and multi-carrier aggregation tricks like Speedify. There is no local WISP serving the area, no fiber, no coax for DOCSIS, and xDSL is either a bad joke, basically basically abandoned, or both in much of the US in 2026.
So far, Starlink is the win.
(I'm pleased to hear that things are better than that for you in your neck of the woods.)