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Comment by hackrmn | Hacker News Reader

The hero image on the linked page, which consists of a muted teal background with the words "Introducing Muse Spark", weighs in at 3,5MB. I don't even...

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"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

- Hacker News Guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's at least Meta-relevant. Compression Represents Intelligence Linearly (Y Huang, 2024)

Such complaints are valid for AI model releases, that tells us that they are not using their own models to test their own release pages.

Maybe they did get their models to test their pages, but they didn't tell their models to pretend that they're browsing on mobile using a 3G connection.

I think this speaks to the product release iself

Good catch - looks like it's a PNG image, with an alpha channel for the rounded corners, and a subtle gradient in the background. The gradient is rendered with dithering, to prevent colour banding. The dither pattern is random, which introduces lots of noise. Since noise can't be losslessly compressed, the PNG is an enormous 6.2 bits per pixel.

While working on a web-based graphics editor, I've noticed that users upload a lot of PNG assets with this problem. I've never tracked down the cause... is there a popular raster image editor which recently switched to dithered rendering of gradients?

My reasoning is because once upon a time, I was using Macromedia Fireworks, and PNGs gave far far better results than JPGs did at the time, at least in terms of output quality. Nearly certainly because I didn't understand JPG compression, but for web work in the mid 2000s PNGs became my favourite. Not to mention proper alpha channels!

...and so it's stuck, two decades on haha

lol it literally took me 2s to google search "optimize image for website" and 10s to upload and get a smaller sized image.

The result for that specific image is: 500kb. 85% decrease in size

An indistinguishable JPG is 170KB. An SVG would be 20KB.

CSS with a linear gradient background would be even smaller :)

You can even automatically do that on your CDN/delivery/web server layer. Or as part of your web deployment pipeline.

Yes, but it might be a little too advance for Meta ;)

But they have personal superintelligence?

Someday our robot overlords will be intelligent enough to ... optimize images!

(But today is not that day.)

The proper optimization in this case is to not use images at all.

For me it's 213 kB. Did they replace it?

And it doesn't even look high-res.

complaining about sand on the beach

It's not sand on the beach, it's garbage on the beach.

I am simply offended. By Meta's lack of sensibilities (or ability) towards use of images on the Web while touting their new flavour of artificial intelligence as a product.

old man shouts at cloud

more like old man shouts at someone else's computer

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