Academy

Lesson 1 — Setting Up Your Machine

Five commands. Copy each one, paste it into Terminal, press Return, and wait for it to finish before the next.

First, open Terminal

Hold ⌘ and press Space. A search box appears in the middle of the screen.
Type Terminal and press Return. A window with plain text opens. That is Terminal.
Click Copy beside a command below, click into the Terminal window, then press ⌘V to paste.
Press Return to run it. Wait until the text stops moving before you do the next one.

If both of these answer with a version number, skip the next box.

brew --version

Asks Homebrew to say which version it is.

uv --version

Asks uv the same question.

Install whichever did not answer. Homebrew will ask for your password — that is normal.

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Installs Homebrew. Skip if brew --version already worked.

brew install uv

Installs uv. Skip if uv --version already worked.

One line. It makes the folder, moves into it, and puts a private Python inside.

mkdir ~/llm-from-scratch && cd ~/llm-from-scratch && uv venv --python 3.12

Creates the project folder and its own Python 3.12.

This brings PyTorch and the ten packages it depends on.

cd ~/llm-from-scratch && source .venv/bin/activate && uv pip install torch numpy

Installs the library that does the mathematics.

The answer you want is True. False still works — it is only slower.

cd ~/llm-from-scratch && source .venv/bin/activate && python -c "import torch; print(torch.__version__, 'MPS:', torch.backends.mps.is_available())"

Asks PyTorch its version, and whether it can use your graphics chip.