David John Roden

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

MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON (1943, M. Deren)

The Piano Teacher (2001) / Michael Haneke

Remember smallpox? No? Because vaccines work

Samuel Beckett, Not I, 1973. Directed by Anthony Page. Un’oscurità totale da cui emerge solo una bocca illuminata, che vomita parole a velocità folle in un monologo frammentato. È il ritratto di un crollo psichico.

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

‘Heavy J5’ by @turingcop is on #SoundCloud on.soundcloud.com/BF46WgTfJFFcyt… Lost somewhere in Heavy-Metal BeBop and ELP country.

@TSoS_ Apart from the unacceptable and rather conventional kink shaming of the Harkonnens, my favourite part of the second movie is the sexual manipulation of Feyd by Lea Seydoux's Lady Margot Fenring - and Charlotte Rampling's inimitably dry summation of the project.

I often see people claim Denis Villeneuve is shying away from the 'weirdness' of Dune and I think that sentiment misunderstands the first novel. Alia the talking fetus, the Harkonnen spider creature and everything happening on Giedi Prime - a monochrome planet rooted in BDSM culture - Paul's visions - way trippier than in the book - the constant, ominous vibes of the Bene Gesserit and even a baby sandworm. Denis Villeneuve's Dune IS strange and weird and in some ways, I would argue it actually goes beyond Herbert's work in that regard. Dune (1965) is a fairly straightforward work of science-fiction that remains mostly practical and grounded. Herbert was focused on Imperial Politics and Space Imperialism, Religion and Ecology and the concept of power. It wasn't his goal to create a grotesquely strange world and he never really did. Some people simply seem to have warped memories of the first novel due to Jodorowsky and Lynch. The book is not a constantly psychedelic, absurdist story; the drug plays a role, but I feel some people oversimplify the story and claim everyone is constantly and completely high. Dune (1965) isn't filled with the plethora of strange concepts you see in the later books. Shape-shifting Tleilaxu Face-Dancers, Gholas, a human-worm hybrid creature, Chairdogs. It doesn't have a guild navigator show up every two pages. They are mentioned, but neither described nor shown until Messiah so it makes sense we haven't seen them yet. I have complete faith that he will capture the weirder lore aspects and characters of Dune: Messiah brilliantly in Dune: Part Three.

“why do you hate god?” why do you hate odin? “i don’t hate odin odin isn’t real”

RABID David Cronenberg | 1977

Artwork by Anatoly Fomenko, a Soviet and Russian mathematician born in 1945, who is also recognized as a topologist and the creator of the pseudoscientific theory known as 'New Chronology'

Bi Gan's Resurrection

so called free thinkers when a new box appears

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