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Comment by eknkc | Hacker News Reader

Meh. I tried to npm install and run it. Npm failed with a cryptic error message. I have a built docker image of this so in any case, I can eventually fix it. Was not that important though.

But then again, why the fuck does that fail now?

I had a friend who was convinced that JPEGs would slowly degrade sitting on a disk. This was around 1990s so he would store important things in BMP so they would not degrade.

I think node_modules has something similar.

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Your friend was sort of not entirely wrong. A JPEG decoder can do many decisions on how to decode, while a BMP is just pixels. (So then it's "only" a matter of color spaces.)

I haven't experienced this with JPEGs but wouldn't be surprised, as I have experienced it with MP3s. Newer decoders can't play some of my MP3s made with older encoders.

Well, a compliant JPEGs will still open in any reader, but can look slightly different. In a low-resolution image, it could change some fine detail you really cared about.

Ages ago I did some bit flip tests on different image encodings for a school project. It was interesting to see how a single flipped bit would propagate across the image in encodings that relied on similarity to nearby pixels for compression. Really the effect was limited to the frame, but the effects could be striking.

Ok you are probably on to something I need to apologize for calling him a moron more than once on this.

Come to think about this, we used a lot of different software and switched them as Windows would not open JPEGs by itself I believe.

There's also bit flips. A JPEG can be more easily corrupted if some bits randomly flip.

Also JPEG is lossy, BMP is lossless.

Bit rot is real and has affected me multiple times. You need redundant storage like RAID to minimize the risk.

That's your fault for not using npm ci

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