this post is just 42kib

I mean... if we reeeaaally wanna carbon date ourselves...

- The whole man is insufficient Data, I love Data so much 🥹
All that's missing is the modem ear rape.
- Pretty sure modem noises were the inspiration behind dubstep.
- 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"
- And websites would have a link to a page and say "Warning! This page contains a lot of pictures!" so you wouldn't click it unless you were prepared to put your other browsing on hold for a little while
Phone rings*
Didn't GIFs load from the bottom?
- It was top to bottom unless the image had a rotation flag in it. I don't remember if it was just PNG that had that or if other formats could too.
- No. You're thinking of jifs

pngcrush gets it down to 21.1 kB with no loss of quality.
I tried posting the file, but Lemmy converts it to the atrocious webp format automatically.
EDIT: JPEG-XL clocks in at just 16.3 kB, again with no loss of quality.

Everyone should use jxl for their photos
JXL for the win! when will we get support for it in firefox though..
- Never....

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.
- 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.
- how small can u get this with the text still readable?
- 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.
- _
Avif, without alpha channel, 17.6 KB

We listened to music as 41kB RealAudio files that sounded like the song was underwater, which was the style at the time.

Fyi, dithering hinders most modern compression algorythms, making the pic bigger.

They looked like they just came from a vault from fallout

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?

Obra Dinn's filter hurt my eyes. A lot of these filters do and glad many are toggles in the options.
- That's very fair, that's a consequence of using a shader based artstyle I really hadn't considered
Dithering is still to this day extremely useful for making custom wall art in Minecraft using maps, because maps have a very specific and limited pallette.

Back when image compression was just reducing the resolution and color depth.

i mean yeah, its a honest loss of information, jpg on the other hand introduces compression artifacts that are basically hallucinations, meaning it pretends to have more data than it actually has and humans compensate for that thru image recognition and fantasy.
- I mean, that's what dithering is
  \ An artifact that your brain processes as something else.
It's really only helpful for formats that will be directly read by hardware (the video chip) and where the "compression" ratio (I would prefer the term quantization) needs to be fixed. For file compression, which was quite mature but CPU- and memory-intensive at the time, the dithering only makes it more difficult to compress further.
Compressed textures on modern GPUs actually use similar compression: a color palette followed by indexes into the palette. But that's done per 4x4 pixel block.
- What do you mean "at the time"?
  \ What time are you talking about?
JPEG also reduces color depth as it’s first step but just in a smarter way. RGB is converted into YCbCr.
- You've phrased this like a disagreement, but I don't see how.
  Although maybe I'm just so jaded, that people providing interesting tangentially related trivia are perceived as being hostile unless they announce that as their intent, because usually unannounced trivia is leveled as an attack.