Work Log - 2026-08-12
🎯 Focus for Today¶
As usual, find some work, most of the day chasing contacts for contracts.
✅ What Got Done¶
- Updated my local LLM to Qwen3
- Hannah confirmed we could use the venue credit later in the year
- Job search
- Python learning
- Going to a VEC Showcase event at Vic
- Synced upstream packaging.python.org fork (see notes below)
🧠 Notes & Reflections¶
I'm learning how to run and manage Qwen3 on a fairly decent old workstation I have. It has a Ryzen 7 CPU, 32 GB DDR4 RAM and a 1 TB NVMe drive, but a rubbish old Nvidia graphics card with just 2 GB VRAM.
I found disabling the Vulkan driver for Ollama doubled performance — where I would get just over 5 tokens per second with it enabled, I get just over 10 tokens per second with it disabled. I'm looking at more tweaks to get a CPU-based LLM performing well, but already it's quite usable. I fed it a Python function and then, with DeepSeek's help, created an issue (#15) to track the review feedback for the op-opsdevnz module.
upstream/packaging.python.org — sync¶
Pulled latest upstream from pypa/packaging.python.org (main, ~20 commits):
- METADATA 2.6 / PEP 808 (#2082) — documents the new core metadata version with append-only fields, accepted PEP. Henry Schreiner, assisted by Claude.
- Self-referential extras (#2087) — documents pip's support for packages
that declare extras referencing themselves (e.g.
[dev]pulling in the package itself for testing). - Withdrawn PEP 459 reference removed (#2064) — cleanup.
- Terminology fix — consistently uses "package managers" where applicable; "package installer" and "dependency manager" reserved for specific tools.
- Doc fixes — flit upper bound bumped, dependency group resolution snippet
fixed, typo fix, Sphinx label for
.dist-info/sboms/section added. - CI maintenance — uv build version bumps (0.11.32 → 0.12.1), ruff hook rename, linkcheck Cloudflare fix.