> I see a lot of people who aren't taking the time to actually understand how LLMs work

The trouble is that the advice in the post will have very little impact on "understanding how LLMs work". The number of people who talk about LLMs daily but have never run an LLM local, and certainly never "opened it up to mess around" is very large.

A fun weekend exercise that anyone can do is to implement speculative decoding[0] using local LLMs. You'll learn a lot more about how LLMs work than reading every blog/twitter stream mentioned there.

0. https://research.google/blog/looking-back-at-speculative-dec...