Tim Hopper

quick new post on what i've gotten out of HN vickiboykis.com/2025/03/17/2...

Anyone know of a recipe that works for getting a "pytest --pdb" debugger REPL up that lets you interactively execute "await ..." statements, similar to "python -m asyncio" ?

The StackOverflow threads about this are all pretty stale, wondering if there's a new option that I've not been able to […]

If someone tells you that coding with LLMs is easy they are (probably unintentionally) misleading you. They may well have stumbled on to patterns that work, but those patterns do not come naturally to everyone. I’ve been getting great results out of LLMs for code for over two years now. Here’s my attempt at transferring some of that experience and intution to you. Set reasonable expectations Account for training cut-off dates Context is king Ask them for options Tell them exactly what to do You have to test what it writes! Remember it’s a conversation Use tools that can run the code for you Vibe-coding is a great way to learn A detailed example Be ready for the human to take over The biggest advantage is speed of development LLMs amplify existing expertise Bonus: answering questions about codebases

Here's the table of contents for my lengthy new piece on how I use LLMs to help me write code https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/11/using-llms-for-code/

Great recs. Adding to my list.

I started using Python 20 years ago, but left and come back to it repeatedly. Every time I picked it back up, the dev experience had swung wildly. Getting caught up, even as an experienced user, was a huge PITA.

I think that's finally going to change with what @tdhopper.com just launched.

If you use the curl method, uv can update itself later which is nice

If you use python, but you don't use uv yet: why?

I decided not to try to pursue this as a print book because the ecosystem is always changing and the scope of the book will grow as I have time to put into it. If there are topics or questions you’d like to see addressed, please let me know.

Python Developer Tooling Handbook

👋🏻

In the last 10 years, I’ve had a growing interest in making Python development more effective. I’ve learned that a lot of teams don’t make the best use of the tooling available to use.

This has culminated with writing an ebook on developer tooling I’m excited to share with you.

pydevtools.com

if your back doesn’t hurt yet, protect it at all costs bsky.app/profile/imlu...

The Sony A7 iii after 5 years A parent's review of the Sony A7 iii

I wrote a post about my love for my Sony mirrorless camera for photographing my 4 kids

tdhopper.com/blog/sonya7i...

7-year old wanted to know how far the north pole is, so I asked Siri three times.

1st time “call mom” displayed on my screen and it started calling my *dad*

2nd it said “which Joel would you like to call”

3rd time it started to show directions to North Pole, AK

Writing a Math Textbook with Claude with Professor Ghrist Dr. Robert Ghrist shares how he used Claude to \

👂🏻I spoke with Dr. Robert Ghrist of the University of Pennsylvania about his recent groundbreaking endeavor to "direct" the creation of a beautiful new linear algebra textbook for AI students in just 55 days using a customized Anthropic Claude project.

tdhopper.com/blog/writing...

Great discussion of my recent post here 👇🏻

One Line Command to Launch a Notebook with Pytorch uv is changing how accessible Python is for new users. If you want to try out pytorch in a Jupyter Notebook, you can install uv and then run this single line command: uv run --python 3.12 --with ...

With uv, you can launch a Jupyter Lab instance with Pytorch installed instantly with a single command 🤯

pydevtools.com/blog/one-lin...

Bambu P1S with AMS

Highly recommend getting a 3D printer because it's the best way to make new parts for your 3D printer

Effective Python Developer Tooling in December 2024 I have been writing Python for 14 years next month. When I started, people were still using easy_install to install egg-based packages for Python 2.7 and nobody had heard about Conda yet, much less uv...

In this article, @tdhopper.com shared key principles of Python tooling, common anti-patterns he has observed, best practices & his list of favourite tools from December 2024.

pydevtools.com/blog/effecti...

#python #Programming #SoftwareDevelopment #WebDevelopment #TechNews #OpenSource

The GPT-4 barrier was comprehensively broken Some of those GPT-4 models run on my laptop LLM prices crashed, thanks to competition and increased efficiency Multimodal vision is common, audio and video are starting to emerge Voice and live camera mode are science fiction come to life Prompt driven app generation is a commodity already Universal access to the best models lasted for just a few short months “Agents” still haven’t really happened yet Evals really matter Apple Intelligence is bad, Apple’s MLX library is excellent The rise of inference-scaling “reasoning” models Was the best currently available LLM trained in China for less than $6m? The environmental impact got better The environmental impact got much, much worse The year of slop Synthetic training data works great LLMs somehow got even harder to use Knowledge is incredibly unevenly distributed LLMs need better criticism Everything tagged “llms” on my blog in 2024

Here's my end-of-year review of things we learned out about LLMs in 2024 - we learned a LOT of things simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/31/...

Table of contents:

Annual Accomplishments Some Personal Accomplishments 2024 Survived painful, herniated disc and went through successful surgery Got back to lifting weights after 5 month break due to a herniated disc Down to the fourth belt ...

Updated my annual accomplishments notes

* Survived herniated disc pain and surgery
* Back to weight lifting after 5 month break
* Landed amazing job @ Spotify
* Spoke at 1st conference in 5 years
* Saw 1st total eclipse
* Back to blogging a bit

tdhopper.com/annual-accomplishments/

I've tried using 𝒜𝐼 could of times to get started, but that's always led to roadblocks I haven't been able to get past.

Does anyone have a good tutorial for bootstrapping something like this?

I don't know much about modern web applications, but I have a few small projects to do that just require basic account creation and CRUD operations. I've been looking at Cloudflare Pages + Supabase so that I could run them for free and serverless.

vicki@hermes git:(main*) 🐍 3.10 % curl -w "@curl-format.txt" -o /dev/null -s "https://api.github.com/repos/veekaybee/viberary" time_namelookup: 0.018073s time_connect: 0.031290s time_appconnect: 0.047484s time_pretransfer: 0.047536s time_redirect: 0.000000s time_starttransfer: 0.131164s ---------- time_total: 0.131659s

today I learned that you can create a special text file to use for logging curl timing details blog.josephscott.org/2011/10/14/t...

Babbage's Difference Engine

Etching of Charles Babbage

#TodayinHistory #dataviz #Onthisday #OTD 📊
🎂Dec 26, 1791 Charles Babbage born in London, England 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

1822: Invented a mechanical device for calculating mathematical tables (the Difference Engine) -- the forerunner of computing machines.

Feels like every hotel, airplane, car, new home, etc implemented standard USB ports and literally the same year the entire tech world changed over to USB-C

🦋is this agi?

Amazing! Thanks

GitHub - RobertCraigie/pyright-python: Python command line wrapper for pyright, a static type checker Python command line wrapper for pyright, a static type checker - RobertCraigie/pyright-python

FYI 'pip install pyright[nodejs]` will install node binaries for you

github.com/RobertCraigi...