A very astute framing by Ted Chiang—large language models as a form of lossy compression for text.
When we’re dealing with sequences of words, lossy compression looks smarter than lossless compression.
A lot of uses have been proposed for large language models. Thinking about them as blurry JPEGs offers a way to evaluate what they might or might not be well suited for.
There’s a new image format on the browser block and it’s very performant indeed. Jake has all the details you didn’t ask for.
This is good to know! Because of a bug in Google App Engine, Brid.gy won’t work for sites using Brotli compression on HTML.
A deep, deep, deep dive into the JPEG format. Best of all, it’s got interactive explanations you can tinker with, a la Nicky Case or Bret Victor.
A handy in-browser image compression tool. Drag, drop, tweak, and export.
Handy web-based tools—compress HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and convert files from one format to another.
Following on from Amber’s introduction, here’s a really in-depth look at image formats, compression and optimisation techniques from Addy.
This is a really nicely put together little web book released under a Creative Commons licence.
Google have released this encoder for JPEGs which promises 20-30% smaller file sizes without any perceptible loss of quality.
The history of the GIF—a tale of licensing, compression, and standards.
Some good thinking from Jason here. In a roundabout way, he’s saying that when it comes to responsive images—as with just about every other aspect of web development—the answer is …it depends.
You’ve probably seen this already, but it’s really worth bearing in mind: when you’re scaling up JPGs for retina display you can safely reduce the image quality by quite a lot—to the point of getting the exact same file size as a higher quality image that’s half the size.
This looks like a really handy tool for reducing the file size of JPEGs without any perceptible loss of quality (in much the same way that ImageOptim works for PNGs)—available as a Mac app or an installable web service.
An in-depth analysis (graphs! data!) of how popular sites are using—or not using—compression.