I’m a little surprised by your description of constant releases and instability. That matches how I would describe Claude Code, and has been one of the main reasons I tend to use OpenCode more than Claude Code.

OpenCode has been much more stable for me in the 6 months or so that I’ve been comparing the two in earnest.

I use Droid specifically because Claude Code breaks too often for me. And then Droid broke too (but rarely), and I just stuck to not upgrading (like I don't upgrade WebStorm. Dev tools are so fragile)

I’ve been on Kagi for over a year and I’m pretty happy with it. At the beginning there were some noticeable differences in results that frustrated me, but at this point I don’t really miss Google except for some of the nice “not web site results” features like calculation and conversion. I mostly go straight to Wolfram Alpha for those now. And for a lot of the “random curiosity satisfaction” stuff where I would have preferred Google results, I’ll now just use ChatGPT or Gemini.

There are probably cheaper options, especially if you want to literally use your smartphone as the hotspot, but the Verizon home backup internet plan I looked at recently is $20 a month (and gives you 7 24-hour periods per month of unlimited data).

The Verizon home router is included when you sign up (you have to return it if you cancel). I bought it out of desperation when my home fiber internet was down all weekend due to a local tech screwing up and unplugging my house from the breakout box on the curb, but given the cost and the normal reliability of my home internet it’s really barely worth it.

I think this is actually the reason the Neo has 8 GB of RAM (non-upgradable). It’s their anti-cannibalization strategy.

They’re relying on the huge portion of their existing laptop market who self-identifies as “tech-savvy” or “enthusiast” and thinks 8 GB of RAM is a non-starter.

Those folks will keep buying Mac laptops at double (or triple, quadruple, …) the price.

It has 8gb ram because the A18 pro chip has that baked in. They won't spend money on redesigning.

If next iteration has A19 pro chip in it - it will have 12gb.

> It's also why the SSD is slower than a MacBook Pro or MacBook Air;

It's actually not that much slower, at least if you compare machines with the same amount of storage. The M2 and M3 MacBook Air with 256GB comes in at 1700 MB/s[1], while the Neo with 256GB is... drumroll... 1700 MB/s[2].

Yes, Air and Pro machines with more storage are faster. I have not seen any benchmark of the Neo with 512GB, so maybe it lags behind the Air and Pro there. But I've not seen anyone publish a benchmark which actually demonstrates that.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/1gvovdt/the_ultimate_g...

[2] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/macbook-neo-has-up-to-8...

I should clarify that I was referring to the memory bandwidth. Compared to the 100 GB/s of a M3 MacBook Air, the 60 GB/s of the Neo is 40% slower. My M1 Pro MacBook Pro's memory bandwidth is 200 GB/s; that's 3.33x faster than the Neo.

That presumes that “killer AI drones” are a valid way to accomplish some valid goal.

For example, I do in fact want to live in a world where only the bad guys have child soldiers, use human shields, deliberately target civilians, and abuse prisoners of war.

If the other guys have child soldiers, you don't need child soldiers of your own to defeat them.

If the other guys have an army of killer robots and you don't, you are going to die.

Do not succumb to "we have to win the race" reasoning and escalation, when the race is leading off a cliff. It is, in fact, possible to stop things via international cooperation. Treat it the way we do nuclear proliferation. (Efforts to stop nuclear proliferation have not been perfect, but they've been incredibly effective and made it much more difficult to make the problem worse than it already is.)

Nukes are intrinsically complex and require a high degree of skill, time, and resources to pull off.

Attack drones can be as easy as strapping an off the shelf grenade to an off the shelf drone.

What fairyland do you live in?

> TypeScript also was specifically designed so engine could strip types and execute result code.

That's no less a build step than concating, bundling, minifying, etc. When people say "I'm against processing code before deploying it to a web site" but then also say "TypeScript is okay though" or "JSX is okay though," all they're really saying is "I like some build steps but not others." Which is fine! Just say that!

If you have proof of home ownership and proof of legal guardianship of the child, what’s the problem?

I can see it being a problem if e.g. a bunch of family members are putting their kids in a school district based on a single home owned by a grandparent. But if that grandparent was also the kid’s legal guardian, fair enough!

> It’s also very brittle and one charismatic populist away from unraveling

All sufficiently large governments (really all organizations of any kind) are necessarily like this, from the most successful attempts at open societies to the most autocratic. They all require constant vigilance both to perform their intended function and to preserve themselves into the future.

Note that even though the U.S. has a Constitution, the entire U.S. government is still, like the UK, highly reliant on inexplicit norms many of which go back hundreds of years before the U.S. was founded. They’re both still English common law systems.

That generally works for timestamps (Temporal Instant). But it doesn’t work for representing calendar dates with no time information (Temporal PlainDate) unless you add an additional strict convention like “calendar dates are always represented as midnight UTC”).