So what happened?

I can only guess, but I do know what I was doing just before the miracle — fixing an error in Terminal, along with cleaning up brew installations.

The error was a missing quote mark in a file, something that has plagued me for years. Before AI, I would copy and paste errors into Google and hope for an answer. Typically I would wind up going down rabbit holes, becoming increasingly frustrated until I finally gave up.

What saved me was Le Chat from Mistral. It showed me how to find the offending file and how to fix it. Out of curiosity, I asked if the the missing quote mark would cause any problems. To my chagrin, it had the potential to create a long list of problems, many of which seemed embarrassingly significant.

But this was a long-standing error, so how would fixing it solve problems that just cropped recently? Again, I can only guess that it was a cumulative thing over the years that finally reared its ugly head.

While I was at it, I upgraded all the stuff that I’ve installed with brew. In some cases, I decided to uninstall — things that take up a lot of space and that I no longer have use for. These included Node, Ruby and Hugo.

Why were these installed in the first place? Because I was curious about static site generators. Fussing around with Terminal is not my idea of a good time, so I eventually moved on. Good old Textpattern can never be replaced.

Recently I learned that Font Awesome has acquired static site generator called Eleventy. They’re rebranding it as Build Awesome.

This is surprising given that Font Awesome’s icons are meant to make life easier for developers. The same goes for Web Awesome, a collection of code components.

I’ll be curious to see how or if they can make a static site generator easy for the average person who has never hear of Terminal, and would be scared to touch it if they had.

Until now.

It started with Spotlight no longer being able to find any apps or files. After a lot of back and for with Claude that resulted in more time in Terminal than I normally like, along with a trying number of reboots, I was able to force Spotlight to re-index.

Spotlight is now back to normal except for one weird thing — it can’t find the stock Apple apps, including, just to make things more irritating, Terminal. These apps are kept in a separate part of the system, and Spotlight — for reasons unknown — is no longer able to index this part.

Claude suggests re-installing macOS, insisting that it’s not that hard and only takes 30 minutes. I’m skeptical, and besides there are other solutions. For one thing, Terminal is now in the dock.

And Spotlight has been demoted from Command-Space. I’ve turned that combo over to Launchbar, which has no trouble finding stock apps. I’m tempted to go on a rant about why on earth a third-party app would be better at indexing than the one built in. But I'll spare you.

I tried other launchers. Raycast found the stock apps, but slowed down the computer to the point of making it juddery. Alfred, surprisingly, could not find the stock apps. Quicksilver found them, but has an interface that only a mother could love.

Launchbar is free if you don’t mind the occasional nag. I haven’t been nagged yet, so we’ll see how that goes. If it gets bad, I might be tempted to see if I can bear Quicksilver. Or, you know, actually pay for Launchbar.

Update: Now Mail won't send email. I switched to Spark, which has a free version that seems fine. But this really is annoying. My expectation is that it would be the opposite — Apple's apps should be the gold standard for basic reliability. Third-party apps should only be there for optional functionality.

Economists have observed that self-interest and the profit motive are the engines of capitalism. We use legal institutions to harness these basic human instincts for the greater good.

To his credit, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has on a number of occasions mused about the need for legislation in the area of technology. I won’t argue with that, but there is another factor we should keep in mind: fear.

Why is the U.S. military so intent on getting unfettered access to AI models being developed by OpenAI and Anthropic? It’s because they fear their rivals will gain superiority in AI and use it against them. We’re in a new kind of arms race.

Fear often outweighs greed. Entrepreneurs are aware they need a rules-based playing field to keep greed from getting out of hand. But fear on a global scale can prevent this from happening — fear that rivals are not doing the same, and that our side would handicap itself with self-imposed rules.

Would some kind of international agreement work? To a certain extent, yes, but there would always be the fear that others were cheating. Would it even be possible to verify that they weren’t?

I was initially tempted to do the same thing until I concluded that Anthropic, the company that runs Claude, is motivated by greed every bit as much as OpenAI.

My first thought was to try Ecosia’s version of AI. I already use Ecosia for search, and like the idea that they use their revenue to fund environmental causes.

But then it occurred to me that Ecosia is very likely using the services of other companies for its AI responses. Sure enough, it pays OpenAI and Google for their APIs — application programming interfaces that allow them to tap into those companies’ models.

They somewhat mitigate this dependency by framing their answers in an environmentally conscious manner. For example, they they tried very hard to make lab-grown meat seem like a good thing — not creepy at all! But still, I wanted to keep looking.

I’m currently trying out Lumo from Proton. They rely completely on open source large language models (LLMs), with no connections at all to OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and the rest of the proprietary bunch.

But open source LLMs don’t come from nowhere. When asked, Lumo cited these contributors: NeMo, OpenHands, OLMO 2, GPT‑OSS, Qwen, Ernie 4.5 VL, Apertus, Kimi K2.

Of these, two might be a bit shady. OpenHands is a Meta project and Qwen is based in China. Lumi promises complete privacy, though, so there should be no worries about your data making its way to the owner of Facebook or the Chinese government.

I have a feeling that many of the switchers to Claude were people who use it for programming. I don’t do much coding these days, but when I do, I might fall back to Claude.

Lumo was able to show me how to centre a div, and it had some good ideas about how to use an app to update a web page. I’m not sure at what point I would need to go for the subscription-based Lumo+ if I really wanted to up my reliance on it for coding.

If nothing else, it’s a worthy experiment.