Weekly update, August 22

I skipped last week, so this covers two. The headline is the dinosaur.

OMG it’s done!

The finished raptor on sawhorses in the living room: flame-striped pink and orange body plates, gray and orange legs, a toothy head, and one glowing blue-violet LED eye

Every plate is painted and varnished, the teeth are in, and the eyes blink. It’s standing on sawhorses in the living room, which is now mostly raptor. The full build log is on the project page.

The eyes are concentric-ring LED arrays on a WLED controller. I vibe coded led-eye-designer to drive them: one HTML file that previews a blink on the actual ring layout, tunes stare time and lid speed, generates the ledmap.json, and installs the animation as WLED presets and a playlist so it runs with no computer attached. A second array on a second GPIO blinks in lockstep.

Still no name. Burning Man is next week. I am exhausted.

A music model went upstream in C++

audio.cpp is a pure C++ inference engine for audio models (ggml underneath, no Python). I ported MiniMax Music3 into it: a Qwen3-8B autoregressive stage emitting one semantic code per 40 ms frame, a four-layer RVQ depth decoder, a 36-layer flow-matching transformer over 200-frame windows, and a Flow-VAE decoder out to 44.1 kHz stereo. My big PR (#241) got closed in favor of the maintainer’s own preview branch, which is fair, so I rebased the useful parts onto theirs: #243 fixed a silent output-corruption bug (the CUDA conv path doesn’t do BF16 kernels, so a BF16 package renders a constant full-scale waveform instead of music), repaired the converter, and wired the family into the web UI. #245 made the Studio honor required request options so prompt-only submissions stop failing at the server. Both merged the same day. The converted weights are on Hugging Face as joemattie/MiniMax-Music3-GGUF.

On the same theme, the local LLM fleet got its refresh: Qwen3.8-27B is the default now on both the EXL3 and vLLM servers (with Muse Glimmer 30B and KAT-Coder V2.5-Dev alongside), vLLM went to 0.27.1 and exllamav3 to 1.4.2.

I liberated my music from Suno

Suno is changing its download limits on September 3, so I had an agent pull everything I’ve made so far.

My local music generation setup still needs some love, but I haven’t had time with all the dinosaur work!

The music videos remain rough drafts.