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Show HN: Meow – An Image File Format I made because PNGs and JPEGs suck for AI

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Re: Show HN: Meow – An Image File Format I made because PNGs and JPEGs suck for AI

#31

Post by refulgentis »

gruez wrote: post #30
refulgentis wrote: post #20

You generated pretty much ~all of this with Claude (c.f. ASCII diagrams with emojis on each line to "prove" various not-even-wrong claims it was told to justify), and the work is mediocre enough that it's worth full-throatedly criticizing both the work quality and that you inflicted this upon the world. Look how many confused comments there are due to the page claiming features you don't have, don't understand, and d…

>You generated pretty much ~all of this with Claude >- Your setup instructions use UNIX commands up until they require running a Windows batch file Is your comment AI generated? The only setup instructions prior to the windows commands are "git", "cd", and "pip". "cd" exists on both windows and unix. The other commands might not be available by default on windows, but they're not exactly "UNIX" commands either. The o…

> Is your comment AI generated?

Are you asking this earnestly, or, is it meant to communicate something else? If so, what? :)

Genuinely, the most interesting part of the comment to me, in that it is does not have 0 meaning, and rings of some form of frustration, yet the rest of your comment stays focused on technical knowledge, and AFAIK you are not the author (who I'd expect would be at least temporarily angry at my contribution)

Re: Show HN: Meow – An Image File Format I made because PNGs and JPEGs suck for AI

#33

Post by gruez »

refulgentis wrote: post #31
gruez wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You generated pretty much ~all of this with Claude >- Your setup instructions use UNIX commands up until they require running a Windows batch file Is your comment AI generated? The only setup instructions prior to the windows commands are "git", "cd", and "pip". "cd" exists on both windows and unix. The other commands might not be available by default on windows, but they're not exactly "UNIX" commands either. The o…

> Is your comment AI generated? Are you asking this earnestly, or, is it meant to communicate something else? If so, what? :) Genuinely, the most interesting part of the comment to me, in that it is does not have 0 meaning, and rings of some form of frustration, yet the rest of your comment stays focused on technical knowledge, and AFAIK you are not the author (who I'd expect would be at least temporarily angry at my…

>Are you asking this earnestly, or, is it meant to communicate something else? If so, what? :)

If you're going to accuse some else of technical inconsistencies, maybe you should make sure your critiques are free of technical inconsistencies as well. You know, "people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones" and all that.

Re: Show HN: Meow – An Image File Format I made because PNGs and JPEGs suck for AI

#34

Post by magicalhippo »

thinkingQueen wrote: post #23
fao_ wrote: post #7

> Instead of storing metadata alongside the image where it can be lost, MEOW ENCODES it directly inside the image pixels using LSB steganography That makes the data much more fragile than metadata fields, though? Any kind of image alteration or re-encoding (which almost all sites do to ensure better compression — discord, imgur, et al) is going to trash the metadata or make it utterly useless. I'll be honest, I don't…

Exactly. Not long ago, someone showed up on Hacker News who had, on his own, begun to rediscover the benefits of arithmetic coding. Naturally, he was convinced he’d come up with a brand-new entropy coding method. Well, no harm done and it’s nice that people study compression but I was surpised how easily he got himself convinced of a discovery. Clearly he knew very little. Overall, I think this is a positive ”problem…

I've had several revolutionary discoveries during my time programming. In each case, after the euphoria had settled a bit, I asked myself: Why aren't we already doing this? Why isn't this already a thing? What am I missing?

And lo and behold, in each case I did find that it was either not novel at all or it had some major downside I had initially missed.

Still, fun to think about new ways of doing things, so I still go at it.

Re: Show HN: Meow – An Image File Format I made because PNGs and JPEGs suck for AI

#35

Post by kuberwastaken »

jtsylve wrote: post #26
a2128 wrote: post #10

You're adding metadata, but what problems does this added metadata solve exactly? If your converter can automatically compute these image features, then AI training and inference pipelines can trivially do the same, so I don't see the point in needing a new file format that contains these. Moreover, models and techniques get better over time, so these stored precomputed features are guaranteed to become obsolete. Eve…

The answer may be in your question. - This is currently solved by inference pipelines. - Models and techniques improve over time. The ability for different agents with different specialties to add additional content while being able to take advantage of existing context is what makes the pipeline work. Storing that content in the format could allow us to continue to refine the information we get from the image over t…

Said it better than I could have

also, the idea is to integrate the conversion processes/ pipelines with other data that'll help with customized workflows.

Re: Show HN: Meow – An Image File Format I made because PNGs and JPEGs suck for AI

#36

Post by Dwedit »

Metadata gets stripped by most websites.

Embedding metadata into the pixels by using the least significant bits of RGB won't cut it, that stuff is gone when the file becomes a JPEG.

But there do exist methods of embedding data in pixels that can survive JPEG compression.

Re: Show HN: Meow – An Image File Format I made because PNGs and JPEGs suck for AI

#37

Post by kuberwastaken »

RamblingCTO wrote: post #5

> it gets stripped way too easily when sharing that's not a bug, that's a (security) feature

Sure is, but do we need that security feature that's common on the internet to have worse context when working with AI?

Re: Show HN: Meow – An Image File Format I made because PNGs and JPEGs suck for AI

#38

Post by can16358p »

Nice work!

Though I have one question: once 2 bits/channel are used with Meow-specific data thus leaving 6bits/channel, I doubt how it can still retain perfect image quality when either: (if everything's re-encoded) dynamic range is reduced by 75% or LSB changes introduce noise to the original image. Not too much noise, but still.

Re: Show HN: Meow – An Image File Format I made because PNGs and JPEGs suck for AI

#39

Post by kuberwastaken »

daeken wrote: post #29

> Python-based image file format This is one of the first lines of the readme. But this is PNG with some metadata encoded using the most naive steganographic technique (just thrown into the LSB of pixels -- no redundancy, no error correction, no compensation for down sampling, etc). Even ignoring everything else, this is just ... Nonsensical. I am very very pro-AI. But this is slop.

That's fair, the idea is to have something like this in practice and this is something I think that can be iterated upon to be actually more useful.

Re: Show HN: Meow – An Image File Format I made because PNGs and JPEGs suck for AI

#40

Post by refulgentis »

gruez wrote: post #33
refulgentis wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is your comment AI generated? Are you asking this earnestly, or, is it meant to communicate something else? If so, what? :) Genuinely, the most interesting part of the comment to me, in that it is does not have 0 meaning, and rings of some form of frustration, yet the rest of your comment stays focused on technical knowledge, and AFAIK you are not the author (who I'd expect would be at least temporarily angry at my…

>Are you asking this earnestly, or, is it meant to communicate something else? If so, what? :) If you're going to accuse some else of technical inconsistencies, maybe you should make sure your critiques are free of technical inconsistencies as well. You know, "people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones" and all that.

There's a false equivalence there, between being not-even-wrong and "you have a bunch of UNIX commands followed by a Windows batch file execution."

Note we both agree on that, you seem to assume I claimed something else, like, cd doesn't exist on windows.

Let's say I instead said "this doesn't work on Windows"

I spent probably...8 hours? on Windows this week doing dev, and I'm about 70% sure all of those commands will work on Windows, with dev mode switched on, with WSL on, prereqs installed...

Let's steelman this to the max: any possible prerequisite that could block it, doesn't mean its actually blocked. Dev mode on, WSL, prerequisites wrestled with and installed, can download source and edit then compile, but can only patch build errors, not add new functionality.

Are you 100% sure those commands will work?

(separately, you misunderstand the quote re: glass houses. It would apply if I had used AI to write not-even-wrong claims and then submitted to HN. This misunderstanding leads to a conclusion that it is impermissible to comment on the correctness of anything if you may be incorrect, which we can both recognize leads to absurdities that would lead to 0 communication ever.)

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