I’ve been tinkering with Python more recently. When used on a MCU1 or a PC, it’s such a nice experience being able to write some code, run it without having to compile, see what happens, and adjust as necessary. Now, since I’m a newb at this, I’m getting help from… *shudder* LLM’s.2 Now, in the past I’d turn to Googling, looking at reliable and friendly forums such as Adafruit and Arduino, but I’d invariably need to check out Stack Overflow as well.3
As you might imagine, Stack Overflow was something of a victim of it’s own success. It’s content was good enough to train the LLM’s of the world – and those LLM’s can parrot / offer all the insights gleaned from Stack Overflow without the caustic haughty condescending replies typical of the comment sections on Stack Overflow / SlashDot / HackADay. Thus, it’s no small wonder the following graphic was circulating on Reddit:
Where was I? Oh, yeah… I was using some LLM’s to help with Python. I don’t have any fancy GPU’s, BitCoin mining rigs, etc, so I’m just using my non-gaming PC’s modest 16 GB VRAM to run the smaller local LLM’s. I can run things up to about 8B parameters, like the various Llama flavors, at 8 bit quantization with reasonable speed. I’ve found for my system that Qwen3 4B to be fast, thoughtful, and helpful.
I’ve realized this blog post is woefully low on actual Python related content. Here’s some things for future-me to remember:
- pip list
- Will give me all the names of all packages installed
- pip install requests Pillow reportlab PyPDF2
- Will install multiple packages, one after another
- Microcontroller unit [↩]
- Large language models such as [↩]
- I bought their April Fool’s joke keyboard turned real product and once I’d remapped the keys, got significant use out of it for a long time. Between the construction, packaging, and accessories, at $30 this is still a total no-brainer if you need a small extra keyboard dedicated to some specific tasks. [↩]