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Sidekick: Local-first native macOS LLM app

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Re: Sidekick: Local-first native macOS LLM app

#81

Post by knowaveragejoe »

brulard wrote: post #60
kridsdale1 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you describe seems to be OpenAI’s “moat”. They currently are the farthest ahead in app UX for nontechnical users and in Brand Recognition. It doesn’t matter if they are 10% behind Anthropic in frontier model quality if Claude For Mac is a shitty Electron app.

Claude for Mac works quite well for me, and now with these MCP servers looking better than ever. And regarding electron - I have seen (and created for myself) awesome apps that would never existed without it.

The only thing missing from the MCP component of Claude Desktop is a better interface for discovering, enabling and configuring different MCP servers.

Re: Sidekick: Local-first native macOS LLM app

#83

Post by jredwards »

kridsdale1 wrote: post #49
phren0logy wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a fundamental issue with naive RAG implementations: they aren't accurate enough for pretty much anything

Ultimately, the quality of OCR on PDF is where we are bottlenecked as an industry. And not just in text characters but understanding and feeding to the LLM structured object relationships as we see in tables and graphs. Intuitive for a human, very error prone for RAG.

I've also observed this issue and I wonder where the industry is on it. There seem to be a lot of claims that a given approach will work here, but not a lot of provably working use cases.

Re: Sidekick: Local-first native macOS LLM app

#84

Post by toomuchtodo »

pzo wrote: post #33

some other alternatives (a little more mature / feature rich): anythingllm https://github.com/Mintplex-Labs/anything-llm openwebui https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui lmstudio https://lmstudio.ai/

Any recommendations wrt resources that compare these or provides more context in that regard?

Re: Sidekick: Local-first native macOS LLM app

#85

Post by wobfan »

mentalgear wrote: post #70

Looks great, kudos for making it open-source! Yet as with any app that has access to my local file system, what instantly comes to mind is "narrow permissions" / principle of least permissions. It'd be great if the app would only have read access to my files, not full disk permission. As an end-user, I'm highly concerned that files might get deleted or data shared via the internet. So ideally, Sidekick would have onl…

> It'd be great if the app would only have read access to my files, not full disk permission.

I'm running it right now and macOS didn't ask for any permissions at all which afaik means that it cannot access most of my personal folders and definitely not the full disk. Am I missing something?

Re: Sidekick: Local-first native macOS LLM app

#86

Post by LoganDark »

wobfan wrote: post #85
mentalgear wrote: post #70

Looks great, kudos for making it open-source! Yet as with any app that has access to my local file system, what instantly comes to mind is "narrow permissions" / principle of least permissions. It'd be great if the app would only have read access to my files, not full disk permission. As an end-user, I'm highly concerned that files might get deleted or data shared via the internet. So ideally, Sidekick would have onl…

> It'd be great if the app would only have read access to my files, not full disk permission. I'm running it right now and macOS didn't ask for any permissions at all which afaik means that it cannot access most of my personal folders and definitely not the full disk. Am I missing something?

> I'm running it right now and macOS didn't ask for any permissions at all which afaik means that it cannot access most of my personal folders and definitely not the full disk. Am I missing something?

This is only true if it uses App Sandbox, which is mandatory for apps distributed through the App Store, but not necessarily everything else

Re: Sidekick: Local-first native macOS LLM app

#87

Post by gcanyon »

brulard wrote: post #60
kridsdale1 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you describe seems to be OpenAI’s “moat”. They currently are the farthest ahead in app UX for nontechnical users and in Brand Recognition. It doesn’t matter if they are 10% behind Anthropic in frontier model quality if Claude For Mac is a shitty Electron app.

Claude for Mac works quite well for me, and now with these MCP servers looking better than ever. And regarding electron - I have seen (and created for myself) awesome apps that would never existed without it.

What in your mind is the main advantage for using the app over the web site?

Re: Sidekick: Local-first native macOS LLM app

#90

Post by pzo »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #84
pzo wrote: post #33

some other alternatives (a little more mature / feature rich): anythingllm https://github.com/Mintplex-Labs/anything-llm openwebui https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui lmstudio https://lmstudio.ai/

Any recommendations wrt resources that compare these or provides more context in that regard?

I haven't played with more advanced feature or RAG, but at least AnythingLLM seems to support both local and remote vector databases (you can choose: lancedb, chroma, pinecone, zilliz cloud), embedding provider again both local (ollama, lmstudio) and remote and adjust text splitting and chuncking. Have some Agent skills like Web Search, scraping websites, sql connector. Seems probably the most advanced and I like you can still use ollama or lmstudio as your main LLM models repository.

OpenWebUI a little bit more harder to setup (need docker), but interface very similar to OpenAI

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