I’m a nudist (meaning I have no problem being naked or seeing people without clothes on when it is comfortable, publicly or privately). What on earth is wrong with a nude photograph? What does it say about humankind that we deny our baseline state?

Fair play to you on the nudism. My question would be whether you’d show up starkers at work? If not, then I’m not sure how it applies.

No I wouldn’t. Firstly because shocking unexpected people is streaking and/or (in some jurisdictions at least) some kind of offence. Secondly because I’m willing to see people undressed doesn’t mean it’s universal (everybody has there preferences, prejudices, and ingrained values). Thirdly because I’m the managing director and enthusiastic or not or not one of my duties is to set the tone for the workplace by example not by demanding that others do what I tell them to but by leading by example, and that includes conservative dress.

Then again I’m in Italy where somewhat different social norms apply: people ask each other out on dates after they meet in the workplace and even if it’s unappreciated nobody dreams of kicking up a stink for sexual harassment because they consider it a normal form of human interaction. It’s also normal to compliment people on their looks and choice of attire. Both genders do it. Nobody gets offended. It’s more like “yeah, I put a ton of effort into choosing and matching this outfit this morning, and nobody noticed?! WTF??”

I guess most people using it have no idea it's a picture from Playboy, nor a nude picture, nor a controversial picture. I used it a lot myself when I was working on content based image retrieval simply because all the literature was using it. It never even occurred to me I was being controversial or sexist.

Now that I'm aware of the picture's history, I agree that it was a poor choice back then but I disagree that using it today is somehow an endorsement of sexism. Using it today only means you are using the standard image processing image.

Not the person you’re replying to, and fuck me if I’m wading into the question of sexism, but professionalism and maturity are things. We get paid the big bucks now, we’re not snotty kids in our parent’s garage; a whole world of acceptable professional behavior goes along with that.

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.