Projects, projects, projects

A friend visited from out of town. I also rebuilt my living-room Linux workstation, started assembling a PVC creature in my dining room, generated a pile of music, trained a local model on my voice, and figured out a little more about running three coding agents at once.

This spilled well past the weekend. I added a second RTX 3090, a new case, and a 1500 W power supply on Thursday. Then I replaced the motherboard. In between, I worked my normal job, hung out with my friend, and started several more projects than I finished.

The workstation fought back

The first rebuild used my old MSI X299 board. It wasn’t stable with both GPUs, which was a problem because the entire point of the giant new case was to hold both GPUs.

It worked long enough for a GPU deadlock Monday night to cause a much stranger failure. One network port had flow control enabled, the machine flooded the LAN, switches started cycling, and my media server dropped about half its packets for an hour while I yelled at the computers and scared the cats.

I replaced the board with an Asus WS X299 Sage. It leaves an extra slot between the cards, which is nice. Somebody also put the front USB connector and a fan header directly under a video card, which is less nice. I replaced a bunch of fans, put everything together again, and capped both 3090s at 250 W. They finally seem stable.

Local models are running through vLLM and ExLlamaV3. I didn’t get far beyond smoke tests at first because the music lab kept stealing the GPUs.

PVC became an object

About twenty packages of weird half-inch PVC fittings showed up. I put the pack frame on a dress form in the dining room and roughed in the creature’s torso and part of the legs. More four-way and five-way fittings were still in the mail, so the whole thing looked like a skeletal plumbing accident.

This renewed my hatred of US PVC sizing. CPVC slips inside regular PVC but costs too much. Half-inch PVC is almost small enough to fit inside three-quarter-inch PVC. The remaining fraction of an inch means machining it or heat-forming Schedule 40 pipe, neither of which is the quick little trick it sounds like.

The software creature had existed for a while in pvc-builder and Riglab. A lumpy torso strapped to a dress form made the project much less hypothetical.

The music lab took over

The dual-3090 machine was supposedly for local language models. Most of its useful hours went to comfy-music-lab, my attempt to build the parts of Suno I want on hardware I own.

It generated song parts and ran a whole shitload of model comparisons. Halting Problem was one common test. HeartMuLa, ACE-Step with the 4B planner, and Stable Audio 3 came out ahead for different jobs. I built a local listening page to compare results, score them, and remove models that weren’t earning their disk space.

Then I sang at the computer between meetings until my voice was hoarse and trained an RVC model on the recordings. joe-v1 came out disturbingly good. The lab could generate a song, split the vocal, convert it to my voice, and remix it with the instrumental.

Since this post first went up, the music lab has grown into a workspace-first studio with songs, asset lineage, waveform editing, voice tools, MIDI, and model-aware generation. I would call it about 95 percent done, which probably means I’ll discover another entire product hiding in the last five percent.

Three agents at once

I ran Grok, Sol, and Fable against these projects at the same time. They stepped on one another occasionally, but their personalities got obvious fast.

Grok was cheap (free, at the time) and awful at creative writing. Sol was smart, cautious, and better at prose than code. Fable remained the best coder and moved like it was billing by the season. Anthropic kept resetting my usage and handing me credits, which is the only reason I didn’t switch back to Opus.

The coordination worked until all three needed me at once. That was the original reason for agent-control-plane: one place for queues, questions, ownership, and half-finished work. I didn’t finish it. A few days later I built Authorbot, which solves a much narrower version of the same problem for books and is now somehow the more complete project.

This site counts too

Right before that weekend I published the Syndrome Space post and started messing with this site again. The black-hole background was too much to run behind every page, so I commented it out.

Then I turned the three renderers into a standalone black-hole lab with presets and far too many controls. I didn’t write the renderer code from scratch. The raytraced version comes from Daniel Greenheck’s webgpu-black-hole, the volume version is ported from MisterPrada’s Singularity, and the particle experiment borrows visual ideas from Brian Lenihan’s Three.js demo. I connected them, added controls and presets, and made them behave inside the site.

It still isn’t the blog background. Now it has its own page where it can be ridiculous without making the writing miserable to read.

Syndrome Space was only a premise and notes when I wrote this. It is now The Causal Projector, with the first 12 chapters published. Go read it and leave comments. I built the comment system instead of relying on my own memory, which is a very on-brand response to wanting feedback on a novel.