• LostXOR
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      377 days ago

      Depends on what you consider readable, but I got it down to 2842 bytes by downscaling it and using an absolutely atrocious quality setting:

      Image

      That’s just small enough to fit inside a QR code, so I did that! (You probably can’t scan it with a typical QR reader; you need something like zbar that supports reading binary data).

      • @[email protected]OP
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        126 days ago

        nice :D

        in a different timeline where the GIF89 specification would not have been mostly ignored, it would have been possible to go even smaller.

        “The GIF89 specification allows you to specify text captions to be overlayed on the following image. This feature never took off; browsers and image-processing applications such as Photoshop ignore it”

        Meaning if your gif viewing client supports full GIF89 then you could just display the text over a 1x1 pixel image, shrinking the file size down to something in the range of < 100bytes.

        • LostXOR
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          16 days ago

          At that point you might as well just send it as text.

        • GreatAlbatross
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          26 days ago

          In that vein, I’d be interested to see if someone could Inkscape it into an SVG with embedded text.

          Though I have no idea how many vectors would be needed to make the image similar enough.

          • @[email protected]OP
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            16 days ago

            The SVG send me down a rabid hole, apparently SVG embedded text is actually selectable and all, this is basically what gif tryed to do and failed lol

            but sadly lemmy dosent seem to let upload .svg :/

        • LostXOR
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          16 days ago

          Unfortunately most QR readers don’t recognize an image regardless of the data format.