feeling of computing: JPEGs?

2026-10-13

i gave a talk at feeling of computing on the 25th of september 2026. here's the script i wrote beforehand which i mostly followed.

i think it's much better if you see the whole performance. if you would like, feel free to find me and approach me and i will do it for you.

thank you to everyone who said nice things about this talk, it felt very good to get these thoughts out of my head.

I'm May, I'm a programmer, I'm here to talk for 7 minutes about JPEGs, but only sort of, I actually want to talk about being human, and enriching your love and understanding of the world, and I've found that JPEG, or at least the JPEG codec, has been like a surprisingly good medium for that for me recently, and maybe some of you will enjoy me talking about that.

Basically I think that JPEGs are fundamentally human and beautiful in a way that something like PNGs aren't. PNGs are basically just putting your image in a ZIP file, it's the same algorithm, it's just trying to find statistical similarities in the bitstream of the image that it can exploit to do compression, which means that like if you were an alien you might have come up with PNG as well, but JPEGs might look like shit if you were an alien, or like even if you were a dog JPEGs probably look a bit bad. JPEGs rely on facts about how we as humans perceive, and how our human vision works, which is way cooler than just maths.

JPEG works in lots of ways, and one of the ways that JPEG works, the one I want to show you, works by taking your picture, splitting it up into 8x8 grids of pixels, and then turning each of those into 8x8 grids of frequencies, and it turns out that the human eye cares way more about low frequency image data than it does high frequency image data, so you can just throw most of the high frequencies away, which is less data to store. When I first read that, I thought 'wtf, that doesn't make sense, how can you turn a picture into frequencies, and wtf does high and low frequency image data even mean' so I made a program that lets you turn frequencies into a picture, and turns the picture into audio.

[demo]

(left, bottom, and right)

(low frequencies at top, high frequencies at bottom)

When I first made this and ran it, I got this like sense of euphoria and understanding and love, which you're probably not getting at all right now, and that's fine, if anything it's kind of the point. I don't want you to care that I have a program that lets me play with JPEGs, I don't care that I have a program that lets me play with JPEGs, I care that I went through the process of writing that program. That's what I want you to care about too, the process of writing the program is more important than the program itself. When you write a program, your mind changes a bit, and you can try and tune into that more, in fact the place I'm trying to get to is such that you could get rid of my hard drive and I wouldn't care, because I was only writing programs for what I got out of the process of writing them.

Maybe try finding something in the world that you don't understand, or maybe something you care about, and write a program about it, the same way you might write a poem or a song. Afterwards maybe even try deleting the program and just see how it makes you feel, because tech in society is so cold and sad, and the computer is so cold and sad, but you can use it to make you feel something