Why do people keep reading dystopias as instruction books?

Oh, I’m with you. I don’t think anyone using Google VPN was using it because it protected their privacy on the Internet generally. At least I hope not.

The NASA VPN, on the other hand

Reasonable when the alternative is literally getting mugged on the daily?

Quoting the linked article:

The contract the Guild secured in September set a historic precedent: It is up to the writers whether and how they use generative AI as a tool to assist and complement—not replace—them. Ultimately, if generative AI is used, the contract stipulates that writers get full credit and compensation.

So, yeah. It’s more about ensuring that a human person in the writers’ guild gets credited as a writer, even if they or someone else uses an ai as a tool in the process.

That’s allowed, no?

Unless I’m mistaken, this was more about writers not wanting the studio to be able to say “we had an ai generated a script. We’ll pay you a day to do a brief editing pass.”

There are plenty of examples of companies challenging the legality of regulations and winning, and other cases of apparent corruption among judges.

Gigabit fiber is a thing, and not at all uncommon in a lot of places.

I mean maybe they decided it was going to be easier to buy a judge than another FCC chair?

It’s the only way to be sure!

Game over, man! Game over!

69 inchemeters.

If you’re making arguments on this issue with someone who feels the photo should not be used because using a cropped porn photo is offensive or derogatory, those are the points that should be addressed. Another approach might be to address why it should be used instead of some similar image, but it seems you agree with me that there is no good reason another image couldn’t be used.

She consented to this, was an adult at the time, got paid for it and moved on

Sorry, consented to what? And what does that have to do with this? The existence of the photo or its continued use as a photo and as porn are not at issue.

Do note that Playboy has the rights of the photo though, not her

And again, this isn’t a rights issue. Lena isn’t upset because her rights are being violated, and neither is anyone else.

I never said that.

And I never said photos of shoulders are porn. You made a straw man or my argument, so I made a straw man or yours. Neither one was particularly useful to discuss.

Of course there were reasons the photo was chosen originally, convenience and the fact that it has just the right amount of complicated detail. But those don’t really matter now because, as you said:

It’s an old photo, along with all the other photos of the time it should’ve been retired ages ago, on technical grounds.

People are upset because the use of a photo from a porn shoot, especially one that has no other particular reason to use it besides “tradition,” is emblematic of a culture that is exclusionary to women.

Any defense of the use of this photo which does not address those points isn’t really a good faith argument.

I mean obviously this is a porn device, it has access to the Internet. How is that relevant? One’s personal devices are exactly where one’s porn should be, not in an academic paper about image processing.

No. But the fact that it isn’t obviously from a porn shoot doesn’t change that it’s from a porn shoot. The model has indicated she doesn’t want it used for this, and other women have indicated they are bothered by this.

Are you really insinuating that there isn’t any other possible standard besides this exact photo to demonstrate methods?

See? I can straw-man too.

Except that people do, in fact, remember. Sure, if society gets destroyed and future archeologists find the cropped photo and that’s all that remains of it, it’s not a porn photo any more. But for now, people know where it came from. That matters.

Edit: typos, clarity

I would be very surprised if the population of “people upset by the use of a teapot/bunny as a test render” was even within a couple orders of magnitude of “people upset by the use of a porn photo as a test image”

I mean, yes you can? You can inform authors that papers that include the image will not be published. How is that not a ban?

But what if someone accidentally changes the bubble and text colors to an unreadable combination? No. We must protect our users from this obscene nonsense.

So, are you a stoned emo man, or a stone demoman, or what?