Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because it's not about you. It's about the women who see the image, understand its history, and see it as another reminder of how tech is not just male-dominated but thoughtlessly so (having Playboy issues lying around in the research lab) and where women are literally reduced to objects. From the article: > “As silly as it sounds, they were surprised she was a real person,” he told me. Women notice stuff like that,…
I think it's important to keep in mind that Lena Forsen (and the other models of Playboy) made the decision to be photographed nude and to have those photos published as a creative expression. To portray the exhibition as exploitative robs them of their agency and demeans their decision.
Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs
41–50 of 125 posts
Re: Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
You assume that the women who choose to model in Plaboy do so not out of their own free will and choice. That is somewhat diminutive of these women wouldn’t you say? Who are you to say anything about their character or quality as “objects”? It seems uncharacteristically harsh to just make an assumption like that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19182950
Yes, but don’t you feel like your wording of women who choose to model in Playboy as objects is somewhat demeaning to them?
Re: Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
So all of the women who have been in Playboy have no agency? Maybe they shouldn't be allowed to vote then... ! Is it not also significant that she then was a model and became a "Shirley" at another company also?
No one said anything about the agency of Playboy models, only about the inappropriateness of using Playboy or other NSFW materials in professional environments making women uncomfortable. In the privacy of your own home, do whatever you like (legally). But don't bring it into the office!
So is the hangup that it was published in Playboy? What if the cropped non-nude version of the photograph first appeared in a mainstream publication, and then was appropriated by the imaging community afterward? Does that contextual difference change anything if we're still discussing the same photograph?
Re: Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one said anything about the agency of Playboy models, only about the inappropriateness of using Playboy or other NSFW materials in professional environments making women uncomfortable. In the privacy of your own home, do whatever you like (legally). But don't bring it into the office!
So is the hangup that it was published in Playboy? What if the cropped non-nude version of the photograph first appeared in a mainstream publication, and then was appropriated by the imaging community afterward? Does that contextual difference change anything if we're still discussing the same photograph?
I don't know–it depends! It's difficult to talk hypotheticals. In the end it's all about the context.
Re: Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Please note that we no longer distribute the following images that were previously available in our database: 4.2.04 (lena), 4.2.02 (tiffany), elaine.512, numbers.512 and testpat.1k. Although these images have played a significant role in the history of image processing, they no longer represent the best examples for future research.
It there a reason why these images "no longer represent the best examples for future research"? How is Lena inferior to the other "female" images? Lena seems to offer a good mix of highly detailed textures, smooth gradients and sharp edges. Maybe there are copyright reasons but Playboy seems to be fine with the use that the Lena image is made of.
Lena is problematic for technical reasons, it’s not PC pushback. The scanning technology of the time was somewhat limited, and the exact parameters are not known if I recall correctly. And of course it is fairly low resolution by current standards. It’s a scan of a reproduction of a production image on magazine paper - something quite different than a photograph. All of these processes introduce characteristic degradations of the image.
I seem to recall someone approaching playboy to see of the negatives where available to make a new “standard” version but I don’t know of that got anywhere. At any rate, there are several subtly different versions around, which has caused some issues in the past.
Lena originally became popular not because people liked looking at a pretty face (though I don’t imagine that hurt) but because it has quite a bit of variation in texture, with strong and weak edges, etc. Particularly for image compression research, it was a real challenge in the 80s and 90s.
All of the technical challenges are better represented these days by other image sets, that don’t have the drawbacks I mentioned. And of course it is much easier to produce your own sets now, and evaluate performance over a significant number of images...
Re: Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19182950
Yes, but don’t you feel like your wording of women who choose to model in Playboy as objects is somewhat demeaning to them?
No, because my wording was carefully chosen to reflect the actual attitudes of the people who worked with the image, not my personal feelings about Playboy models. If you'll notice, I included a quote from the article where they literally did not know (and had never cared enough to find out!) that the image was of a real person. It was literally an objectified woman.
Re: Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally I’m not bothered, and while the image isn’t pornographic, it is from Playboy which does make it at least porn adjacent. I see it’s use less as a matter of offensiveness or some headfuck of “intersectionality” and more as just immature and unprofessional. Sexuality is great, it’s everywhere, and I think it has literally nothing to do with this issue. I can understand not wanting a Playboy model to be the st…
I would have expected something more algorithmic out of experimentation, to easily compare compression errors and otherwise interesting issues. Nope. They chose porn from Playboy. And this trend continues on to today with "brogrammers". No wonder why women feel inferior in tech.
> I would have expected something more algorithmic out of experimentation
Faces are a great test case. They represent a large fraction of the images we need to compress, and humans are very good at picking out issues with faces.
Re: Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but don’t you feel like your wording of women who choose to model in Playboy as objects is somewhat demeaning to them?
No, because my wording was carefully chosen to reflect the actual attitudes of the people who worked with the image, not my personal feelings about Playboy models. If you'll notice, I included a quote from the article where they literally did not know (and had never cared enough to find out!) that the image was of a real person. It was literally an objectified woman.
But human beings generally engage in this kind of objectification, and it's often not malicious. For instance, people elicit similar reactions to meeting athletes for the first time (i.e. only knowing them on TV in a competitive context, and then meeting them in reality and discovering for the first time their non-sport related traits and characteristics that are incongruent with their athletic persona).
I don't interpret "oh you're a real person" as saying "oh wow, you're more than a sex object". I think the reaction is more in line with the awe of meeting the flesh and blood subject behind a static photograph (and an alluring photograph at that).
Re: Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs
#49What’s wrong with female beauty? It’s not like it’s porn or a nude image. I’m not even a straight male but I can still appreciate female beauty and I don’t think it’s sexist. The photo is more artistic than anything. I wonder if the same people who complain about this photo lodge similar complaints when they visit art museums that have female nudity in oil paintings or nude female sculptures? I know nudity and even a…
Because it's not about you. It's about the women who see the image, understand its history, and see it as another reminder of how tech is not just male-dominated but thoughtlessly so (having Playboy issues lying around in the research lab) and where women are literally reduced to objects. From the article: > “As silly as it sounds, they were surprised she was a real person,” he told me. Women notice stuff like that,…
I had no idea about the origin of the picture until people started discussing it, so actually this might result in more people being uncomfortable, not less. Consider this thought experiment: suppose that in some foreign language the word "hello," once had a horrible and offense meaning. However both sides of the past social divide had forgotten its past meaning and now it is used commonly as a greeting. Now, some well-meaning historian comes along and uses this history to convince a member of a marginalized group that every time someone says hello, they are echoing something horrible and offense. Now this person will walk around with a heavy weight of paranoia, having been "woken up" to a reality that is long past. Every time someone says "hello," they will suffer through the experience of someone who is being insulted, and worse will have to then repeatedly convince themselves that no harm was meant (this is brutal if you have ever experienced it). That sounds like a curse to me, I say things like that should stay forgotten.
Re: Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, because my wording was carefully chosen to reflect the actual attitudes of the people who worked with the image, not my personal feelings about Playboy models. If you'll notice, I included a quote from the article where they literally did not know (and had never cared enough to find out!) that the image was of a real person. It was literally an objectified woman.
But human beings generally engage in this kind of objectification, and it's often not malicious. For instance, people elicit similar reactions to meeting athletes for the first time (i.e. only knowing them on TV in a competitive context, and then meeting them in reality and discovering for the first time their non-sport related traits and characteristics that are incongruent with their athletic persona). I don't inte…
Yeah but in your effort to make an analogy, you're missing the point, which is that context matters. You need to look at the context of using objectified pictures of women in the workplace, especially one where women are routinely given signals that they don't belong. Your example of a fan meeting an athlete or celebrity for the first time is just a wildly different context.