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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

Dithering can still be a striking aesthetic choice. Low Tech Magazine is my go-to example: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/

From their About page:

"Thus, instead of using full-colour high-resolution images, we chose to convert all images to black and white, with four levels of grey in-between. These black-and-white images are then coloured according to the pertaining content category via the browser’s native image manipulation capacities. Compressed through this dithering plugin, images featured in the articles add much less load to the content: compared to the old website, the images are roughly ten times less resource-intensive."

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See also the video game Return of the Obra Dinn (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_of_the_Obra_Dinn) as well as the developer log entry about dithering (https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.msg136374...).

Was about to mention this game. Found it through HN and loved it. The dithering is used very well in the game and fits very well with the overall gameplay.

An interesting aspect about the game is how it required making the dithering stable to changing viewpoints, not something typical dithering algorithms care about.

> compared to the old website, the images are roughly ten times less resource-intensive.

Does that account for the repeated post processing done by every client?

My sense is they're trying to reduce request size/processing/reading from disk for their solar-powered server, more than reduce the whole world's energy use.

Their core goal is, paraphrasing, helping design a sustainable society[1]. Reducing the whole world's energy use is aligned with that - more than reducing load on a single server.

That being said, I doubt the post processing adds much in this case.

[1]: "Low-tech Magazine questions the belief in technological progress and highlights the potential of past knowledge and technologies when it comes to designing a sustainable society" - https://www.patreon.com/lowtechmagazine/about

Decoding a black and white compressed image using a two color palette is essentially free. You have to paint a bit to a color, might as well choose #ff00ff instead of #111111 for "black"

Unfortunately, if the browser window were not at the right size, some of those dithered images will be scaled with visible moiré patterns. If they wanted a dithered look that works at different resolutions, it might have been better to serve grayscale images and filter them on the client side.

Dithered content stands out because it’s an outlier in a world of smooth gradients. We’d be clamouring for the opposite if everything was dithered.

Thanks. Low Tech Magazine is fascinating.

Lichtenstein would agree.

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