Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Journey to JPEG XL: open-source experiments shaped the future of image coding

opensource.googleblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 93 posts

Re: Journey to JPEG XL: open-source experiments shaped the future of image coding

#81

Post by JyrkiAlakuijala »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #69
JyrkiAlakuijala wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent 10+ years in building JPEG XL and I'm proud of the result. It wasn't always easy times. It is not so bad people can see what I look like and take a peek what the process was to get there. This article is not about the entropy codes and predictors, memory bandwidth and decision trees, but about the long horizon planning in corporate-driven OSS efforts and being connected to both community and cross-industry.

That doesn't sound like a denial to me. Your years working on JPEGXL are extremely admirable, and you deserve to be recognized for it, but the gratuitous use of genAI in this post is also insulting to humans. The world isn't improved by a fabricated photo of a fake setting with an actor looks like you but isn't standing in front of a white board that says basically nothing.

I made that AI rendering and consider it demonstrates the conceptual discussions we had likely better than what an actual whiteboard drawing would look like. An actual whiteboard drawing from our day to day work would be very confusing without a lot of context and discussion. I have to admit that whiteboard drawings were somewhat rare in our real JPEG XL development, but it has been an intensively collaborative effort.

Re: Journey to JPEG XL: open-source experiments shaped the future of image coding

#82

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

JyrkiAlakuijala wrote: post #81
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't sound like a denial to me. Your years working on JPEGXL are extremely admirable, and you deserve to be recognized for it, but the gratuitous use of genAI in this post is also insulting to humans. The world isn't improved by a fabricated photo of a fake setting with an actor looks like you but isn't standing in front of a white board that says basically nothing.

I made that AI rendering and consider it demonstrates the conceptual discussions we had likely better than what an actual whiteboard drawing would look like. An actual whiteboard drawing from our day to day work would be very confusing without a lot of context and discussion. I have to admit that whiteboard drawings were somewhat rare in our real JPEG XL development, but it has been an intensively collaborative effor…

> consider it demonstrates the conceptual discussions

Photos do not, cannot, demonstrate discussions except in the most superficial and pointless way.

There are two reasons to show a photo of anything: 1) To share the experience of having been in a particular place in a particular moment of time, 2) to share what something looks like. Your image does not share an experience of having been in a particular place in a particular moment of time, because the place and time depicted are fake. Nor does it share anything about the discussion itself, because the content depicted is fake.

Is the fact that google has white boards an important part of your story? The only thing you've shown is a demonstration of what standing in front of a white board looks like. Not even a real white board. Not even real you.

If you want people to know what you look like, show an actual photo of yourself, not AI slop.

> An actual whiteboard drawing from our day to day work would be very confusing

I think you've failed to know your audience.

Re: Journey to JPEG XL: open-source experiments shaped the future of image coding

#83

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

JyrkiAlakuijala wrote: post #79
pdimitar wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you addressed your parent comment... how exactly?

Parent comment says I should not be known and my picture should not be on the blog post. I just want to disagree with that. In my opinion JPEG XL is a notable success and it is also ok to celebrate us, its makers.

That is not what the parent comment says at all. The parent comment says that an actual photo of yourself doing literally anything at all would have been better and less insulting to your readers than AI slop.

Re: Journey to JPEG XL: open-source experiments shaped the future of image coding

#84

Post by mrandish »

JyrkiAlakuijala wrote: post #60
arghwhat wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen such detailed and tidy whiteboard diagrams, but the catch is that they never occur in active discussion . It doesn't make room for scribbling, and stopping a discussion for 5-10 minutes to draw slowly and nicely doesn't make sense...

True, no one can understand my whiteboard drawings the next day, not even I.

Perfect operational security!

Re: Journey to JPEG XL: open-source experiments shaped the future of image coding

#85

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

Mindless2112 wrote: post #7

> In this Gemini-reconstructed scene, ... I'm generally pretty pro-AI, but I find this icky. Of course, I wouldn't have noticed except the whiteboard drawing seemed not quite right, so I'll probably be fooled in the future.

My favorite part of the drawing is where it talks about Variable Black Sizes.

Re: Journey to JPEG XL: open-source experiments shaped the future of image coding

#86

Post by mrandish »

breppp wrote: post #47
mrandish wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, I was totally nerd-sniped by the image. I've never seen an engineer draw a whiteboard diagram anywhere near that detailed and tidy. No acronyms, consistent title case, descenders on a baseline - everything about it is wrong. It's so counter to reality, I seriously wondered if it was a joke. The Nano Banana team should be pissed Google PR is distributing such a terrible photo. The poses are stilted, expressions f…

I think the logic follows: If we are already staging a scene just for PR purposes as was usually done then why not generate it using AI?

I actually didn't full-stop on it because I thought it was AI. For the first few seconds I thought it was a staged photo. I was nerd-sniped because it was staged so badly.

Re: Journey to JPEG XL: open-source experiments shaped the future of image coding

#87

Post by fc417fc802 »

cyberrock wrote: post #57
qingcharles wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They only reversed under pressure from the Safari and Firefox folks. The killing of JXL did push the ever-talented Jyrki to create jpegli, which was honestly a wonder.

Mozilla's position from when Chrome first dropped it to September 2024 was "the benefits it provides are not significant enough on their own to justify the cost of adding another raster image format to the Web" [0], which they say is a "neutral" stance. Then like Chrome they only agreed to try it with jxl-rs [1], which is still their present stance. They are a complete passenger in this whole affair, like all other s…

> Is Apple also killing mechanical keyboards and hobby electronics development

Obviously not, but they are killing as web standards the things they omit. At present for something to be standard it needs support from safari and chrome. That's just the current state of the world.

If tomorrow safari removed support for png that would effectively kill it as a web standard (assuming it didn't lead to mass revolt ofc).

Re: Journey to JPEG XL: open-source experiments shaped the future of image coding

#88

Post by 201984 »

ksec wrote: post #77
201984 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone know why the JPEG XL team went through ISO instead of publishing it themselves?

Because it is an international standard accepted by government and many other parties.

I just don't get why an image format needs the ceremony from being an international standard accepted by governments. It's just an image format; governments shouldn't be involved in this at all.

What did ISO give the JPEG XL team that made paywalling the standard worth it? Did ISO pay them or something?

Re: Journey to JPEG XL: open-source experiments shaped the future of image coding

#89

Post by nextaccountic »

JyrkiAlakuijala wrote: post #79
pdimitar wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you addressed your parent comment... how exactly?

Parent comment says I should not be known and my picture should not be on the blog post. I just want to disagree with that. In my opinion JPEG XL is a notable success and it is also ok to celebrate us, its makers.

Your technical achievements will help make the web a better platform (here hoping that browsers in general adopt JPEG XL sooner rather than latter). I've not seen anyone in the thread asking for you to not be credited for your work, or that you should not be known in general. Also, attaching your picture and some biographical info in that article is cool and expected, no problem there.

But.. that image isn't your picture, is it? It's a gen AI simulacrum. It's 2026, the uncanny valley causes visceral, immediate rejection in some subset of people. People that recoil in disgust at the sight of that.. thing pretending to be real? Since 2022, it's like our world became an eternal black mirror episode

(a more serious problem would be the prose itself being AI generated, but honestly reading it I am not sure)

Gen AI (both images and text) does not help your technical writing stand out. It doesn't help to illustrate better the points made in the article. If anything it debases your work and your own image

Re: Journey to JPEG XL: open-source experiments shaped the future of image coding

#90

Post by [deleted] »

JyrkiAlakuijala wrote: post #63
yboris wrote: post #12

Weird they don't name Jon Sneyers - a person pivotal in creation of JPEG XL Here's a blog post by him: https://cloudinary.com/blog/2026-the-year-of-jpeg-xl

No, it is normal. Similarly Jon's blog post does not name any of us by name.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN