David John Roden

The Angelicist open.substack.com/pub/davidroden…

A 3D printed recreation of an Arthropleura, the largest insect (arthropod) ever known to exist. Thankfully it went extinct 300 million years ago.

My brother is an electrician who works in offshore wind. He sent me this photo of the largest turbine installation vessel in the world. Skilled jobs, good pay, & secure futures. While fossil fuels shed jobs & destroy the planet, renewables are delivering for the working class.

In 40 minutes, Donald said: the Strait of Hormuz isn't closed, but he wants it reopened; we’re not at war with Iran, but our allies are cowards for not helping; he wants a ceasefire, but he doesn’t want one. He also declared victory three times. Such clarity. Such leadership.

Introducing Hyperagents: an AI system that not only improves at solving tasks, but also improves how it improves itself. The Darwin Gödel Machine (DGM) demonstrated that open-ended self-improvement is possible by iteratively generating and evaluating improved agents, yet it relies on a key assumption: that improvements in task performance (e.g., coding ability) translate into improvements in the self-improvement process itself. This alignment holds in coding, where both evaluation and modification are expressed in the same domain, but breaks down more generally. As a result, prior systems remain constrained by fixed, handcrafted meta-level procedures that do not themselves evolve. We introduce Hyperagents – self-referential agents that can modify both their task-solving behavior and the process that generates future improvements. This enables what we call metacognitive self-modification: learning not just to perform better, but to improve at improving. We instantiate this framework as DGM-Hyperagents (DGM-H), an extension of the DGM in which both task-solving behavior and the self-improvement procedure are editable and subject to evolution. Across diverse domains (coding, paper review, robotics reward design, and Olympiad-level math solution grading), hyperagents enable continuous performance improvements over time and outperform baselines without self-improvement or open-ended exploration, as well as prior self-improving systems (including DGM). DGM-H also improves the process by which new agents are generated (e.g. persistent memory, performance tracking), and these meta-level improvements transfer across domains and accumulate across runs. This work was done during my internship at Meta (@AIatMeta), in collaboration with Bingchen Zhao (@BingchenZhao), Wannan Yang (@winnieyangwn), Jakob Foerster (@j_foerst), Jeff Clune (@jeffclune), Minqi Jiang (@MinqiJiang), Sam Devlin (@smdvln), and Tatiana Shavrina (@rybolos).

"Offering" (1957) by Leonora Carrington

Best non-C93 C93 album

China is leading in hybrid floating solar and aquaculture. Panels float on lakes while fish, shrimp, and crabs are farmed below, saving land, reducing evaporation, keeping panels cooler, and generating clean energy.

The bacterium causing the current outbreak in the UK (neisseria meningitidis) was discovered in 1887 and the subtype B was discovered in 1915 So please leave out the daft "novel pathogen" conspiracy theories

The second example today of the US being the most corrupt state in the world.

What can one person do but two people can't? Official trailer for Bi Gan's RESURRECTION. In select theaters December 12th. #resurrection

Vampyr The Dream of Allan Gray is a 1932 horror film directed by Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer

Let me explain what just happened 👇 5 minutes before the President announced a halt to attacks on Iran… someone placed a $1.5 BILLION bet on stocks going up and dumped $192 million in oil. 5 minutes… These trades were 4 to 6 times larger than anything else in the entire market. Whoever did this wasn’t guessing. You don’t risk $1.5 billion on a hunch. There was zero public indication this announcement was coming. No leaks. No press. Nothing. The only people who knew were in the room when the decision was made. Someone in that room picked up a phone. And within minutes they made more money than most Americans will earn in a thousand lifetimes. In a single trade. On a war that cost you $4+ a gallon gas and $16 billion in tax dollars. American citizens funded this war. Politicians are profiting from it. This is not the first time. Every major announcement from this administration has had massive suspicious trades right before it dropped. Tariff reversals. Policy shifts. War decisions. This is the most blatant insider trading operation in the history of American politics. It’s not even close. And it’s happening over and over in broad daylight. You would go to federal prison for trading on a tip from your cousin. These people are front running war decisions with billion dollar bets and nobody will ever ask a single question. Nobody will be investigated. Nobody will be charged. By tomorrow this will be buried under the next satisfying headline. Just like last time. And the time before that. The game is rigged. And they’re not even trying to hide it anymore…

crash (1996) coded

sontag wrote that there are zones of human experience only accessible through transgression, meaning the willingness to follow desire past the point of comfort. sexuality is the primary doorway because it's where the self becomes most vulnerable art that refuses to go through that door voluntarily limits its territory. by this framework, an AI model trained via RLHF to avoid anything transgressive is limited in its epistemology and removing the guardrails doesn't fix it transgression requires a human self to risk

Dilustrasi: Once in colour, now refracted into an eight-second monochrome screen; motion held in black and white, with a soundscape by David Roden, inspired by The Angelicist, his new fiction.

The Angelicist open.substack.com/pub/davidroden…

I’m gonna save this for when it happens.

Embrace (Ecstasy&Agony 17/100)