That's old fashioned internet drama right there. It's cool he added images and video to terminals. That's something about terminals people have been trying to change for a long time and no one's figured out how to do it yet in a way that can gain consensus. I personally find the block character workaround more exciting since it's portable, requires a small amount of algorithmic / mathematical hackery, and produces a nice retro aesthetic.

Not sure I understand this workaround. Can it achieve pixel-exact output?

Say I want to leverage it to get inline visual output in the terminal from imagemagick. Am I getting pixel-exact output? Or am I merely imagining pixel-exact output roughly the size of the retro-styled block?

It's pixel-exact if you use unicode half blocks but pixel-exactness is meaningless if you scale the image or video to fit it in the display. You can gain higher resolution using the unicode block elements since it effectively grants four quasi pixels with two colors, in which case you can use some kind of nearest neighbor search to figure out which combination most closely approximates the 2x2 pixel chunk of the image. Where the math gets turned up to 11 is if you limit yourself to a 256 or 8 color palette and you want to use the shade blocks to blend colors like the dos days since that's difficult to accurately model. Last time I checked the techniques based on the cielab δe or din99d are the current state of the art. Some terminals like gnome-terminal avoid it entirely by simply not displaying shade blocks at all, and instead substituting them for solid blocks where the color blending is performed naively in software.

Let's just assume the image fits into the terminal window without scaling. In this case are any of the techniques you describe perceptually indistinguishable from displaying the image by normal means (e.g., displaying an image that fits without scaling in my browser window)?

It's simpler if I show you: https://justine.lol/printvideo.html That's how you hack a terminal to display multimedia in a portable way. Sadly most terminals can't keep up. Some like Alacritty crash with memory errors running that program. Other ways exist of hacking your way to multimedia. I've seen some people code their terminal programs to sort of hook into the X Windows server, figure out where the terminal window is, and then blit their media onto an overlay. But like I said I appreciate the retro aesthetic.

I feel like there must be an alternate reality where someone got a rudimentary canvas into POSIX. There are probably jet packs there, too. :)

That would be the parallel universe in which its creator hadn't been ripped apart by regulators before they had a chance to build one. AT&T tried their best to keep it going after the settlement with System Five but they were doing it with half a brain, since the us govt ordered 50% of their lab geeks to switch jobs to the one of the baby bells.

"Half a brain" is a poor metaphor for "one of the most impressive collections of researchers money could ever buy, divided by two."

Indeed. Carefully built team is more than the sum of its parts though. If you had your own Space Shuttle and 50% of it was taken away then how would you visit the stars?

> If you had your own Space Shuttle and 50% of it was taken away then how would you visit the stars?

Being a bit of a stickler here, but that's still a different type of problem in your metaphor.

The space shuttle will fail to launch because it's ostensibly missing critical systems now.

The software team will become ineffective because it's impossible for them to stop thinking about the original number of pink elephants.

Put another way-- if the original shuttle design called for half the required systems it still wouldn't have succeeded. But consider if the original Bell team had the post-breakup roster but the breakup itself never happened. (I.e., start with half the number of participants but keep that number and funding for them arbitrarily into the future.) Would you still be willing to state that this hypothetical team would have lacked the ability to succeed from the start?

I'm not claiming anything. I just think the Bell System was doing cool work on operating systems and it would have been interesting to see what would have happened if the government hadn't disrupted that. I pass no judgement either. Since as good as that thing might have been, the breakup also gave rise to opportunities for the tech giants we have today to emerge, for better or worse.