4 Matching Annotations
  1. Last 7 days
    1. in general, fight club is a meditation on nihilism: everything will die, nothing will last, nothing makes sense, so how do we want to die?

      passive nihilism ("team blue") is represented by the anonymous character, wasting his time to optimize his appartment (cave) with pretty-but-useless furniture, waiting for a day that never comes (false patience, hopium), waiting for "a natural death" (in effect, rotting in bed while being held alive by "doctors"), selfishly trying to "just have some fun" and then die without leaving a trace

      active nihilism ("team red") is represented by Tyler Durden, the man with a plan... of course he will not change the fact that everything will die, but at least he actively consciously chooses to "die with style", to "die in combat", to die as a warrior, sacrificing his life for some higher purpose ("space monkey"...)

      there’s more i won’t list

      one detail i really like about fight club is the "homework assignments" scene, where Tyler Durden (the leader) assigns "homework" to his soldiers in written form, so all the operations stay as clandestine as possible. so effectively, Tyler Durden is bootstrapping his own secret service, biased towards "active measures" (team red, attack)

  2. Jan 2024
    1. Moreover, Midjourney apparently sought to suppress our findings, banning Southen from its service (without even a refund of his subscription fee) after he reported his first results, and again after he created a new account from which additional results were reported. It then apparently changed its terms of service just before Christmas by inserting new language: “You may not use the Service to try to violate the intellectual property rights of others, including copyright, patent, or trademark rights. Doing so may subject you to penalties including legal action or a permanent ban from the Service.” This change might be interpreted as discouraging or even precluding the important and common practice of red-team investigations of the limits of generative AI—a practice that several major AI companies committed to as part of agreements with the White House announced in 2023. (Southen created two additional accounts in order to complete this project; these, too, were banned, with subscription fees not returned.)

      Midjourney bans researchers and changes terms of service

  3. Apr 2022