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Comment by roughly | Hacker News Reader

The issue is the image is a crop from a picture in a Playboy shoot. The issue is not a licensing problem, it’s not a technical problem, it’s that the field for 50 years has used as a reference image a crop of a Playboy centerfold. We have to keep justifying changing it based on licensing and on the technical merits because fundamentally as a field computer science is still about 12 years old and can’t seem to understand why using a crop of a Playboy centerfold is both unprofessional and exclusionary, but the actual problem is the image is a crop of a Playboy centerfold that we’re continuing to use despite it being obvious even back then that it was probably a bad idea.

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What is unprofessional about a playboy shoot? Who are you to tell a woman what she can or can’t wear in a profesional environment?

Obviously whoever picked it was a forward thinking person who wanted women to know they would be able to work in the nascent field of digital imaging.

Would you have an issue if it was a picture of Michaelangelos David?

Pornographic images are generally considered unprofessional in settings outside of the sex work industry.

It's wild that this even has to be spelled out but here we are.

It’s not pornographic. There’s not even nudity in it. Is David a pornographic statue too?

It's referencing an image created with pornographic intent. This is not that difficult, come on.

Modern relativists feign ignorance regarding the cost of what was almost universally regarded as societally harmful. It’s literally regressive behavior making decisions purely on the basest chemical responses and emotion and not higher order thinking, reasoning or logic. And then somehow bundling that up and claiming to be enlightened.

I don't know who David is.

But in case it helps: not all nudity is pornographic, and not all non-nudity is non-pornographic.

It is a nude, pornographic image that has been cropped. Cropping doesn't change the original intent.

I think its debatable whether the cropped image is pornagraphic.

The original situation when the image was scanned was certainly inapropriate.

But i think its a jump to describe the cropped version as pornagraphic.

Whether something is pornagraphic depends on context. Cropped and removed from the original context i fail to see how it is still porn.

It seems like the argument is because its origin is porn, everything associated with it is porn. This seems like a very dangerous argument and a very slippery slope.

The photo is not pornographic...

The photo is here: https://womenlovetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/distres...

Make up your own god damn mind, but it's pretty clearly pornographic to me.

This is what I mean by our field is 12 years old. You know all the answers to those questions, you’ve heard them all told to you in earnest by people desperately trying to get you to understand them, and yet you’re still sitting here arguing in favor of this image because it doesn’t directly affect you (except in the loss of talent available to the field, but people have a hard time mourning things they never knew they had) and it’s fun to argue.

On one hand we‘re not supposed to be prude and judge/shame women who make a career out of onlyfans and prostitution, on the other a picture of a woman‘s head with a hat on, consenting to the usage of said picture, is regressive and exclusionary. Maybe it’s your ideology that needs to figure itself out.

On the one hand we're not supposed to shame people for their career choices, but on the other hand we're not supposed to create an atmosphere which makes scientific fields feel like "boy's clubs" by e.g using pictures from porn shoots in journals

Oh my how can we ever tackle this level of nuance

What‘s boy‘s club about a woman deciding to sell pictures for an erotic, not even some hardcore porn, magazine? That would imply she was forced into it by men, rather than using her privilege of being born beautiful to make a ton of money

Are you playing dumb? Nothing wrong with a woman deciding to sell pictures for an erotic pictures, I've been pretty clear about that. The "boy's club" part is the part where the (almost exclusively male) researchers then take the erotic image of a woman from a porn shoot and decide to make it the standard test image for the whole field

"Oh my how can we ever tackle this level of nuance", "But in case it helps" makes it clear you're arguing in bad faith instea dof looking for a discussion.

You ask "Are you playing dumb?", but then pretend " I don't know who David is." as if that's possible. It's pushed down high school students' throats. And if you googled it, then surely you'd remember that one time you saw it printed on cheap toilet paper in that hotel in Bangok.

When it suits your point it's "Nothing wrong with a woman deciding to sell pictures for an erotic pictures"

When it doesn't suit your point it's "from a porn shoot" and "THE standard test image" (instead of one of many)

I'm arguing in good faith, I just don't think you are.

I know many people called David. I didn't go to American high school, so no, one particular "David" was never pushed down my throat as the one canonical "David". I've also never been to Bangok, wherever that is (did you mean Bangkok? I haven't been there either)

I did finally google it though and I guess I've seen a picture of that statue before, didn't know it was called Statue. Cool beans

I don't understand what you're trying to say with that last part. There's nothing wrong with a woman selling erotic pictures from a porn shoot. I've been consistent on this from the beginning.

Its literally one of the most important sculptures in western civilization. It is kind of hard to imagine someone being ignorant of it. Sort of like someone saying that they have never heard of Shakespeare.

Cool

I don't think they're playing dumb, I think they genuinely don't get the reasoning. I don't get the reasoning either. Good faith discussion and all that.

The reasoning is literally as simple as: there's nothing wrong with being in the porn business, but that doesn't mean porn is appropriate in all contexts.

If a woman does porn (or a man for that matter), that's fine. They didn't do anything wrong.

If a company CEO decides to display porn in a company-wide meeting, there's probably something inappropriate and unprofessional about that.

Where is the contradiction between these things???

Well, for one, the image used in the field is not pornographic at all, it's a woman's face. Second, its been used for over 50 years. If this were really about showing porn in the office I think the old guard would've definitely put a stop to it. It's not about showing porn because the image is not porn. Finally, it is used primarily because it is technically fantastic for its use cases.

It's a playboy shoot. She's nude.

It's not some hardcore thing, it's obviously not as inappropriate as the "CEO showing porn in a company meeting" example, but it 100% creates a "boy's club" type atmosphere.

There's this website I use a lot, called rawpixels.net (seems to be down now?). It's an excellent tool for peeking at raw picture data when I work on debugging video decoding stuff at work. However, the default loaded picture is the Lena picture. It feels inappropriate every time I open the website at work, in our open office space where my screen is visible. Because it clearly looks like a picture that's intended to be erotic/suggestive. And if it feels inappropriate to put up on my large screen at work, it's clearly not appropriate as the standard test image for a whole field.

She isn’t tho. It’s her face.

Witness, "her face": https://womenlovetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/distres...

That's the picture someone cropped, scanned, and used as the standard test image for all of computer imagery.

Yeah...

So what? The image used is of just her face. We are all naked under our clothes, is it inappropriate to be naked under our clothes at work? You said it yourself, it was cropped, so as to remove the inappropriate nudity. Problem solved.

Your arguments are not very compelling.

The image used is cropped porn. Think about the message that sends.

Attractive women who are a vast minority should not be made to feel excluded by the majority.

This just goes to further stigmatize women by saying that being attractive and having your picture taken rises to the level of being unethical to publish in a scientific paper.

Attractive women’s should be made to feel welcome in all STEM fields and not shamed for their bodies or clothing choices.

>What is unprofessional about a playboy shoot?

I think it is pretty obvious why using pornographic images in scientific papers for no legitimate reason is unprofessionell.

>Would you have an issue if it was a picture of Michelangelos David?

It isn't a pornographic image, but depending on the photo it might be appropriate or not. It is also an awful test image for color images.

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