The code contains a function that, given the target ΔE, generates two colors in floating-point Oklab representation, separated by that distance. But there is no check whether the two generated colors end up rounding to exactly the same one on 8-bit displays. So, I was asked to find a boundary (while the claim was that there were two distinct colors 0.0013 ΔE apart) between RGB(80, 83, 152) and RGB(80, 83, 152). Obviously unfair.
Another issue is that it discards the color pair if the generated coordinates fall outside 100% sRGB. The problem here is that many low-end laptop displays cover significantly less than 100% sRGB, but come with the correct primaries in the EDID, thus causing browsers to display colors correctly if they can and clip colors if they can't. Colors too close to the sRGB boundary will be clipped in your game - different colors generated, different colors when converted to sRGB, same color on the screen because it is out of the screen gamut. Maybe it makes sense to avoid colors with more than 60% saturation?
I hope you post this again when you do - I was presented with the "0.00080" difference a couple times, and it looks like this is where it becomes actually impossible because of this issue.
Are you using Oklab channels to measure delta-E / difference? If so, Oklab is a hacky way to approximate a real colorspace with just one matrix multiplication, the channels have no meaning and are not related to delta-E. Use real Lab*, it'll take 10 minutes with an LLM.
EDIT: Just read the blog post. I thought HSL was bad for design, Oklab is much worse. It just goes right ahead and reuses color science terms so it sounds it got it all right. (dEOK existing and its "JND" being 0.02 absolutely made my head spin. None of this is recognizable to a color scientist)
>dEOK existing and its "JND" being 0.02 absolutely made my head spin. None of this is recognizable to a color scientist
isnt it just because the lightness scale is 0-1 instead of 0-100? i would like to learn more about this, and your comments are contrary to what i see on, for example, https://www.w3.org/TR/css-color-4/
"In CIE Lab color space, where the range of the Lightness component is 0 to 100, using deltaE2000, one JND is 2. Because the range of Lightness in Oklab and OkLCh is 0 to 1, using deltaEOK, one JND is 100 times smaller."
if youd rather just point in the direction of where to read more, that would be fine too. i assumed (wrongly?) that the CSS color specification would be accurate. or, at least, accurate enough to not make heads spin. (any ideas on why w3 got it so wrong? or why they would use OKlab at all, if it is as utterly awful as you imply?)
> "In CIE Lab color space, where the range of the Lightness component is 0 to 100, using deltaE2000, one JND is 2. Because the range of Lightness in Oklab and OkLCh is 0 to 1, using deltaEOK, one JND is 100 times smaller."
It's very correct - but the implications must not be clear.
In the CIELAB space (read: a scientific space), JND is 2. (3 is color science version, but a minor quibble)
In OKLab space, we'll say it's the same, and then account for normalized lightness.
Oklab's lightness isn't CIELAB's lightness, neither are their dimensions the same, so it's like saying "when we measure in kilometers, a Just Noticable Distance is 2 meters. Miles is scaled differently then normalized, but we'll just say it's 2 yards." (and that's being too kind, in practice, 2m ~= 2 yards, and I don't want to give the impression it's a simple linear scaling difference. The example is meant to communicate they're different dimensions entirely)
> i assumed (wrongly?) that the CSS color specification would be accurate. or, at least, accurate enough to not make heads spin. (any ideas on why w3 got it so wrong? or why they would use OKlab at all, if it is as utterly awful as you imply?)
The thrust of my comment isn't that Oklab is so awful it should be banned, in fact, it's specifically mentioned as better than the incumbent. However, continued reusing of color science terminology, and people assuming that it then applies, is both remniscent of HSL and may worse intellectual poverty for software engineers, even the well-intentioned and studied, as it sounds unobjectionable at its face, but would be batshit insane if applied to synonymous areas of science that affect daily life (ex. distance)
awesome, i appreciate the reply, thanks. most of this is all foreign to me, so i am missing a lot of the knowledge most of the things im finding & reading assume i have. the analogy helps.
Cheers, email in bio if you ever wanna shoot something off someone / get a hyper opinionated take (got lucky enough to be paid to cut through this jungle for ~2 years)
Exactly. For many, the idea of being able to see England, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India in one 50 day trip with many similar minded travelers who aren't in a rush is really quite appealing.
Also, with bus travel you could, if you felt like it, leave the trip to enjoy many more local attractions and resume your travels later in a way not afforded by airplane or rail travel.
The various admonitions to publish to a personal blog, while encouraging, don't really get at the 0xfaded's request which I'd summarize as follows:
With no one asking questions these technical questions publicly, where, how and on what public platform will technical people find the problems that need solving so they can exercise their creativity for the benefit of all?
Clearly we need something in between the fauxpen-access of journals and the wilde west of the blogosphere, probably. Why wouldn't the faded ox publish in a paper? Idk, but I guess we need things similar to those circulars that British royal society members used to send to each other...except not reserved for a club. The web should be a natural at this. But it's either centralized -> monetized -> corrupted, or decentralized -> unindexed/niche -> forgotten fringe. What can come between?
I wonder if there could be something like a Wikipedia for programming. A bit like what the book Design Patterns did in 1994, collecting everyone's useful solutions, but on a much larger scale. Everyone shares the best strategies and algorithms for everything, and updates them when new ones come about, and we finally stop reinventing the wheel for every new project.
To some extent that was Stack Overflow, and it's also GitHub, and now it's also LLMs, but not quite.
May I suggest "PASTE": Patterns, Algorithms, Solutions, Techniques, and Examples. "Just copy PASTE", they'll say.
Ward Cunningham once, of all places in an Github issue [0], explained how the original C2 Wiki was seeded.
> Perhaps I should explain why wiki worked.
> I wrote a program in a weekend and then spent two hours a day for the next five years curating the content it held. For another five years a collection of people did the same work with love for what was there. But that was the end. A third cohort of curators did not appear. Content suffered.
A heroic amount effort of a single person, and later the collective effort of a small group, worked in the mid-90es. I'm skeptical that it will be repeatable 30 years later. Despite this, it would be the type of place, that I'd like to visit on the web. :(
Yup, that was always very much the plan, from the earliest days. Shame it soured a bit, but since the content is all freely reusable, maybe something can be built atop the ashes?
This is _not_ at all the same thing. Grok just ripped off Wikipedia as its base and then applied a biased spin to it. Check out the entry on Grok owner Elon Musk; it praises his accomplishments and completely omits or downplays most of his better-known controversies.
Yes exactly! It would need some publicity of some kind to get started but it's the best solution, certainly? And all of the tools and infrastructure already exist.
> Clearly we need something in between the fauxpen-access of journals and the wilde west of the blogosphere, probably.
I think GP's min-distance solution would work well as an arxiv paper that is never submitted for publication.
A curated list of never-published papers, with comments by users, makes sense in this context. Not sure that arxiv itself is a good place, but something close to it in design, with user comments and response-papers could be workable.
Something like RFC, but with rich content (not plain-text) and focused on things like GP published (code techniques, tricks, etc).
Could even call it "circulars on computer programming" or "circulars on software engineering", etc.
PS. I ran an experiment some time back, putting something on arxiv instead of github, and had to field a few comments about "this is not novel enough to be a paper" and my responses were "this is not a publishable paper, and I don't intend to submit it anywhere". IOW, this is not a new or unique problem.
You can (and always were encouraged to) ask your own questions, too.
And there are more sites like this (see e.g. https://codidact.com — fd: moderator of the Software section). Just because something loses popularity isn't a reason to stop doing it.
StackOverflow is famously obnoxious about questions badly asked, badly categorized, duplicated…
It’s actually a topic on which StackOverflow would benefit from AI A LOT.
Imagine StackOverflow rebrands itself as the place where you can ask the LLM and it benefits the world, whoch correctly rephrasing the question behind the scenes and creating public records for them.
The company tried this. It fell through immediately. So they went away, and came back with a much improved version. It also fell through immediately. Turns out, this idea is just bad: LLMs can't rephrase questions accurately, when those questions are novel, which is precisely the case that Stack Overflow needs.
This is an excellent piece of information that I didn’t have. If the company with most data can’t succeed, then it seems like a really hard problem. On the side, they can understand why humans couldn’t do it either.
Seriously where will we get this info anymore? I’ve depended on it for decades. No matter how obscure, I could always find a community that was talking about something I needed solved. I feel like that’s getting harder and harder every year. The balkanization of the Internet + garbage AI slop blogs overwhelming the clearly declining Google is a huge problem.
And discord is a terrible tool for knowledge collection imo. Their search is ok, but then I find myself digging through long and disjointed message threads, if replies/threading are even used at all by the participants.
When I grew up shakes fist at clouds I had a half dozen totally independent forums/sites to pull on for any interest or hobby no matter how obscure. I want it back!
It's true though, and the information was so deep and specific. Plus the communities were so legitimate and you could count on certain people appearing in threads and waiting for their input. Now the best you have are subreddits or janky Facebook groups .
Agreed, it’s the discoverability that’s the real problem here at the end of it all. All the veterans are pulling up the drawbridges to protect their communities from trolls, greedy companies, AI scraping, etc. which means new people can’t find them. Which then means these communities eventually whither and stop being helpful resources for us all.
> where, how and on what public platform will technical people find the problems that need solving so they can exercise their creativity for the benefit of all?
The same place people have always discovered problems to work on, for the entire history of human civilization. Industry, trades, academia, public service, newspapers, community organizations. The world is filled with unsolved problems, and places to go to work on them.
It's been interesting to see how often Elon is chided (even by his supporters) because his reach always seems to somehow exceed his grasp knowing full well that this is by design and not by fault.
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