Back when image compression was just reducing the resolution and color depth.
this post was submitted on 11 May 2025
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Dithering is so fucking cool. At some point I wanna check out that game that uses a ton of really stylized dithering - return of the obra djin I think?
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I mean... if we reeeaaally wanna carbon date ourselves...
All that's missing is the modem ear rape.
There were reports of teenage boys becoming so conditioned that they would get an erection when they heard a modem dialling
The internet has always been about porn
The first ever image digitally transmitted was a playboy centrefold. "The Lena"
Unironically I love that so much lol
On the off chance you haven't experienced the Floppotron:
I fuckin love the floppotron! 🥰
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I miss dithering. It's got a certain je ne sais quoi.
We listened to music as 41kB RealAudio files that sounded like the song was underwater, which was the style at the time.
This JPEG is just 41 KiB, which was the style shortly after I was born.
Excuse me, I forgot the text. Wouldn't be fair without all that entropy. To make up for it, I turned on chroma subsampling. This one is 39 KiB.
I turned on chroma subsampling
43KiB, though obviously a chunk of that is from the colors of the jpg Professor.
EDIT: I just noticed webp messes with colors around the edges too (which would matter more if I cut the resolution in half or so). The original .png (what I actually uploaded) doesn't at 51.6KiB.
Also obviously this would be less data in non-pixel format (well, it'd likely be eaten up by overhead for packaging, though after that it would allow tons of art for negligible data cost). Would be smaller as an svg for example (or an swf).
Dithering is much older than jpeg.
They used dithering in printed media, so it was transfered to digital media as a way to save on color depth, before jpeg got invented.
how small can u get this with the text still readable?
Depends on what you consider readable, but I got it down to 2842 bytes by downscaling it and using an absolutely atrocious quality setting:
That's just small enough to fit inside a QR code, so I did that! (You probably can't scan it with a typical QR reader; you need something like zbar that supports reading binary data).
nice :D
in a different timeline where the GIF89 specification would not have been mostly ignored, it would have been possible to go even smaller.
"The GIF89 specification allows you to specify text captions to be overlayed on the following image. This feature never took off; browsers and image-processing applications such as Photoshop ignore it"
Meaning if your gif viewing client supports full GIF89 then you could just display the text over a 1x1 pixel image, shrinking the file size down to something in the range of < 100bytes.
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could you get it small enough to fit in a data uri so phone qr scanners will read it?
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To be more accurate, the dithering was more specific to animated gifs and not static pictures. Unless you go back really far... I remember finding porn on 5 inch floppies my dad had in his closet and even the non-animated images were black & white and dithered to hell. Though I am pretty sure he didn't obtain those off the internet.
Dithered Street Fighter porn?
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