[apt-get]

The sloppa in this article is... offending.

The obvious AI headings, pointless genned image of people (I'm starting to think islam had a point with discouraging depictions of human figures), and especially the blurry, artifacted, distractingly skeuomorphic diagram, with random wire traces going everywhere... this is a technical blog, not an investor sales pitch! Every time I see one of these, I have to double-check for a second if I'm not on some phishing SEO site!

If even Google, previously a gold standard of technical writing, is falling prey to this kind of laziness, then I have nothing to worry about -- knowing how to write without a language model in the driver's seat is gonna be a top tier skill in the future...

A damn shame too, as I've been following the progress of JXL in the standardization pipeline for a few years now and was quite interested in the historical breakdown, but all that's gonna stick with me from this is the disrespect I felt as a reader.

[JyrkiAlakuijala]

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.

[BugsJustFindMe]

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.

[JyrkiAlakuijala]

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.

[BugsJustFindMe]

> 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.

[pdimitar]

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

[JyrkiAlakuijala]

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.

[nextaccountic]

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

[smusamashah]

> I should not be known and my picture should not be on the blog post

That is the opposite of what parent comment says. It took offence on a generated photo of you. It would have been better to not have anything than a generated image.

[pdimitar]

I think everyone on HN would easily agree with this. They take issue with the how i.e. AI-assisted images (and maybe text).

[BugsJustFindMe]

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.