June 30, 2026

#486 underscore-underscore-ghost-emoji

29 minutes

Topics covered in this episode:

Free-threaded Python: past, present, and future

django-admin-site-search

Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development

A large batch of PEPs are finalized

Extras

Joke

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Show Intro

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Calvin #1: Free-threaded Python: past, present, and future

The GIL has prevented true multi-threaded parallelism in CPython since the beginning — multiple past attempts to remove it failed on performance grounds

Sam Gross at Meta finally solved it; his work became PEP 703 and ships as free-threaded CPython today

Python 3.13 was experimental with 20–40% single-threaded slowdown; 3.14 brought that to 0–10%

Python 3.15 (October 2026) delivers a unified ABI — one extension binary works on both GIL and free-threaded builds

Already >50% of the top PyPI binary wheels support free threading

Wouters predicts free-threaded becomes the default between 3.16–3.20 (2027–2031), with the GIL eventually disappearing next decade

Michael #2: django-admin-site-search

via Adam Parkin

A global/site search modal for the Django admin, by Ahmed Aljawahiry. Hit cmd+k anywhere in the admin and you get a command-palette-style search window, kind of like the one in VS Code.

It doesn't just search one model's list page. It searches your entire site in one box:

App labels

Model labels and field attributes

Actual model instances (your data)

Two ways to search the instances:

model_char_fields (the default): runs an __icontains across every CharField (and subclasses) on the model. Zero config, works out of the box.

admin_search_fields: defers to each ModelAdmin's existing get_search_results(), so it respects the search_fields you've already set up.

The part I like: it's permission-aware out of the box. Users only see results for the apps and models they actually have view permission on, so you're not leaking anything through search.

Results appear as you type, with throttling/debouncing so you're not hammering the server on every keystroke, and it's full keyboard nav: cmd+k to open, up/down to move, enter to go.

It's responsive, does dark and light mode, and it pulls Django's built-in admin CSS variables so it just matches whatever admin theme you're running.

Under the hood it's Alpine.js, but bundled into static so there's no external CDN dependency.

Setup is about what you'd expect: pip install django-admin-site-search, add it to INSTALLED_APPS, mix the AdminSiteSearchView into your AdminSite, and drop a few template includes into base_site.html.

Supports Python 3.8 through 3.14 and Django 3.2 through 6.0, MIT licensed, and everything is overridable if you want to skip certain models, add TextField matching, etc.

Calvin #3: Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development

Qwen 3.6 27B is being called the first local model that genuinely competes as a general-purpose intelligence — benchmarks put it at roughly mid-2025 frontier level (comparable to GPT-5 / Claude Sonnet 4.5)

Runs locally via llama.cpp; on an M5 MacBook Max with 8-bit quantization + multi-token prediction, it hits ~32 tokens/sec using ~42GB RAM

4-bit quantization gets it under 18GB, runnable on 32GB devices; Nvidia RTX cards run it even faster

The dense 27B is recommended over the faster MoE 35B A3B — author prefers higher quality output over raw speed

Privacy and reliability are the pitch: fine-tunable, can't be taken down, suitable for sensitive/proprietary data

Author sees this as a stepping stone — frontier open-weight models like GLM 5.2 are now locally runnable with company-grade hardware, and smarter-still local models are coming

Michael #4: A large batch of PEPs are finalized

A bunch of PEPs went from accepted to final.

668, 687, 691, 699, 701, 703, 728, 770, 773, 829

But this wasn’t them making their way into CPython. It’s an admin sorta thing. (Thanks PyCoders)

See the commit.

Extras

Calvin:

More fun bling for your terminal this time - https://charm.land/

Michael:

Follow up from pls, What the pls? Thanks Pito.

Joke: BEMoji

A production-grade utility and component framework built entirely on emoji class names

via Jeff Triplett

...more

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By Michael Kennedy and Calvin Hendryx-Parker

4.7

212212 ratings