@jtr I went through a similar migration from Arc. I landed on Safari (1 profile for work and 1 profile for shopping/banking) and Orion (everything else – casual browsing, research, technical stuff, etc). I still miss Arc because it is a lovely UX/browser experience on the desktop (their iPhone/iPad browser, though, ugh).

@Mtt I haven’t really dabbled in “local” AI image generation or editing, so don’t have any insider intel to share. I hope you post on what you learn as you progress!

@Mtt for running LLM’s, I’ve been switching back and forth between LM Studio and Anaconda’s AI Navigator. They are pretty similar apps – providing a pretty easy UI for discovering LLM’s, downloading, loading, and then chatting with the model. Both also provide you the ability to setup an API endpoint to programmatically access the LLM (typically thru an OpenAI specification).

LM Studio ties into HuggingFace for its choice of models while AI Navigator seems to pull from a list of models curated directly by Anaconda. This list is smaller than HuggingFace.

Both work really well – I have an M4 Pro-based Maci Mini with 48gb ram. This allows for a pretty decent range of LLM’s to run. If you’re running on a mac, try find MLX-based models to run as they are optimized for Applie Silicon. However, the majority of models on HuggingFace are GGUF-based.

@JohnBrady I recently became a paying customer as well and don’t regret it at all! I’ve also been starting to use their Orion web browser and liking it so far.

@johnchandler yes, to this. syncing a git repo into an iCloud Drive folder WILL cause sync’ing issues – especially if your other iCloud-enabled computer is also using git! I discovered this first hand and wound up moving my local git folders out of iCloud Drive. No issues since.