That's amazing, thanks for sharing. Going in rather uninformed, I expected it to 'look better' by typical smoothing tricks and whatnot...but no. It has -tons- more detail...looking at little things like wrinkles in the socks and shirt and whatnot. Impressive.
What's the patent status? As far as I know, H265 is patent encumbered(and not actually supported on a large chunk of Android devices for the same reason) , so including this somewhere might invite legal trouble.
I was under the impression most implementations rely on hardware support. Hardware vendors pay the royalties then software just hands it off. Afaik that's how it works in most browsers and many modern CPU/GPUs support hardware decoding h265
HEIC is this plus a kitchen sink of features for digital camera rolls, which aren't useful on the web, all wrapped in a ton of legacy ISO BMFF complexity reaching as far as Classic Mac Quicktime. BPG structure is much more minimal and pragmatic.
However, BPG is unnecessary nowadays. Modern browsers support AVIF, which is HEIF+AV1, so basically HEIC with the painfully patented bit swapped for a freely licensed one.
It seems that way - I read this [1] which does a high level comparison of the technologies. It does seem like BPG is patent encumbered by the underlying H265 algorithms (aka HEVC) [2]
Wow that comparison is really cool. Looking at BPG vs original, you can see some loss of fine detail as the file size cranks down, but you can get an excellent reproduction with an order of magnitude less storage. Seems like BPG is smoothing the image a bit. For example, the space shuttle image has film grain in the sky, but BPG smooths this away.
Significantly better than JPEG at small file sizes... BPG eliminates the obvious color banding and does a much better job preserving detail.
If you set BPG to a large file size, you still get some of the noise in the sky of the Endeavor photo. But this is 1/20 the size of the original image which is incredible.
Why would anyone use such exotic unsupported format when there is WebP, AVIF or JPEG XL, which are all much more supported and better? It's shame they are not natively supported by most of the camera Android apps.
This was fascinating. I changed to JPEG large vs BPG small and they are almost indistinguishable. JPEG small vs BPG small wasn't even close (JPEG being much worst).
It does look really good for detailed areas, but when you look at the abandoned building pic BPG can never quite get the smooth sky gradient right, even at Large size.
Bro. Why are you promoting so much an app that barely does anything (opens a series of images from a hosting), as 'pornographic application that change your life'?
This account exists ONLY to talk about that app. Every one of my projects is isolated from the others by using different accounts, etc. We should all be meticulous about compartmentalizing our online identity.
This app uses an unusual image codec (BPG) which illustrates that if you control the encoder and decoder, you can choose a format with no mainstream support. I think it is a good point.
Do you run into issues being seen as a shill for your app?
I ask this in good faith, because I think a decent chunk of HN readers check a person's post history when they recommend something. I get the idea of compartmentalizing your online identity, but I imagine that comes at a cost in some instances.
> We should all be meticulous about compartmentalizing our online identity.
I disagree and I believe the HN guidelines do as well:
> Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
Do you believe the person posting is guilty of "creating accounts routinely"? Or just one for this app and one 'main' account?
I don't see an issue with creating multiple accounts as long as they're not used for abuse, e.g. spam or trolling, or cause technical issues, e.g. creating millions of accounts. I mean if done right you'd never know or care.
I'm usually pretty critical of self-promotion, but in this case they gave a real world example of how they did something related to the article's contents. They didn't even provide a link or an app name, just said that you could find it in their history if you were curious.
I think that's about the best you can do not to promote your product while trying to give real-world examples of things that are being discussed.
Listen friend, I'm using it as a concrete example of a technology in every case.
Today I'm using it as a concrete example of H.265 (BPG) as an astonishingly good alternative to JPEG in applications where you control the encoder and decoder.
Be careful working in this field (pornography). In 2017 I wrote a mildly pornographic app (http://driftwheeler.com) and it appears on my resume. When hiring managers or recruiters take a look, some of them get upset.
For example, a scheduled interview was abruptly cancelled the night before. I pursued the matter through a friend who had a senior role at the hiring company and it was determined that the (middle-aged female) in-house recruiter had been deeply offended when she followed the link on my resume and had cancelled everything. Eventually, I received a sincere apology from the CEO.
There is a real stigma, and it will affect you. Beware.
F' that. I worked for Kink.com (NSFW) (as a software engineer) and I'm proud of it. I got experience building cutting edge, high demand systems and services that I wouldn't have gotten elsewhere. We did realtime 1080p streaming video before anyone else and a full micro currency (Kinks). I even built a whole ad serving system that served banners from sites like PornHub (so I got a taste of the traffic levels they had).
If that held me back from getting a job at some puritanical company, so be it. I wouldn't have wanted to work there any way.
The CEO sent him a written apology. I wouldn't call that a puritanical company.
All it takes is one person in the critical path to not like what you're doing, even if 99% of the rest don't give a shit, and that's a potential job off the table.
You're proud of your work, that's great, but also doesn't change the fact that your work also puts you at risk of having your resume tossed for a dumb reason.
My use of the word is a generalization, sorry that wasn't clear.
Agreed, your resume could be tossed for anything. US has some protections for this. Other countries don't have this at all. You don't take a job with a porn company without realizing that. It definitely made hiring more difficult as well.
While working there, we lost access to our web analytics tool because they got bought by a Mormon company that booted us. Endless issues with credit card processors. We also had to host our own server hardware because at the time, porn wasn't allowed on many hosting services and/or we were fearful of being booted from other cloud providers.
That's also what attracted me to my current business venture, which is to provide decentralized cloud infrastructure services (aka: web3). It seems weird to think of that being decentralized, but if we don't know the specifics of what you're running on our hardware, there is nothing for us to turn off. Based on my history, I see a lot of value in that.
Love to hear more about it. We have often been told porn are one of the largest internet video category. Even before the Internet, pornography decided the war on DVD or Blu-Ray. Or at least that is what I have been told, never fact checked on any of these.
And there are so many tech on these system I wish I could read more about it. And yet we dont. There could be loads of things that could be open sourced too. Or do we live in a world where an open source component from a porn company are not good enough to use. ( I would not be surprised if that is case right now in Silicon Valley ). And yet we are happy to read technology being used in warfares?
I would imagine you have lots of restrictions and barrier in your work, from hosting to payment or whatever. It will be interesting to see how those are worked out.
Oh but please post it in a separate blogging platform so we can all enjoy it during work hours.
> Even before the Internet, pornography decided the war on DVD or Blu-Ray. Or at least that is what I have been told, never fact checked on any of these.
Beta vs VHS.
DVD did not compete against BluRay, they are two different generations. BluRay competed against HD-DVD. From what I remember technically HD-DVD was superior, BluRay won because it had extra copy protection mechanism the HD-DVD lacked.
HD-DVD was inferior. BluRay could do 25GB per layer while HD-DVD could only do 15GB.
The major factor was that Sony shipped a BluRay player in the PlayStation 3. When HD-DVD was discontinued, Sony had sold 10.5M PlayStation 3 units while there were only 1M HD-DVD units. Sony spent a lot of money subsidizing the PS3 and its BluRay player, but a 10:1 ratio of PS3s to HD-DVD players won the market (and all the standalone BluRay players just made the ratio worse).
As the PS3 sold, rental chains like Blockbuster decided to go with BluRay exclusively - and at the time Blockbuster was the largest rental chain and really powerful. Netflix also moved exclusively to BluRay. As the PS3 sold, Target decided to move exclusively to BluRay. Once the PS3 had started selling way more units than all HD-DVD players combined, everyone started moving away from HD-DVD which just reinforced its decline.
BluRay won because Sony was willing to suffer pretty big losses on PS3 sales to push the format.
It is funny, they describe it below as a character attack, but I don't even take it as that. Their quote is spot on and correct. Yes, I happily missed out on jobs to work on cool things like porn streaming.
I certainly could have gone to work for Facebook or some other FAANG, but given the choice of selling my soul for porn or selling my soul to Mark and FB... I'd pick porn any day. It was a great job. Full benefits, matching 401k, like minded coworkers, interesting and challenging use cases, best after work parties, etc.
You broke the site guidelines badly in this thread. We ban accounts that do that. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
This probably also breaks the rules, but uhh, thanks for smacking these bozos Dang. I have been here since HN started [ahem, I did lurk for a few years] and I really appreciate it being kept to high standards and a great place to discuss tech and such :)
“Don’t link to NSFW content on your resume” seems like a common-sense rule that’s applicable independently of whether you worked in the porn industry or not.
There's a big difference between surprising someone by leading them to a website that immediate shows NSFW content and putting on your resume that you previously worked for a company that published NSFW content. The latter absolutely should not be considered "NSFW" and shouldn't be considered a red flag by a potential employer.
Maybe they did good work and felt proud of it and thought the hiring managers could look past the content of the product of the company and look at the real work needed to deliver that product.
Exactly. That is why such a entry in your resume works like a great filter.
If I had worked in NSFW and an application would get rejected because of that I would sincerely thank my former job for saving me a job in an environment I would not want to touch with a ten foot pole.
If people in (even small power) like HR drones abuse their position as to flag a resume because of such a former experience I doubt there is a company culture of honesty, openness, respect or value of the individual.
To me personally a great filter to have.
If one is desperately in need of a job. OK - remove it and try to jump ship once secured in the current place.
> If people in (even small power) like HR drones abuse their position
I call this the traffic warden principle: Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. A really tiny amount of power, in one specific area of your life, corrupts even more.
(Also, FWIW, it's "people in (even small) power", not "people in (even small power)".)
Seriously. All he had to do was make a SFW version for his resume if he was so keen on showing off the work. Use pictures of smurfs and puppies.
I might unfairly be making assumptions about how technically feasible the change would be. If it would be difficult to do so, I'd be interested to learn how/why, eg was it a system design choice or is it inherent to the tech itself...
It's probably true that most work worth keeping on a resume, after some experience, is going to be non-trivial to replicate at best, and awkward to lie about/dance around in explaining purely to accommodate the sensitivities of adults who should chill out. I've worked mostly for companies I wasn't fired from, and it'd be great to avoid talking about the experience directly. Could I re-create the frontend interface for massive auction company? Maybe, but it would take a large amount of extremely unsatisfactory work. Could I recreate the database, backend infrastructure, and conditions that really made the work hard? No
Yeah, you're definitely right. If I was in that situation, I think I would be up front about the nature of the work and offer a "sanitized" textual walkthrough of the project. Let people decide if they want to risk being offended.
I'm slightly conflicted here. I don't like pretending that facets of life don't exist, especially when they don't directly harm the involved, but I am also mindful of people's individual sensitivities.
To tie it back to something more general, it seems like a lot of software engineering work is predicated on the cis male perspective. It's hard for me to imagine the psychological impact that sexual harassment might have on a woman, partly because I have the privilege of moving through the world without having my body or attractiveness be a point of interest whatsoever. I feel safe walking outside at night. I don't check my car's backseat before getting in. I have no idea what the fear of kidnapping even is.
In light of the above, of being honest with the gaps in what I will ever experience, how can I venture to link to a site that might offend a woman? Even if it seems ok to me, and it's a joke or whatever excuse, how can I possibly say I fully understand her perspective when her lived experience places her in such vastly different situations?
I agree about a lot of that, but you also don't necessarily need to link to the site or compell someone to go and inspect it. There is a reason Pornhub's parent company is actually MindGeek. Just list it, describe what you did as your job or accomplishments, and if someone chooses to check it out, you never have control over that, and while you may mot share the experience of some or most women, you have your own experiences that other people aren't necessarily worried about, but that you might be bothered by. I can't try and guess what those are, and that's life; it's bound to happen. Many people have been sexually assaulted in this world, and that's just the sad reality. Should everyone always avoid mentioning the word rape? No. Should you regularly mention it in a professional context? Probably not. Same thing for theft, child abuse, bigotry, circumcision, regular assault, guns in general, being audited, adultery, divorce, robbery (different than just theft), sexual harassment, suicide, death of any kind, gaslighting or other manipulation, depression or using the word depressed as an exaggerated expression of ongoing sadness, alcholism, OCD, ADD, w/e...
There's nuance in there of course, pick your situations, but basically none of them are going to be broadly unique or predictable, and part of life is just dealing with those awkward moments if they come up.
Absent some mitigating context, I would also conclude that something is wrong with you for putting NSFW content on your resume. The issue here is mainly what you're telegraphing about your grasp of social norms.
Regardless of whether the woman in question is a neopuritan -
I am not offended by OPs app, nor the display of a woman's breasts or genitalia. But I would greatly question what kind of employee OP would be if they're putting their jerk-off apps on their resume. If OP lacks the basic social awareness to not cause steam to come out the ears of the large percent of society that might be deemed neopuritan, then I have to suspect OP is lacking in social awareness that is going to affect their/coworkers performance in the office.
If I had written an app like that, and wanted to use it as a demo of my knowledge in some field on my resume, I would reimplement it to work on puppies or something.
This is a soundbite falsehood. The military industrial complex is the driving force of the internet and all things computing. Porn is just another monetization.
If you closely study Twitter's actions (How did that Arab Spring turn out for everybody?), or read about the InQtel origins of google (Assange's "Google Is Not What It Seems"), or how the Israelis blasted the Palestinians with porn during a siege (the OnlyFans economy!), you will see that it is still very much a weapon.
Of the actual innovations in this field, how many came from defense (DOD, CIA, NSA, ARPA, & their contractors), and how many came from pornography?
I never said secret-services...governments etc have nothing to-do with the Internet, and it would be stupid not to use it for psyop's, but the money comes from private sectors and not the "military" anymore.
Back in the day, RedTube had incredibly high quality, low bandwidth video compared to YouTube (which at that stage had been owned by Google for a couple of years). They also had mouse-over previews on the seek bar years before anywhere else did.
Yeah, I often read about porn sites for their engineering (I'm not being sarcastic, I mean that 100% sincerely). It's a shadow world that counts among it some of the most highly-trafficked sites on the internet - and then bear in mind that most of the few sites above them are not devoted to serving high-quality long-duration videos. These sites are phenomenal feats of engineering. Anyone who discounts them just because of some silly pudeur about their content is not an engineer in my eyes.
I don't really see mouseover previews as being in the same league as ethernet, GUI, laser printers, cryptography, TOR, supercomputing, LISP, Ada, etc, etc...
Xerox, under a fat DARPA grant. If you read Kay's "Early History of Smalltalk", or any of the other writeups on PARC projects, it's a genealogy of DARPA projects:
who said puritanism has to be right-wing. It's also not necessarily about sexuality. It's about putting up a set of idealistic moral standards and trying to force everybody to comply or pretend to comply.
I mean, pretty much everyone associates puritanism with the right-wing, but ok my bad...
We put up sets of idealistic moral standards that some or most of a society generally agree protects vulnerable people. This is why we have age limits on alcohol, for example. This is why we have age limits on porn, too.
Everyone is forced to comply or pretend to comply with minimum drinking ages, which are pretty common throughout the world. I think all would agree.
It doesn't really seem to be puritanism that drives a society to protect its vulnerable populations. It's not out of a hatred of alcohol that drinking ages exist, it's because alcohol abuse has been proven to ruin lives. Just like porn.
Well I think at this point you're just using puritanism as short-hand for "people trying to enforce morals I disagree with".
So if you're left-wing, than in your terminology puritans will be by definition right-wingers. And the people enforcing morals you agree with cannot be called Puritan.
If you take a brief look at the history of the original Puritanism however, it was definitely a 'revolutionary' movement against tradition. Including the ones who came to America.
> pretty much everyone associates puritanism with the right-wing
That "everyone" must be old. The new phenomena are already lampooned in plenty of memes. The boomers aged pretty badly.
> It's not out of a hatred of alcohol that drinking ages exist, it's because alcohol abuse has been proven to ruin lives
If that were the case, alcohol would just be banned outright. The limits are basically virtual anyway, anybody can attest that getting alcohol is trivial once you start to really want it. Just like porn.
A lot of law is effectively performative morality, and no more so than in the area of personal pleasures. Prohibitionism always fails, eventually, because people want to feel.
> I mean, pretty much everyone associates puritanism with the right-wing, but ok my bad...
The fact that the right wing is puritan doesn't mean that puritanism entails being right-wing. This is, like, Logic 101, 'Socrates is a man'-level shit.
The Puritans weren't right-wing. They were the freaky liberals of their time, arguing that the Anglican church was too close to the conservative, traditional Roman Catholic church - ie they wanted massive social change and a break from the past.
Eh. Modern political cleavages map very poorly onto seventeenth century religious divisions.
I'm a Quaker. Early Quakers were radical (rejecting the religious authority of priests and the fighting of wars), conservative (looking backwards to a partially-imagined better, more wholesome Christianity of the past), obnoxious (turning up to Anglican churches to heckle the sermon), and disciplined (strong structures in place for the support of families of those imprisoned for their faith, and a communal discernment process that rejected 'do as thou wilt').
Puritans rejected catholic influence on the church, yes, but their focus on individual piety, and their association with the rising merchant class, puts them a long way from freaky liberalism. One of their critiques was that others were insufficiently sober and God-fearing!
I think it's pretty clear to me. Puritan aligned forces overthrew the English Monarchy and established a republic - some 150 years later left and right came about when opponents of the French monarchy would sit on the left. There's also a very clear relationship between Puritans and the Whigs - it's surely very clear that they were to the left of the Tories.
In either century, the right represents old moral values, and the left represents a fresh new source of moral values which seek to replace the old. Granted, in the 17th century those new moral sources were religious and in the 21st century they are secular - the substance of what is now left and what was then left has absolutely changed. But the overall structure is the same.
If merely being a software engineer who handled traffic for a crappy tube site, where most videos are uploaded by consenting freaky couples, gets you blacklisted from working in companies, while people who handle privacy destruction at Google and Facebook get cushy jobs - yeah, it is bad. It's not a software engineer's fault that some frat boy uploaded revenge porn and porn does not have to be bad. Plenty of feminists are also pro-porn, just when it's done in the right way and doesn't involve manipulation or coercion.
It's not the software dev's _fault_ that someone used their tool to hurt another person, but it _is_ the dev's _responsibility_ to consider how their tool might be abused and consider whether it's really a societal good to build it.
That's kind of the whole point of the original article, narrated by a guy who _ actually feels guilty_ about his role in enabling people like your hypothetical frat boy.
You realize you have full control over your resume, right?
"It appears on my resume" makes it sound like some other controlling entity has put it on your resume, so that it now just appears there as a matter of fact.
I looked at the "mildly pornographic app" you wrote and my reaction was, I would not choose to hire you. Basically I don't want to be exposed to people's sexual fantasies as a part of my job. It's obnoxious and way, way into the territory of TMI. Do what you like and keep it private. The fact you thought it was appropriate to share this with a potential employer reviewing your resume is a red flag. Your sense of what is appropriate to share in the workplace is clearly off.
This is quite different than merely listing an employer such as pornhub on your resume.
I tend to get suspicious when porn sites (or porn-related sites) avoid https. Maybe I'm paranoid, but it's so simple to use ssl today than I find it hard to give the benefit of the doubt.
Is there any reason to your choice in publishing content such as this in a way that exposes all visitors?
The hiring process is determining who is a good fit for whom, both skills-wise, and other-wise. What if they never followed the link, and you had been hired, and you ended up working with a team of people who were culturally incompatible with you?
This falls into the same category as "be careful having opinions in public". Ever since we've been easily Googlable, right-wing employers have canceled left-wing candidates and very much vice-versa (e.g. Antonio Garcia Martinez and Apple). There's been some degree of outcry and stink about this, but in the end it's probably a net good for employees to work with teams they are culturally aligned with. Getting cut early on account of what you believe or what else you worked on is probably best for everyone involved.
Would you like to be able to enjoy a beer with your coworkers or not?
You write about the unjust bias (and unjust it is) against you for having worked with porn, but then seem to to try to evoke ageist and gender stereotypes.
OP never said the bias was unjust, only that the bias exists and people working in that industry should be aware it could be used against them.
Multiple studies exist showing that men and women have very very different views on pornography and in particular women's views on it are significantly more negative than men's views. Furthermore people's views on pornography change as they get older with older people having an even more negative view about it than younger people. This isn't like a fringe difference either, consumption of porn by women is less than 20% that of men. There's nothing sexist about pointing out that women can and often do have very different views on a subject than men, and no reason to think that women having a negative view of pornography somehow makes them inferior in anyway.
>Multiple studies exist showing that men and women have very very different views on pornography and in particular women's views on it are significantly more negative than men's views
Can you cite some of these studies?
IIRC there is a difference in consumption rates between genders, but not negative attitudes.
I think the implication is that women tend to have more of a problem with pornography than men. Perhaps if the CEO had been a man it wouldn't have gotten to the point where it resulted in their interview being cancelled.
Agreed. And while I doubt this is what the author of the comment actually had in mind, I think it is important to notice that porn, by large extent, takes advantage of women, and so it’s women who naturally have bigger issue with it than man. And I assume the CEO who sent the apologetic letter was a man. In other words, the author inadvertently exemplifies how sexist IT can still be.
> There is a real stigma, and it will affect you. Beware.
Small anecdote, but I was recruited by and almost took an offer for the folks behind "BangBros." Their corporate structure was apparently such that the IT / Software roles worked for a shell company with a generic name, generic website, etc. This company apparently works in a "consulting" like capacity for all of their assets (BangBros, "tube" sites, cam sites, etc.)
I asked what was going on with the shell company, because it seemed sketchy as all hell. It was explained that because of industry stigma most of their employees use the shell company for their resume with generic "worked on highly-scalable systems handling N amount of traffic."
Apparently it was a highly professional outfit, and the closest you could get to dealing with FANG-level problems while not being a FANG-eligible person. Great pay and benefits, business casual dress located in a nice building in Miami Beach.
Same sort of arrangement, I casually discovered, is often in play for gambling sites (pun intended). Because the overall outfit can be seen as questionable (occasionally by accident: gambling regulations change very often, so what is legal today might well be illegal tomorrow), the technical side is kept at arm's length, so that they can still attract good talent.
I'd be all for stigmatization if the ranking wasn't absolutely bonkers. Between advertising and porn, advertising is worse for the collected psyche. It is a constant onslaught that tells everyone to want, and never relents. Porn can be avoided approximately 10,000 times more easily than advertising.
Porn is almost as unavoidable as ads, especially for kids. We know the average age of a boy viewing porn is 11 (1)and that virtually all of them will see porn by 15(2). Of porn viewing done by minors 22% are done by children under 10 (3). Porn has also been proven to have significantly more impact over your brain than advertising. The dopamine response to seeing porn is similar to crack (4). You can't get addicted to ads. Pornography is categorically more dangerous to society than ads, tracking, and privacy invasions.
I found this fairly dubious, and followed through with this and got to the study[0]. It uses [1] as its source. That source is a private antivirus company (bitdefender), and they don't quote any sources for those claims, but luckily they offer a solution:
> Use security solutions with Parental Control to watch over kids online. Features such as Bitdefender Parental Control block inappropriate content, restrict Web access between certain hours and helps parents remotely monitor their children”s online activity
I haven't followed through on the other statistics you quoted, but that seems like some major corporate BS you're basing your argument on there.
> The research was conducted by Bitdefender in September 2016 covering 706 users of Bitdefender's security solutions.
Where are these ads? I never see pornographic ads in my daily browsing.
> The dopamine response to seeing porn is similar to crack (4).
That doesn't prove anything about harmfulness. I think it was already obvious that humans are hardwired to be attracted to sex. Nothing in these links suggests that this response creates to an addiction similar to hard drugs.
> Pornography is categorically more dangerous to society than ads, tracking, and privacy invasions.
He was making a point about the proliferation of porn. It's not so bad if your settings turn off NSFW on various sites. However even then, it's often in your face. I won't go into details though.
Porn isn't sex. The repeated exposure to a huge volume of media can't be compared to a physical experience. It's more comparable to a drug.
"yourbrainonporn.com" is about as reliable as quoting D.A.R.E. for information on drugs. In other words, it holds literally no weight and is likely religion-driven "family values" propaganda.
Just to correct myself, the page I linked to is actually about making the case for the link between dopamine and addiction. The effect of porn on the brain is made indirectly.
A lot of other things are also highly addictive though, like social media. So where do you draw the line? Also, why are some people so much more addicted than others?
That seems like equivocation on the word "unavoidable." There's a big difference between saying "ads are unavoidable because they are displayed on nearly every computing device you use" and "porn is unavoidable because people actively want to see it."
Midwest US, mid 30's. This sort of view is strongly held by the intellectual and political circles I support and follow. I think it is a very insidious and corrupting addiction, and the modern incarnation of it is orders of magnitude more stimulating than in prior eras. Infinite access to a stimulus that simulates in male brains "mating" with ever varied women, which is hijacking a strong biological imperative.
As another comment mentioned a similar problem with "advertising" in general, I think sexualization and over stimulus of the population weakens people, and not to say there is some conspiracy purposefully pushing this (it may just emergent from technology and human instinct) I do think the corrupting influence weakens a population and makes them more easily dominated by strong forces... media, business, government, etc. All to say that, in terms of "what is best to cultivate a strong society and people" porn is extremely antithetical to this. A stronger society is one that would be avoiding, however necessary, consumption and production of pornography.
This presentation [0] on the physiological effects of porn consumption is very informative. Observations mirror what strong opiates do to the brain
A good overview of the public health problem of porn[1]
The psychologically destabilizing and weakening effects of porn, and how they breakdown willpower to oppose stronger forces are illustrated by the time when the Israeli military broadcast pornography onto the televisions of Palestinian residents of the besieged West Bank town of Ramallah [2]. Why would they do this if porn was good for you?
Oh wow. I am blown away. You just threw me back some 30 years.
Let me explain. About three decades ago I was (gladly not to strongly) part of a Christian youth group. Led by honorable members of the parish. They condemned porn, Sex, condemned schools doing sex ed. The condemned viciously youth magazines doing sex ed as well (German Bravo magazine).
Kids naturally discovered their budding sexuality. Looked at porn or nudism magazines. Tried maturation (oh what a sin in the eyes of the elders). As said everything sexusl, everything bodily was tabu.
Kids, especially in the inner part of these groups with parents active in the parish were fearful. Full of shame because they felt their bodies betraying them and their faith. Felt the touch of Satan. Felt dirty and without being worthy.
You (or at least others) might get the drift.
And - more importantly - these kids (boys and girls alike) were vulnerable. And believe me - easy prey. And prey they were. The most respected members of the flock, leaders of youth groups and excursions who prayed with us and always told us that we could always come to them with any question about our faith and life in general. These were the wolves. Males as well as females. They longed for the confessions. Let the kids show what they had done. Wanted to see in detail. Some even went further. Did not constraint themselves to confessions and private shows of underage maturation.
So yeah I learned early that porn is to blame for a rotten society. Porn is the culprit. Not people.
Sorry, but what you wrote is nearly verbatim the arguments that were hammered into us.
Porn is not sexual, it is anti-sexual. Young adults are having less sex than prior generations. The birth rate is collapsing. To equate compulsive consumption of a synthetic substitute for real sex and the natural reason for its existence is ridiculous.
Like equating criticizing unhealthy eating of candy and junk food to an opposition to "food" would be similar.
Thank you for this! This is something that is really really important to me and my wife. We have seen some horrible consequences in our parents' generation from porn addictions. I also had an addiction to it, but thankfully I am free now. My biggest desire as a father is that my children would grow up addiction free. Boys are exposed to porn when they are simply unable to understand what it is, what sex is, and what the price of the short-term pleasure is. I know I was. I hate what happened to me, I hate what I did, but I felt like I had to do it.
Yes, they weren't a good thing but even those were taboo and fairly inaccessible to the average kid and came with a stigma for the adults buying them in public.
Do you not see how the infinite novelty of endless porn videos accessible in the palm of your hand is different than the (crude and still objectionable) magazines sold in corner stores?
I would suggest the photocopy of a crunched up semi-nude Madonna photo from the 80s caused our imagination to soak much more than what is available online.
At the time many lighters and cards had nude images. It was much more common and celebrated.
Pornography is an active good for society that affords people an easy way to enjoy themselves and live out fantasies while causing no inherent harm to anyone else. It is certainly less harmful to society than tobacco, gambling or telemarketers.
Sex is a perfectly enjoyable past-time, similar to woodworking or snowboarding, and nothing changes about its morality when you record it on a camera.
It is also worth noting that pornography has existed in essentially every human culture that has had writing or visual artistry. The noble spirit of mankind, if such a thing exists, has yet to crumble.
It is shaming the abuse of a naked body, and the mind that goes with it. I have more respect for the beauty of the naked body than do porn producers and consumers. Real meaningful sex is respect for the naked body, porn is a poor, pathetic, addictive, mind altering and weakening synthetic substitute. Get it?
Your view seems based on over-generalization.
It's fine to think "most porn is disrespectful", but that shouldn't lead you to conclude all porn should suffer from repressive laws or social norms.
If I'm working on something interesting, something of real tangible value, it's very easy to tune out everything--noise, headache, hunger, hornyness. When I'm grinding out corporate stuff to pay the bills, it's another story. I think our impulses are bursting with wisdom. If the work loses out to the sex drive, how meaningful was the work in the first place?
If sex hasn't taken over pretty much everything else in the list of priorities, it just means that you haven't gotten horny enough.
There a whole wide spectrum between "I'm kind of horny", "I think i'm pretty darn horny" and actually full-blast horny.
In due time, sex will move up to no1 spot in the list of priorities.
And if doesn't, then you're either old (or getting there) or perhaps never had a particularly strong sex-drive to begin with.
Sex-drive is just an insanely powerful force in men, most men have experienced but
only a small sliver of how powerful it can get, since they never let it get there, because porn is always there and easily accessible, and you can just rub one out without porn too.
So is hunger. So is survival. I don't think you understand what I have written. If your instincts are putting sex at the top of the list, maybe it's time to have sex, with a real person, instead of muting your instincts with soma so you can earn more fiats?
>muting your instincts with soma so you can earn more fiats?
I actually love programming, and when I was refering to "programming work" I was specifically refering to my hobby projects.
> So is hunger. So is survival.
Unlike sex-drive, hunger and survival is very much aligned with what I want.
I have to eat so I can keep doing things that I love (programming, creating music, etc)
While sex-drive is a hardwired instinct to procreate and have children - which is very much polar-opposite of my best self interests.
More over I do NOT want to have sex with any of my EXes or bar slobs or hiring prostututes. It just seems "like a good idea" under an altered state of mind. No thank you, very much.
I'm not my body.
And I'm not even my mind half of the time (especially when overloaded with the horny hormones).
Obviously porn is not a necessity to rub one out, especially if you're really, really horny. As I was.
However, being in that really horny frame of mind, you really dont want to jerk off at all, or even watch porn frankly - that is not what you want at all. You want to fuck a woman in the most direct-est animalistic raw kind of way.
I wouldn't have rubbed one out without porn, it wouldn't have happened.
Instead you do stupid shit, like start texting all your EX-es, or going on dates with woman you don't really even like or consider booking a prostitutes and all sorts of fucked up stuff...
Being horny, really horny is a trip, an altered state of mind is what i'm going to say.
Porn very effectively brings you back to earth and disables biological imperatives in a quick and enjoyable way (hell, it's not even particularly enjoyable after an extended long abstinence, since it's is waaay to intense).
Porn is definitely easy to abuse for some people, but it doesn't mean it's all bad, it is extremely useful tool.
I would assume it's affecting most countries with high speed internet. I just chose not to opine on those countries since I don't live in them and am less informed. You can view this comment I made for why porn is dangerous:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30443056
If HR passed on them because 'porn' they either abused their position or gave a clear signal about company culture. They need to find someone that fits. In terms of skills and team fit/professionalism.
Either the company values prude/neoconservative value signaling (the at least I wouldn't want to work there and they should openly tell people what ideology is expected) or the HR person abused their position and did not do their job in finding someone that fits the skill set and role.
Being anti-porn is hardly limited to neocons, unless you think the totality of FAANGs are neocons. This is the sort of live wire that cuts right across all political groups.
I'll echo a sub post on this and say, with a most gentle: fuck. that. I consider it a positive signal that I would be rejected for some of my past work in adult. It shortcuts the whole you're-interviewing-them portion of the recruiting process. They've done my work for me. In the past, my involvement in the area has proven to be an interesting facet of my work history that others don't have, often resulting in interviews just out of curiosity on their end. Did I receive offers on all of them? No, and I don't care either and that's not the point.
My point is that I'm not going to censor myself or my background in anticipation of someone being offended. Let them be offended, there's lots of other places where that isn't a problem.
That is fine if you don't mind loosing out on some opportunities because a very religious recruiting coordinator 6 months out of college making 45K per year decides your profile is icky.
It's probably not the CTO, your direct manager, or even any of your peer that would be offended. Anyone in the long chain of people that are involved in your process from applicant to employee could cause a stink.
It's difficult to say one employees who might filter you out is indicative of the entire company culture. I know a lot of happy employees who absolutely hated their experience being onboarded because of 1 or 2 difficult people. But who gives a shit about how Michael from HR took 9 days to send an official offer letter if you're never going to have to interact with them again?
How does it improve the pornography experience? The description and examples on that website don't make it obvious. The Register article linked seems to help but I really didn't get that from the landing page or example video.
edit: now I understand, it is a continuous slideshow of erotica, and you can tap any part of the image to be taken down a path of similar images. that's kind of cool.
I thought it would have had something to do with decensoring, but nevermind.
Does BlueStacks work on an Apple Silicon machine? I don't have an android device.
In 2017, on a low-end GPU, the indexing took about 10 minutes of 100% utilization, for a dozen patches covering each of 50,000 images (feature vectors were 1,024 32-bit floats).
After that, the app just queries a precomputed list (256 precomputed matches per query) depending on where in the image the user pressed. Even with hundreds of simultaneous users, it can hardly keep a $5 Linode busy.
Similarly, I've been writing respectable software for decades but I'm fairly certain that my most widely used piece of software, by a wide margin, is a mildly pornographic app (http://driftwheeler.com)
This app, published in 2017, has a continuously growing population of users from all over the world. I get email every day asking whether soft1 is the only server, thanking me, suggesting improvements, etc.
It's ironic, and there is a lesson to be learned here.
It's just a numbers game. The total number of people who consume porn is probably many orders of magnitude larger than the audience of your respectable software, so even if you're tapping into a very small niche of porn consumers, it can be enough to overtake your other software.
Similarly, I've been writing respectable, sophisticated software for decades but I'm fairly certain that my most widely used piece of software, by a wide margin, is a mildly pornographic app (http://driftwheeler.com)
Other projects I've published have a trickle of users. But this app, published in 2017, has a continuously growing population of users from all over the world. I get email every day asking whether soft1 is the only server, thanking me, suggesting improvements, etc.
It's ironic, and there is a difficult lesson to be learned from this reality.
All the major app stores restrict pornographic or sexually explicit content.
But if you Google "porn app", the 4th or 5th search result (SexTechGuide) is a page that features the app, with a review, pros/cons, and the funny icon.
http://driftwheeler.com
Not safe for work. Pornography advertising.
I get a cut of the monthly fees when somebody signs up for MetArt.