Dan

Film & engineering spicy takes

[girish @googrish]

“don’t train your own model” is common ai advice. it's wrong. your token bill's the proof.

today, we’re excited to launch castform into open preview. castform is the easiest way for you to train your own model, on your own data.

open-weights models are performant and much cheaper. when trained on your task & proprietary data, they beat closed models. the thing standing between you and that was weeks of plumbing & years of ml expertise.

with castform, model training is as simple as prompt engineering. @castformai

bring your agent traces or raw corpora. castform turns it into training data, picks the right algorithmic recipes, manages gpus, and gives you an ide to watch and chat with your model as it learns.

see what you can build with castform👇

[Benyam Ephrem @bephrem]

last day for submissions

[Kuleshov @EffectKuleshov]

Lapid has seemingly spent his entire career critiquing israeli nationalism, called for a ceasefire immediately after Oct 7, and even went as far as to move countries but it isnt enough because he was born impure

[Dan @DanShevchuk2]

A true monster of a montage

[The Happy Smiler @artchad]

Unrelated to the new Anthropic model release today
here is the ending montage from Bugonia
Unrelated, I just think it's neat :)

[prettier jesus @bxsel]

buying a $15 smoothie because queer joy is an act of resistance

[Dan @DanShevchuk2]

@DonovanNapoli Yes! She’s a self starter with a unique voice. She didn’t need film school. She would have created her art anyways.

[Dan @DanShevchuk2]

I disagree. She has such a unique, spiritual point of view as an auteur. She would have succeeded regardless

[poshbagel @DonovanNapoli]

@DanShevchuk2 I wish people would understand that skill isn’t apart of the nepo baby problem. Of course she’s good she has the resources for training and access to opportunities others don’t.

[Dan @DanShevchuk2]

Unfortunately for this author, Chloe Zhao is one of the best directors of our generation. So none of this matters ❤️

[Hollywood Gadfly @Hwdgfly]

Hollywood’s favorite story: the broke outsider who self-financed an $80k movie on credit cards.

The receipts: a ~$1M elite education, $330k+ in grants on her prior film, and a father - a Chinese real-estate and equity investor - credited as an executive producer.

I call it “poorface.” New piece: https://t.co/VTC1Twrpgj

[Dan @DanShevchuk2]

This set is freaking awesome

[Ti Morse @ti_morse]

Set is ready @ElonMusk

We built it 25min from downtown Austin and can shoot anytime in the next 7 days on 1h notice.

Humanity is on the verge of becoming a multi-planet species and spacefaring civilization.

My goal with this interview is to help people viscerally feel what that future is going to look like and get everyone excited to help build it.

[Dan @DanShevchuk2]

This is such a powerful attitude

[Sophy Romvari @SophyRomvari]

Do you really need that time consuming and labour intensive crane shot? How about shooting from a tall adjacent building and instead having better food on set. Do you really need an expensive camera rig to attach your camera to a car? Watch a Kiarostami film.

[Dan @DanShevchuk2]

LOL

[Variety @Variety]

Sean Penn says he decided to stop attending award shows (including this year’s Oscars, where he won Best Supporting Actor) after being bombarded by people asking for selfies at the Golden Globes.

"People should not do selfies ever with anyone. It’s bad for you; it’s bad for everyone. It’s a soul-sucker,” Penn said. “It’s the Holocaust grandmother and her 6-year-old paraplegic wheeling over? It’s a hard no."

https://t.co/VUjDSR7hEY

[Boots Riley @BootsRiley]

Obsession & Backrooms r great successes for film

Unfortunately, cuz theyr "horror", studios will file em under the same exception theyv always given4horror & keep making the same shit

If I Love Boosters steadily grinds thru summer w reduced screens, we'll show a different story

[mary oliver’s evil twin @mitenkabutgirl]

every time i read this poem, it knocks the wind out of me. “the only thing?” fuck.

[NIK HUNO 🦉 @NikHuno]

the golden shadow is jung's most underrated concept. everyone talks about the dark shadow, the parts you repress. but you also repress your greatness. the qualities you admire in others and refuse to claim in yourself. most people I work with come to work on their darkness. but in reality they're blocked by an unconscious refusal to be as brilliant as they actually are.

[Dan @DanShevchuk2]

Amen

[ally @missmayn]

these new horror movies are hitting because young folks are scared of different things.

home invasions don’t work because no one owns a home. slasher movies are unrealistic when everyone has ring cameras and life360.

liminal spaces and being forced to date a bad guy? horrific

[Dan @DanShevchuk2]

@blakethinks @andyjbays Thanks cutie :)

[Dan @DanShevchuk2]

@blakethinks Just curious, why did they feel hollow to you? Every one of those films felt like they had an emotional heart they were trying to display. What made them not impact you?

[Dan @DanShevchuk2]

Said by someone who has never made a creative thing in their life ;)

[PunishedLaRacist @KillEveryMod]

Horror has to be the most low skill form of filmmaking.

[Dan @DanShevchuk2]

What a fun mystical argument!

[Johnathan Bi @JohnathanBi]

1. Homosexuals have privileged access to God.
2. Orthodox religions (e.g. Christianity, Hinduism) favor sublimated homosexuality over active heterosexuality.
3. Many of the great religious leaders themselves were queer.

These are the surprising claims of my guest, Rice professor Jeff Kripal. Jeff grew up Catholic and went to seminary but had to leave because, as a straight man, he was alienated by the overwhelmingly homoerotic environment.

Jeff then dedicated his early career to investigating the unlikely bedfellows of mysticism and homosexuality and found the same pattern again and again not just in Christianity, but Hinduism, Sufism and every major mystical tradition: whenever a tradition elevates celibacy it attracts homosexuals who would otherwise be persecuted in society. These homosexuals would, in turn, transmute their sublimated homoeroticism into spiritual practice and form the vanguard of the religion. This is Jeff’s reading of not just religious followers but religious leaders like Jesus and Ramakrishna themselves!

While I struggle to get onboard with the extent of Jeff’s conclusions, his explanations helped illuminate a puzzle I’ve been pondering for a long time: what explains the overwhelming creative contributions of homosexuals?⁠
• Why does pederasty pop up in every elite culture including our own (Hollywood, SF, British boarding schools)?⁠
⁠ • Why is this group, less than 3% of society, so dominant in creative fields such as academia, media, and technology?⁠
⁠ • Why are homosexuals overrepresented in positions of power, while being persecuted in almost every pre-modern society?⁠

Even if I remain unconvinced about the full extent of Jeff’s otherworldly thesis, his arguments have given me great insight into homosexuals’ secular creativity.

Timestamps:

00:00 0. Introduction
11:38 1. Why Mysticism Selects for Same-Sex Desire
21:06 2. A Queer Reading of Jesus
32:47 3. Why a Sexless Jesus Won Out
41:27 4. Jeff’s Encounter with a Hindu Diety
53:30 5. Mysticism as Hedonism
1:04:07 6. Plato on Love, Sex, and Divinity
1:07:40 7. Sex Runs Through the Supernatural

[Dan @DanShevchuk2]

Kane Parsons crushed this film! My favorite moment was the crawling up the stairs over the void. Felt like a nightmare I’ve had before…

[Variety @Variety]

Kane Parsons opens up about the feelings the #Backrooms brings out in him:

"I feel as though liminal space, that whole world, is very much connecting with people on the level that it’s referencing uncurated little fragments of memories that are lacking context. Moments in your life where the primate mind has learned its environment, and has a specific relationship with the way it memorizes its environment. You’ve got little abstract flickers of a location you went to when you were a kid that you have no idea where it was, or when it happened, or what happened there exactly. You just have information that floats around in the brain sometimes, and a lot of these little space photos evoke the feeling of people who had childhoods in the early 2000s and ’90s, and I think that’s partially just due to the medium of a lot of the stuff being digicam."

https://t.co/RIV5BYMEHn