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>Image that will be rendered straight to a webpage? Yeah, it’s probably a fine

I don't know, I still think the concept would appear in the context of image scaling and aliasing.

I agree in the sense that image scaling definitely requires you to think of pixels as more than just squares, but IMO browsers and OSes have gotten good enough at it that as a web developer you mostly don’t have to think too hard about it other than to remember to use high enough resolutions.

Oh sure. At that point though, are you even thinking as far as "little squares"?

Fair point. I'm not really thinking of it as little squares, I'm more just thinking in terms of integer coordinates in a 2-d Cartesian space. But I do think I'm inherently abstracting the "screen" as a grid of square pixels because it's a serviceable abstraction that is substantially simpler than "here is the whole signal processing pipeline that sits between my <image> tag and some phone user's eyes."

I suppose you're right that what I'm describing is just the lack of conscious mental model for what the pixel represents, versus when I'm writing a shader, where I'm actively thinking through the mental model of a pixel.

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