Early Warning

Before we dive in, please note that this is not an of­fi­cial Google an­nounce­ment. Instead, this is based on a re­cent, on­go­ing fea­ture re­quest on Google IssueTracker, in which a com­ment by one of the core ADB main­tain­ers (Google em­ployee) talked about re­strict­ing On-Device ADB con­nec­tions to pro­tect from “bad ac­tors”.

Before you stop what you are do­ing to head over to that IssueTracker thread, please read this care­fully:

If you plan to visit the is­sue tracker just to post low-qual­ity com­ments (such as “Hey, don’t do this, I need Shizuku!”), com­plaints about mo­nop­oly, or in­sults, I highly rec­om­mend that you re­frain from do­ing so. Spamming the thread will only cause Google de­vel­op­ers to lock the is­sue, ig­nore valu­able com­mu­nity feed­back, or stop shar­ing pub­lic up­dates about this change en­tirely.

I think a change like this could ben­e­fit Google as it goes well along their new Sideloading changes, but I do not ac­tively be­lieve this is what is go­ing on here. There is a true, valid rea­son be­hind this, and I think two dif­fer­ent ap­proach can be taken. We will talk about it in this blog post.

How You Can Help:

If you have a unique use case: If you are di­rectly af­fected and can write a de­tailed, con­struc­tive mes­sage ex­plain­ing your work­flow, pro­vid­ing links, or of­fer­ing tech­ni­cal so­lu­tions/​com­pro­mises, please, by all means, share your feed­back in Google is­sue.

If your use case has al­ready been men­tioned: You do not need to re­peat it. Instead, sim­ply click the +1 but­ton in the top right cor­ner of the Google IssueTracker to let Google know you are af­fected, and tog­gle no­ti­fi­ca­tions to stay up­dated on the dis­cus­sion.

I am hes­i­tant to make this blog post, as I fear it may over­load the few de­vel­op­ers that work on ADB. I am un­sure if I should wait more and see what hap­pens or hold it longer and see what ap­proach they take. Waiting too long could also be bad… As of writ­ing this, I am un­sure when/​if this post will re­lease. I saw some re­cent up­dates on as­sign­ments which were given to the main guy who pre­vi­ously worked on ADB, so we will see what hap­pens.

Introduction

Hi! I’m Kitsumed, de­vel­oper of ShizuCallRecorder, a Shizuku based ap­pli­ca­tion. As you may have guessed by now, I would be af­fected by this change. Obviously, I would re­ally like it if they do not pro­ceed with it in a way that pre­vent loop­back con­nec­tions.

To talk briefly about my­self, I made ShizuCallRecorder to help with some of my own dis­abil­i­ties. I can get by with­out it, but it’s much eas­ier with it.

You could say I have a very unique use case, and I keep dis­cov­er­ing other un­usual ones, like this per­son on Reddit, who used my ap­pli­ca­tion to pre­serve the voice­mail of a de­ceased loved one.

Call record­ing on Android is a com­pli­cated topic. There are count­less user re­quests, an of­fi­cial at­tempt to add the fea­ture in Android 11 that was later can­celed, and many closed-source, pri­vacy-in­va­sive ap­pli­ca­tions that use work-arounds.

I used to hear that many users with dis­abil­i­ties had to trade their pri­vacy for an eas­ier daily life. I guess that’s what peo­ple mean when they talk about those trade-offs.

Don’t even get me started on OEMs that force an au­dio warn­ing such as “This call is be­ing recorded,” when it’s in places where it’s not legally re­quired. People of­ten don’t re­act well to that, even if you ex­plain why you’re record­ing the call, it gives a bad im­pres­sion. To be hon­est, I prob­a­bly would­n’t re­act well to it ei­ther.

I’m sure most of you have a more “power-user” use of Shizuku or even use loop­back ADB for de­vel­oper tasks. I do those too, but I wanted to point out one of my unique use case.

Alright, back on the main topic. Before I ex­plain what the pro­posed change is, I’m go­ing to ex­plain what is ADB for less tech­ni­cal users.

What’s ADB?

ADB, also called Android Debug Bridge, is pro­to­col cre­ated by Google to let de­vel­op­ers do de­vel­oper things on Android de­vices…

Basically, it grant us a high level of priv­i­leges, give us ac­cess to a lot of sen­si­ble com­mands to tests how the phone and ap­pli­ca­tion be­have. Useful stuff for any de­vel­op­ers or power-users.

ADB was orig­i­nally de­signed to work over a USB con­nec­tion, but later ex­panded how it could works:

USB: The orig­i­nal way. ADB com­mu­ni­cates di­rectly over a USB ca­ble.

TCP/IP: Introduced as a way to run ADB over a net­work us­ing an IP ad­dress and port (typically port 5555). The con­nec­tion car­ries ADB traf­fic in plain text and pro­vides a YES/NO prompt as au­then­ti­ca­tion. Can only be en­abled once you al­ready have an ac­tive ADB con­nec­tion.

Wireless Debugging (Wifi 1.0/2.0): Introduced in Android 11, it aims to im­prove the legacy TCP/IP work­flow. It re­quires pair­ing the com­puter with the de­vice us­ing a pair­ing code or QR code, then es­tab­lishes an au­then­ti­cated and en­crypted con­nec­tion for sub­se­quent ADB ses­sions. It does not re­quire an ac­tive ADB con­nec­tion to be en­abled.

What’s a On-Device ADB con­nec­tion?

ADB was orig­i­nally in­tended to be used with two de­vices (simplified ex­pla­na­tion): the Android de­vice be­ing de­bugged run the ADB Daemon (ADBD) and a sep­a­rate de­vel­oper ma­chine run the ADB client. In prac­tice, how­ever, this setup is not al­ways con­ve­nient. Some de­vel­op­ers work di­rectly from their Android de­vice and do not have ac­cess to a sec­ond ma­chine.

This led to us­age of On-Device ADB (this is not a of­fi­cial term). By us­ing a ter­mi­nal em­u­la­tor such as Termux, de­vel­op­ers can run an ADB client di­rectly on their phone and es­tab­lish a con­nec­tion to the lo­cal dae­mon (ADBD) server us­ing ei­ther ADB TCP/IP or Wireless Debugging. Since both the client and server are run­ning on the same de­vice, the con­nec­tion is made through the loop­back ad­dress (127.0.0.1). That’s what I call On-Device ADB.

While this is a niche use case com­pared to how ADB in­tended to be used, it has led to the cre­ation of pro­jects such as libadb-an­droid by MuntashirAkon and Shizuku by RikkaApps. These pro­jects, along with many oth­ers, have cre­ated a large open-source com­mu­nity that made a wide range of tools for de­vel­op­ers and power-users.

The pro­posed change

A new fea­ture was made on Google IssuerTracker to al­low de­vel­op­ers to choose what in­ter­face ADBD (ADB server dae­mon) would lis­ten to.

This fea­ture was pro­posed fol­low­ing a ma­jor se­cu­rity is­sue iden­ti­fied as CVE-2026 – 0073, which al­lowed the Wireless ADB au­then­ti­ca­tion process to be fully by­passed. What is pro­posed in this is­sue is ac­tu­ally a nice idea.

Right now, ADBD makes it­self avail­able on every net­work your phone is con­nected to. This fea­ture re­quest asks to let de­vel­op­ers choose which in­ter­face is cho­sen, re­duc­ing the ex­po­sure.

The prob­lem

The prob­lem lies in the re­sponse from one of ADB core main­tain­ers:

sa…@google.com:

Connection to lo­cal­host has also been the source of ex­ploit where app are us­ing that socket to adbd to es­ca­late their priv­i­leges.What about we re­strict to al­ways only bind­ing to wifi in­ter­face wlan0 ?

Connection to lo­cal­host has also been the source of ex­ploit where app are us­ing that socket to adbd to es­ca­late their priv­i­leges.

What about we re­strict to al­ways only bind­ing to wifi in­ter­face wlan0 ?

Here, we can see that the em­ployee talk about only al­low­ing wlan0, the in­ter­face of the Wifi con­nec­tion. Doing so would break many things, On-Device ADB, ADB via VPN, ADB via Ethernet, and many other unique de­vel­op­ers se­tups.

Another is­sue I see here is the stance they seems to cur­rently have on “On-Device ADB”. Their com­ment sug­gests that On-Device ADB is viewed pri­mar­ily as an ex­ploit bad ac­tors can use to el­e­vate priv­i­leges, yet there a lot of le­git­i­mate us­ages of on-de­vice ADB. Developers them­self uses it when they can’t ac­cess a com­puter.

While it can in­deed be used to el­e­vate priv­i­leges, a “malicious” ap­pli­ca­tion can­not do so alone. It re­quires mul­ti­ples ac­tions that MUST be per­fomed by a hu­man.

Why On-Device ADB Is Not Really Used by Bad Actors

A ma­li­cious ap­pli­ca­tion could use an on-de­vice ADB con­nec­tion to per­form priv­i­lege es­ca­la­tion. However, it can­not es­tab­lish one by it­self.

To il­lus­trate this, I’ve laid out the gen­eral lim­i­ta­tions a bad ac­tor would face in a few sce­nar­ios, sim­i­lar to my com­ment on IssueTracker.

Scenario 1: General Android Users

You in­stall a ma­li­cious ap­pli­ca­tion.ADB is dis­abled. ADBD is not run­ning, and the ap­pli­ca­tion does not have the WRITE_SECURE_SETTINGS per­mis­sion, as it must be man­u­ally granted via ADB. No ex­ploita­tion at­tempts are pos­si­ble.

ADB is dis­abled. ADBD is not run­ning, and the ap­pli­ca­tion does not have the WRITE_SECURE_SETTINGS per­mis­sion, as it must be man­u­ally granted via ADB. No ex­ploita­tion at­tempts are pos­si­ble.

Scenario 2: A Developer on Android 11+ Using Wireless ADB

You in­stall a ma­li­cious ap­pli­ca­tion.

You en­able USB de­bug­ging, start­ing ADBD.

You en­able Wireless ADB. ADBD is now run­ning on your phone and lis­ten­ing on all net­work in­ter­faces.

The ap­pli­ca­tion would need to per­form the one-time pair­ing process. This re­quires the user to man­u­ally re­trieve the one-time code from Settings and pro­vide it. No ex­ploita­tion at­tempts are pos­si­ble.

Scenario 3: A Developer Using ADB over TCP/IP

You in­stall a ma­li­cious ap­pli­ca­tion.

You en­able USB de­bug­ging, start­ing ADBD.

You con­nect via USB ADB to en­able TCP/IP, then dis­con­nect the USB ca­ble.

ADBD con­tin­ues run­ning and lis­tens on all net­work in­ter­faces.

The ap­pli­ca­tion ini­ti­ates a con­nec­tion, caus­ing an au­tho­riza­tion prompt to ap­pear on the screen. If the user se­lects No, the con­nec­tion is re­jected. No silent ex­ploita­tion at­tempts are pos­si­ble.

Conclusion

In a nor­mal sce­nario, a bad ac­tor can­not gain an ADB con­nec­tion. It is only pos­si­ble while the de­vel­oper is ac­tively us­ing ADB on the de­vice, be­cause a bad ac­tor can­not start ADBD by them­selves.

However, if we re­turn to a sce­nario such as CVE-2026 – 0073, ex­ploita­tion would be­come pos­si­ble in Scenarios 2 and 3, but only af­ter the user has man­u­ally en­abled USB de­bug­ging. As for sce­nario 3, it would also re­quire the de­vel­oper to MANUALLY en­able TCP/IP. I can un­der­stand the mo­ti­va­tion for pre­vent­ing loop­back con­nec­tions by de­fault, but not to fully pre­vents it.

There is a dif­fer­ence be­tween pre­vent­ing it by de­fault and per­ma­nently pre­vent­ing it. I think this should be some­thing users can dis­able through a per­sis­tent set­ting. By this, I mean a tog­gle that sur­vives a re­boot (else it would make tools like Shizuku im­prac­ti­cals) and, ide­ally, can­not be read by third-party ap­pli­ca­tions. Otherwise, de­vel­op­ers would have to re­peat­edly dis­able it when­ever bank­ing apps or games de­tect that on-de­vice ADB is avail­abl. That said, this part could be worked around once a ap­pli­ca­tion is man­u­ally granted WRITE_SECURE_SETTINGS.

I think that jus­ti­fy­ing block­ing it be­cause a hu­man could per­form ac­tions to al­low it would be far-fetched. A hu­man could also des­ig­nate a ma­li­cious ap­pli­ca­tion as a de­vice ad­min­is­tra­tor or grant it Accessibility per­mis­sions, and yet we would not get rid of those fea­tures.

I be­lieve it should be an as­sumed risk that dis­abling such a se­cu­rity fea­ture en­ables on-de­vice de­bug­ging while also ex­pos­ing the de­vice to the rare pos­si­bil­ity of a fu­ture vul­ner­a­bil­ity. To me, the fea­ture/​risk ra­tio make sense here, as there is a real, le­git­i­mate us­age.

Although it may have not been orig­i­nally in­tended, On-Device ADB has en­abled a niche ecosys­tem of de­vel­oper and power-user tools, in­clud­ing pro­jects such as App Manager, libadb-an­droid, Canta, aShell, ShizuWall, ShizuCallRecorder and Shizuku.

To con­clude, I would like to men­tion my con­clu­sion in What Is Shizuku? How Does It Work? Security Implications?, where I said as a joke:

Here’s my clos­ing thought: I can’t wait to see how they’ll jus­tify dis­abling loop­back ADB over TCP/IP con­nec­tions on non-em­u­la­tor de­vices and start re­quir­ing a Google ac­count…

Here’s my clos­ing thought: I can’t wait to see how they’ll jus­tify dis­abling loop­back ADB over TCP/IP con­nec­tions on non-em­u­la­tor de­vices and start re­quir­ing a Google ac­count…

Well I guess they may in­deed dis­able loop­back ADB. Huh… I was al­most 100% right on that one I guess. If you are a tech­ni­cal user, I in­vite you to give your feed­back in­side the is­sue here. Please don’t for­get the early warn­ing.

Congratulations to Professor Hannah Fry, who has been awarded the Leelavati Prize at the International Congress of Mathematicians for out­stand­ing con­tri­bu­tions to in­creas­ing the pub­lic aware­ness of math­e­mat­ics.

Hannah Fry is Professor of the Public Understanding of Mathematics in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP). She joined the University of Cambridge in January 2025, be­com­ing the first per­son ever to hold the role.

As a broad­caster, au­thor, pod­caster and so­cial me­dia star she is one of the UK and world’s most recog­nis­able — and favourite — com­mu­ni­ca­tors of math­e­mat­ics and sci­ence. The ci­ta­tion for the Leelavati Prize out­lines her ex­tra­or­di­nary im­pact:

“Hannah Fry is one of the fore­most global am­bas­sadors for math­e­mat­i­cal think­ing,” the prize ci­ta­tion says. “She has be­come a voice for math­e­mat­ics that res­onates far be­yond the pub­lic au­di­ence nor­mally in­ter­ested in sci­ence com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

“Through a wide range of me­dia — in­clud­ing books, videos, and tele­vi­sion pro­grams — she has used out­stand­ing cre­ativ­ity and orig­i­nal­ity to trans­late math­e­mat­ics into a lan­guage of won­der and rel­e­vance for the pub­lic with­out di­min­ish­ing its scope and im­por­tance.”

“When you en­joy [maths] your­self, I think you have first hand ex­pe­ri­ence of just the ab­solute joy of it,” says Hannah Fry about her pas­sion for com­mu­ni­cat­ing math­e­mat­ics. “I feel as though there are these won­der­ful se­crets that are com­pletely in­vis­i­ble to al­most every­body in the world who are not math­e­mati­cians, and it does­n’t make sense to me we would keep them to our­selves — I feel as though I have this re­ally good bit of gos­sip that I just want to share.”

A lan­guage of won­der

The Leelavati Prize, recog­nis­ing out­stand­ing con­tri­bu­tions to in­creas­ing the pub­lic aware­ness of math­e­mat­ics, is awarded every 4 years by the International Mathematical Union (IMU), and is an­nounced at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM). Bringing to­gether thou­sands of math­e­mati­cians from around the world, the ICM cel­e­brates the di­ver­sity and scope of mod­ern math­e­mat­ics. It also at­tracts sig­nif­i­cant at­ten­tion as the set­ting for the an­nounce­ment of some of the sub­jec­t’s most cel­e­brated awards, in­clud­ing the fa­mous Fields Medals.

The Leelavati Prize is the lat­est of many ho­n­ours and awards — across both acad­e­mia and the main­stream me­dia — recog­nis­ing Hannah Fry’s ex­cep­tional work in pub­lic com­mu­ni­ca­tion and en­gage­ment. As well as aca­d­e­mic recog­ni­tion in­clud­ing the Christopher Zeeman Medal in 2018 and the Royal Society’s David Attenborough Award in 2024, her ma­jor me­dia awards in­clude win­ning an Emmy in 2025 for an episode ex­plor­ing quan­tum com­put­ing in the TV se­ries The Future with Hannah Fry, and a Webby Award in 2026 for the pod­cast The Rest is Science, co-pre­sented with Michael Stevens. With over 2 mil­lion fol­low­ers on Instagram, she has also been named by Time as one of the 100 most in­flu­en­tial dig­i­tal cre­ators of 2026.

Fry shares the in­spi­ra­tion with the next gen­er­a­tion of math­e­mati­cians too. In 2019 her tele­vised Ri Christmas Lectures were filmed in front of au­di­ences of hun­dreds of school chil­dren. Even closer to home, ear­lier this term she gave the an­nual Rouse Ball lec­ture to a packed au­di­ence of Cambridge stu­dents, fol­lowed by math­e­mat­ics com­mu­ni­ca­tion work­shops for cur­rent un­der­grad­u­ates.

“Mathematics qui­etly un­der­pins so many as­pects of mod­ern life and the im­por­tance of com­mu­ni­cat­ing math­e­mat­i­cal ideas to the pub­lic has never been greater. Few peo­ple have con­tributed more to this goal than Hannah Fry,” says Professor Nick Dorey, Head of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics.

Mathematics is “a com­pletely orig­i­nal way to see the world,” says Hannah Fry. “And I think that in the same way as with any­thing in life where you re­ally en­joy it, I just want to talk to peo­ple about it.”

As Fry says, the limit to some­one’s un­der­stand­ing is never their abil­ity to un­der­stand. The limit is al­ways in their mo­ti­va­tion to care. And she sees her role as be­ing to pro­vide that mo­ti­va­tion.

“I think what you need to do,” she says about the key to con­nect­ing with a wide au­di­ence, “is to cre­ate a hole in peo­ple’s imag­i­na­tion. If I can cre­ate just a mo­ment where you want to know the next bit — you know ex­actly the size and shape it needs to be to ful­fil your crav­ing for that ex­act piece of in­for­ma­tion — then every­body’s in.”

Listen to this pod­cast in­ter­view with Hannah Fry about win­ning the Leelavati Prize, and dis­cover more cov­er­age of the full ICM 2026, on our Plus outreach plat­form.

Image: Professor Hannah Fry speak­ing at the Communicating Mathematical and Data Sciences event at the Isaac Newton Institute, Cambridge. Image credit: Grace Merton/INI

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Open-weight mod­els are be­com­ing the foun­da­tion for the next AI ecosys­tem. The US should com­pete in it, not wall it­self off.

I have seen a ver­sion of this story be­fore.

In 2013 I co-founded Mesosphere, an open source cloud-na­tive soft­ware com­pany. We built on Apache Mesos, which my co-founder Ben Hindman had helped cre­ate at UC Berkeley. We later built DC/OS (Data Center Operating System) around Mesos, re­leased it as open source, and com­mer­cial­ized it through an en­ter­prise dis­tri­b­u­tion with sup­port and pro­pri­etary fea­tures.

After sev­eral years of mas­sive growth, Kubernetes dis­rupted us. It was newer, fully open source, and it quickly gal­va­nized the cloud-na­tive com­mu­nity. Many of the world’s best dis­trib­uted-sys­tems and in­fra­struc­ture en­gi­neers bet their ca­reers on it, and even some of our most loyal com­mu­nity mem­bers changed horses.

Once that hap­pened, in­no­va­tion moved to Kubernetes. Whatever the plat­form was miss­ing, some­one started build­ing: net­work­ing, stor­age, ob­serv­abil­ity, de­ploy­ment tools, pol­icy en­gines. A large num­ber of star­tups were cre­ated, and legacy ven­dors joined in as well. Almost every com­po­nent re­quired to run Kubernetes in pro­duc­tion be­came avail­able as open source. Cloud providers and com­pa­nies in­clud­ing Mesosphere/D2iQ, Rancher, Red Hat and Nutanix then built busi­nesses around in­te­gra­tion, en­ter­prise fea­tures, sup­port and op­er­a­tions.

Kubernetes did not win sim­ply be­cause its repos­i­tory was pub­lic. It be­came a neu­tral sub­strate that en­gi­neers, cloud providers and en­ter­prise ven­dors could all ex­tend to fit their cus­tomers’ needs. Common in­ter­faces and ven­dor-neu­tral gov­er­nance gave every­one con­fi­dence that they could build on it.

The les­son I took away was­n’t that open source al­ways wins. It was that once an open plat­form that peo­ple can cus­tomize be­comes the in­dus­try’s cen­ter of grav­ity, no sin­gle ven­dor can match the com­bined rate of in­no­va­tion around it.

I think AI is ap­proach­ing the same point.

Open weights turn a model into a plat­form

First, a ter­mi­nol­ogy note. Most mod­els we ca­su­ally call “open source” are more ac­cu­rately de­scribed as open-weight. You can down­load and mod­ify the trained pa­ra­me­ters, but the train­ing data and com­plete train­ing process usu­ally aren’t avail­able. That falls short of the Open Source Initiative’s de­f­i­n­i­tion of open source AI. The dis­tinc­tion mat­ters. It does­n’t, how­ever, pre­vent an ecosys­tem from form­ing around the ar­ti­fact peo­ple can run and mod­ify.

The Kubernetes anal­ogy is­n’t per­fect. Kubernetes con­trib­u­tors could in­spect and change the ac­tual source, and im­prove­ments could flow back into a shared up­stream pro­ject. Model fine-tunes usu­ally don’t work that way. Frontier weights may be down­load­able but still re­quire ex­pen­sive hard­ware, and there is no AI equiv­a­lent of the CNCF pro­vid­ing neu­tral gov­er­nance and com­mon in­ter­faces. Those are real dif­fer­ences. The com­mon mech­a­nism is that a suf­fi­ciently ca­pa­ble, portable sub­strate can at­tract com­ple­men­tary in­no­va­tion far be­yond what its orig­i­nal cre­ator could build alone.

The first rea­son to use open-weight mod­els was self-host­ing. Companies wanted con­trol over their data. They wanted to run mod­els in their own cloud or data cen­ter. And as us­age and in­fer­ence costs grow, they in­creas­ingly want con­trol over cost as well.

That de­mand pro­duced a healthy open source serv­ing stack: vLLM, SGLang, llama.cpp, Ollama, MLX and oth­ers.

But self-host­ing is only the be­gin­ning. Open weights turn the model it­self into some­thing de­vel­op­ers can adapt and re­dis­trib­ute. Hugging Face now hosts more than two mil­lion pub­lic mod­els. Around pop­u­lar fam­i­lies such as Qwen and Gemma, de­vel­op­ers pro­duce:

quan­tized and con­verted weights for dif­fer­ent sil­i­con ar­chi­tec­tures and scale;

fine-tunes and LoRA adapters for cod­ing, med­i­cine, law, math and agen­tic work­flows;

model merges that com­bine dif­fer­ent fine-tunes;

adap­ta­tions for run­times such as TensorRT-LLM, vLLM, MLX and oth­ers.

Until re­cently, it was easy to dis­miss this ac­tiv­ity at the fron­tier. Open mod­els were use­ful, but the base mod­els weren’t good enough for the hard­est cod­ing and agen­tic tasks. That gap is nar­row­ing quickly. Z.ai has re­leased GLM-5.2 with pub­lic weights un­der an MIT li­cense. Its own eval­u­a­tion re­ports 62.1% on SWE-bench Pro ver­sus 58.6% for GPT-5.5, al­though re­sults vary across bench­marks and agent har­nesses.

Moonshot says Kimi K3 ap­proaches the closed fron­tier on long-hori­zon cod­ing and has promised to pub­lish its weights on July 27. Artificial Analysis sup­ports the per­for­mance claim, scor­ing it along­side Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 in its in­de­pen­dent eval­u­a­tion.

Once the base model is good enough, the ecosys­tem can com­pound. I ex­pect new pro­jects around agent run­times, cod­ing har­nesses, sand­boxes, eval­u­a­tions, ob­serv­abil­ity and spe­cial­ized fine-tunes. Together they can be­come a pro­duc­tion-grade stack: an open-weight model run­ning on open source soft­ware, cus­tomiz­able for a team’s work­load, hard­ware and eco­nom­ics.

Will that stack beat every closed model on every bench­mark? Probably not. But I would not bet on any sin­gle ven­dor out-in­no­vat­ing the com­bined open ecosys­tem over time. Frontier tech­nol­ogy is a tal­ent war, and open ecosys­tems give tal­ented peo­ple every­where a rea­son to build on the same foun­da­tion.

Banning Chinese mod­els would be an own goal

This brings us to the cur­rent de­bate in Washington. After the re­lease of Kimi K3 and other ca­pa­ble Chinese mod­els, the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion is re­port­edly con­sid­er­ing re­stric­tions on Chinese open-weight mod­els. The ex­act form of a po­ten­tial ban re­mains un­clear.

A broad ban on American re­searchers and com­pa­nies us­ing Chinese open-weight mod­els would do some­thing else en­tirely. It would cut the US off from an ecosys­tem that is al­ready at­tract­ing many of the world’s best AI re­searchers and en­gi­neers, in­clud­ing a large num­ber of Chinese re­searchers. The rest of the world would keep build­ing. American de­vel­op­ers would be the ones locked out.

We’ve seen this dy­namic with Qwen al­ready. Hugging Face re­ports that Chinese mod­els ac­counted for 41% of model down­loads over the past year. If the best open-weight foun­da­tion mod­els in­creas­ingly come from China, in­no­va­tion will ac­cu­mu­late around them in the same way it ac­cu­mu­lated around Kubernetes.

How the US should com­pete

The US should com­pete in that ecosys­tem, not re­treat from it.

Release fron­tier-grade American mod­els

American labs need to re­lease fron­tier-grade open-weight mod­els un­der li­censes that star­tups can ac­tu­ally build on. There has been progress. NVIDIA’s Nemotron mod­els are com­mer­cially us­able un­der NVIDIA’s own per­mis­sive li­cense. Thinking Machines re­leased Inkling un­der Apache 2.0, as did OpenAI with gpt-oss and Google with Gemma 4. But OpenAI’s and Google’s strongest mod­els re­main closed, as do those from most American fron­tier labs.

Use pro­cure­ment to cre­ate an open mar­ket

The gov­ern­ment should use pro­cure­ment to cre­ate de­mand for portable, in­ter­op­er­a­ble sys­tems rather than per­ma­nent de­pen­dence on one API ven­dor. The Department of Defense has done this be­fore. Platform One pro­vides open source tools and en­ter­prise prod­ucts that dif­fer­ent mil­i­tary pro­grams can build on. The same play­book can ac­cel­er­ate in­no­va­tion around open-weight mod­els.

Build the rest of the stack

American com­pa­nies need to build the rest of the stack. Startups can cus­tomize and ex­tend the mod­els, em­bed them into prod­ucts, and pro­vide the serv­ing, tool­ing, sup­port and op­er­a­tional lay­ers. Our lead­ing sil­i­con com­pa­nies will keep im­prov­ing the hard­ware. Hyperscalers and neo­clouds can serve the mod­els and their ecosys­tems.

Set stan­dards in­stead of ban­ning mod­els

Safety is the strongest ar­gu­ment for re­stric­tions, but a blan­ket ban is too blunt and would sac­ri­fice ac­cess to the en­tire ecosys­tem. A bet­ter ap­proach is in­de­pen­dent test­ing and stan­dards for fron­tier mod­els. The anal­ogy is­n’t ex­act: Kubernetes con­for­mance tests com­pat­i­bil­ity, not safety. But the gov­er­nance model is use­ful. Demis Hassabis has pro­posed a US-led in­de­pen­dent stan­dards body along those lines.

America should not re­spond to open Chinese mod­els by build­ing a wall around its own de­vel­op­ers. We should run the mod­els our­selves, tear them apart, bench­mark them, im­prove on them and build bet­ter American al­ter­na­tives. Then we should make the American stack the eas­i­est one in the world to adopt.

The United States has spent decades at­tract­ing the world’s best tech­ni­cal tal­ent and giv­ing it room to build. Turning that ad­van­tage into a walled gar­den while the rest of the world stan­dard­izes on a more open stack would be a spec­tac­u­lar own goal. We would be giv­ing up our role as the AI leader by choice.

Project Reconecta in­stalled eight rope bridges in a mu­nic­i­pal­ity in Brazil, and a 15-month study used cam­era traps to doc­u­ment thou­sands of ar­bo­real wildlife adapt­ing to new aer­ial cross­ings.

Safe road pas­sages en­able seed dis­per­sal and gene di­ver­sity, re­vers­ing the “domino ef­fect” of bio­di­ver­sity loss that be­gins when high­ways split habi­tats.

Reconecta’s cre­ator, bi­ol­o­gist Fernanda Abra, a National Geographic Explorer and win­ner of the Whitley Award, is now ex­pand­ing these low-cost con­ser­va­tion tools to other Brazilian bio­mes and neigh­bor­ing Suriname.

Brazil’s fed­eral trans­port de­part­ment has of­fi­cially des­ig­nated the rope bridge de­sign as the rec­om­mended na­tional stan­dard for high­ways to curb the mil­lions of wildlife deaths recorded on roads an­nu­ally.

Around 7 a.m., with dense fog blan­ket­ing the land­scape, bi­ol­o­gist Gabriel Falquetto had al­ready come across sev­eral road-killed an­i­mals along ES-164 high­way in Brazil’s Espírito Santo state. He was on his way to Kaetés Private Natural Heritage Reserve (RPPN), in the Atlantic Forest, where he mon­i­tors wildlife and road­kill in the re­gion.

Suddenly, he spot­ted the life­less body of a pri­mate on the pave­ment. It was a buffy-headed mar­moset (Callithrix flav­i­ceps), a species listed as crit­i­cally en­dan­gered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List. An es­ti­mated 2,500 in­di­vid­u­als re­main in the wild, mak­ing it one of the world’s most threat­ened pri­mates.

“It was ex­tremely painful and dis­cour­ag­ing,” Falquetto told Mongabay. “We travel through this re­gion every day mon­i­tor­ing wildlife, and we cel­e­brate every en­counter with groups of buffy-headed mar­mosets in the for­est.”

“Finding an in­di­vid­ual in those con­di­tions brings a feel­ing of sad­ness and help­less­ness. Beyond the loss of that an­i­mal, the in­ci­dent re­minds us of the im­pacts our ac­tiv­i­ties have on bio­di­ver­sity.”

About 2,900 kilo­me­ters (1,800 miles) away, on the road that leads to Alta Floresta, a small Amazon town in the far north of Mato Grosso state, cases like the buffy-headed mar­moset’s road­kill have not been recorded since 2024. That year, eight canopy bridges were in­stalled, con­nect­ing frag­mented for­est patches. Camera trap footage re­vealed that, over 15 months, the aer­ial wildlife cross­ings en­abled 15,000 safe cross­ings by ar­bo­real an­i­mals — and not a sin­gle road­kill.

The bridges are part of a pro­gram in­volv­ing Projeto Reconecta and the mu­nic­i­pal gov­ern­ment, along with lo­cal or­ga­ni­za­tions and busi­ness own­ers who are ea­ger to con­serve the unique bio­di­ver­sity of their town and pro­mote eco­tourism, but were alarmed by the grow­ing num­ber of wildlife-ve­hi­cle col­li­sions.

Biologist Fernanda Abra, an as­so­ci­ate re­searcher at the Smithsonian National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute in the U.S., and the founder of Reconecta, re­called that just hours be­fore in­stalling the first bridges in Alta Floresta, she found two Schneider’s mar­mosets (Mico schnei­deri) dead. The species is en­demic to the Brazilian Amazon and is threat­ened with ex­tinc­tion.

“A canopy bridge serves two pur­poses,” Abra said. “The first is to im­prove con­nec­tiv­ity for wildlife, al­low­ing an­i­mals to move from one side to the other in these frag­mented for­est ar­eas. As a re­sult, we also re­duce road­kill.”

All bridges have two cam­era traps, one fac­ing the cross­ing to record which an­i­mals are us­ing it and an­other fac­ing the for­est to ob­serve which an­i­mals ar­rive there but de­cide not to use it.

Among the pri­mate species recorded us­ing the bridges dur­ing the first months of the pro­gram were the black-faced black spi­der mon­key (Ateles chamek), the Purus red howler mon­key (Alouatta pu­ru­en­sis), the north­ern night mon­key (Aotus in­fu­la­tus), the tufted ca­puchin (Sapajus apella), Schneider’s mar­moset and the Alta Floresta titi mon­key (Plecturocebus grovesi).

Described only in 2019 and soon af­ter clas­si­fied as crit­i­cally en­dan­gered, the Alta Floresta titi mon­key has be­come the sym­bol of the ini­tia­tive, which is now en­ter­ing a new phase thanks to its pos­i­tive re­sults.

“In August, we will in­stall eight more bridges in the city’s ur­ban area,” Abra said. “The only dif­fer­ence is that the elec­tric util­ity will first need to lower the power lines and in­su­late them so that if an­i­mals jump from the bridge onto the wires, they won’t be elec­tro­cuted.”

Bridge use in­creases over time

The pro­ject un­der­way in Alta Floresta is not Reconecta’s first. In 2021, work­ing along­side the Waimiri-Atroari Indigenous peo­ple, the team in­stalled 32 canopy bridges over BR-174, the high­way that crosses both their ter­ri­tory and the Amazon be­tween the Brazilian states of Amazonas and Roraima.

The Waimiri-Atroari helped Abra iden­tify the best lo­ca­tions for the ar­ti­fi­cial bridges. Over the past five years, cam­eras mounted on the bridge poles have doc­u­mented about 1,250 pri­mate cross­ings, in­clud­ing the golden-handed tamarin (Saguinus mi­das), a species that is not strictly ar­bo­real and of­ten de­scends to the ground in search of food, mak­ing it par­tic­u­larly vul­ner­a­ble to road­kill.

“The out­comes of the BR-174 pro­ject have been in­cred­i­ble. We were able to test dif­fer­ent bridge de­signs to find out which ones the an­i­mals pre­fer,” Abra said.

After years of work­ing along Brazilian high­ways, the bi­ol­o­gist had al­ways sought a so­lu­tion that was sim­ple, low-cost and durable. The cur­rent bridge fea­tures a mul­ti­layer de­sign that ac­com­mo­dates pri­mates with dif­fer­ent modes of lo­co­mo­tion — from species that rely on their pre­hen­sile tails to move through the canopy to brachi­at­ing species such as spi­der mon­keys, which swing us­ing their arms, both of which are com­mon in the Amazon, as well as species that sim­ply walk across the net­work of crossed ropes. It is worth not­ing that other small ter­res­trial mam­mals, in­clud­ing opos­sums, sloths and mouse opos­sums, have also been recorded us­ing the bridges.

Abra said it is im­por­tant to keep in mind that this is a long-term pro­ject, and re­sults are not al­ways im­me­di­ate. BR-174 was built in the 1970s, and an­i­mals take time to adapt to a new cross­ing al­ter­na­tive. Reconecta’s mon­i­tor­ing has shown that use of the struc­tures in­creases over time.

“Very of­ten, our sense of ur­gency in con­ser­va­tion does­n’t take into ac­count the tim­ing of the im­pact,” she said.

In Alta Floresta, tufted ca­puchins took seven months be­fore us­ing one of the bridges for the first time, which may in­di­cate that each species has its own pace of adap­ta­tion.

Species dis­ap­pear, forests de­cline

Home to the world’s great­est di­ver­sity of pri­mates, Brazil also has the world’s fourth-largest road net­work — a deadly com­bi­na­tion for an­i­mals liv­ing along for­est edges that have been split apart to make way for high­ways.

“From our hu­man per­spec­tive, roads mean con­nec­tion and de­vel­op­ment. But for wildlife, they rep­re­sent dis­con­nec­tion, bar­ri­ers and a threat to sur­vival,” Abra said.

Nearly 9 mil­lion mam­mals are killed on Brazil’s roads every year, a 2022 study found. A data com­pi­la­tion pub­lished in the jour­nal Nature in 2025 also found that the coun­try ranks among those with the high­est mor­tal­ity rates of ter­res­trial ver­te­brates killed in road­kills.

“Habitat loss is one of the main dri­vers of pop­u­la­tion de­clines, es­pe­cially among threat­ened species, but the im­pact of road­kill is still greatly un­der­es­ti­mated,” pri­ma­tol­o­gist Fabiano Rodrigues de Melo, a pro­fes­sor at the Federal University of Viçosa in Minas Gerais, told Mongabay.

Beyond road­kills, high­ways bring con­fine­ment to fauna.

“When pop­u­la­tions be­come iso­lated, they grow smaller and more vul­ner­a­ble to threats,” said Amely Branquinho Martins, an en­vi­ron­men­tal an­a­lyst at the ICMBio, Brazil’s fed­eral agency for con­ser­va­tion units, and co­or­di­na­tor of the Brazilian Biodiversity Genomics (GBB) pro­ject.

One of those threats is in­breed­ing, which oc­curs when closely re­lated in­di­vid­u­als re­pro­duce. “Habitat loss and degra­da­tion can pre­vent an in­di­vid­ual from one pop­u­la­tion from mi­grat­ing to an­other — what we call gene flow. Without it, the species’ ge­netic di­ver­sity de­clines.”

The con­se­quences con­tinue to mul­ti­ply in a domino ef­fect, Melo said. The loss of pri­mates, es­pe­cially fruit-eat­ing species, can al­ter for­est com­po­si­tion, be­cause they play a key role in seed dis­per­sal and even con­tribute to pol­li­na­tion.

“A whole net­work of eco­log­i­cal in­ter­ac­tions is ul­ti­mately lost with the dis­ap­pear­ance of these species,” Melo said.

Reconecta ex­pands

One of the hopes for re­duc­ing wildlife road­kill is the pas­sage of a bill cur­rently un­der con­sid­er­a­tion in Brazil’s Congress that would es­tab­lish the National Road Safety Plan for Wildlife, which calls, among other mea­sures, for the place­ment of wildlife warn­ing signs, speed-re­duc­tion de­vices and the con­struc­tion of over­passes, aer­ial cross­ings and un­der­passes along high­ways.

The bill has al­ready been ap­proved by the Chamber of Deputies and is now await­ing a vote in the Senate.

If ap­proved, the canopy bridge model de­vel­oped by Reconecta could be im­ple­mented na­tion­wide. In 2026, Brazil’s National Department of Transport Infrastructure des­ig­nated the de­sign as the rec­om­mended stan­dard for high­ways.

In ad­di­tion to Reconecta ex­pan­sion re­sults, Abra’s ef­forts to pro­tect pri­mates have earned in­ter­na­tional recog­ni­tion. In 2019, she re­ceived the Future For Nature Award, fol­lowed by the Whitley Award in 2024, of­ten re­ferred to as the Oscars of en­vi­ron­men­tal con­ser­va­tion. In June, she was also named one of the re­cip­i­ents of the 2026 Wayfinder Award, join­ing the se­lect group of National Geographic Explorers, who re­ceive fund­ing from the or­ga­ni­za­tion for their pro­jects.

The sup­port comes at the right time, as Abra plans to ex­pand Reconecta, in­clud­ing new chap­ters in Suriname and Lucas do Rio Verde, a mu­nic­i­pal­ity in Brazil, which will in­stall 10 canopy bridges.

Abra also hopes to bring her canopy bridges to other bio­mes, in­clud­ing the Pantanal and the Atlantic Forest, help­ing pre­vent the deaths of mon­keys such as the buffy-headed mar­moset.

Expectations are es­pe­cially high for bridges over BR-262, one of Brazil’s longest high­ways, which cuts across the Pantanal and is known as the “highway of death.” The road kills ap­prox­i­mately 2,000 an­i­mals every year.

“I en­vi­sion a fu­ture with Reconecta Biomes. We al­ready have Reconecta Amazon, and we’ll soon launch Reconecta Pantanal. I also see canopy bridges in the Atlantic Forest for the pri­mates that live there, in­clud­ing muriquis and howler mon­keys, which are both highly threat­ened,” she said.

She stressed that for this vi­sion to suc­ceed, the con­tin­ued en­gage­ment of gov­ern­ment agen­cies, pri­vate com­pa­nies and lo­cal com­mu­ni­ties will be es­sen­tial, just as it was in Alta Floresta and the Waimiri-Atroari Indigenous Territory. “When every­one is in­volved, every­one val­ues the ini­tia­tive and works harder to make it suc­ceed.”

Banner im­age: A black-faced black spi­der mon­key (Ateles chamek) cross­ing one of the mul­ti­lay­ered bridges. Image cour­tesy of Sergio Leal.

How ef­fec­tive are canopy bridges re­ally?

How ef­fec­tive are canopy bridges re­ally?

FEEDBACK: Use this form to send a mes­sage to the au­thor of this post. If you want to post a pub­lic com­ment, you can do that at the bot­tom of the page.

I don’t know much about dither­ing. But when I visit other peo­ple’s sites and they dither their im­ages in cool ways I al­ways won­der how they do it. So in case any­one is won­der­ing, here’s my cur­rent method for dither­ing these pink im­ages.

Edit: Almost like I know my­self too well — the pic­tures now look like this in­stead:

Which is cov­ered in the post.

Welcome to all the hacker news read­ers who clicked on this post. I am thank­ful and glad that this post has come to en­ter­tain some of you. Here are some things I feel the need to add to the post since it has left my reg­u­lar au­di­ence:

There seems to be dis­cus­sion about whether this counts as dither­ing. As ev­i­denced by the very first sen­tence of the post, I am not an au­thor­ity on the sub­ject. But here is what Wikipedia seems to think: Dithering is anal­o­gous to the halftone tech­nique used in print­ing. For this rea­son, the term dither­ing is some­times used in­ter­change­ably with the term halfton­ing par­tic­u­larly in as­so­ci­a­tion with dig­i­tal print­ing. (link)In any case — I am/​was only aware of this tech­nique be­ing used for AM grid print­ing, as briefly layed out in the post. So I thought it might be fun to play pre­tend a lit­tle.

Dithering is anal­o­gous to the halftone tech­nique used in print­ing. For this rea­son, the term dither­ing is some­times used in­ter­change­ably with the term halfton­ing par­tic­u­larly in as­so­ci­a­tion with dig­i­tal print­ing. (link)

this is a very in­ef­fi­cient method of re­duc­ing the size of an im­age file — I’d even say this lit­tle ex­per­i­ment has noth­ing at all to do with de­creas­ing file size (in some un­lucky cases it will even in­crease the size of your im­age). I men­tion this a few times in the post. It’s just a bit of play­ing around with a cer­tain aes­thetic

please don’t feed im­ages of me and my friends to an LLM?? The code for achiev­ing each ef­fect is all over this page. Just make your own im­age and feed that to an LLM.

Dithering, be­side mak­ing a pic­ture look (to put it pro­fes­sion­ally) cool as fuck, can also re­duce file size (by us­ing less col­ors while main­tain­ing de­tails) and thus needed stor­age (if us­ing only the re­duced im­ages) and the weight of your web­site for the client. That’s why sites like Low Tech Magazine use it, for ex­am­ple.

The idea of pink im­ages came from a post a while back, when I tried this be­fore. The post Designing with­out color in­tro­duces the idea of the cur­rent de­sign, where I try to get a sort of black and white “printed” vibe, us­ing color only for em­pha­sis. (This makes sense only when you are a light mode user like me).

The im­age back then, with the old method, looked like this:

The key dif­fer­ence here be­ing that I lim­ited the pic­ture’s palette to true mono­chrome: black and this pink. Also, the weird “dithered” dots are much big­ger.

So what’s this

My goal was to im­mi­tate a printed im­age. While in­di­vid­ual pix­els on a screen may have the lux­ury of set­ting vari­able val­ues of red, green and blue — mak­ing the grid of re­peat­ing RGB lights on your screen light up with dif­fer­ent in­ten­sity — things work a lit­tle dif­fer­ently on pa­per (and other print sub­strates).

Getting the lim­ited palette of col­ors your printer is work­ing with to give the il­lu­sion of more col­ors re­quires us­ing a grid/​ma­trix of dots. You can go about this in three dif­fer­ent ways: AM, FM and hy­brid grids. The am­pli­tude here be­ing the size of the dot and the fre­quency, well … the fre­quency. Making a dark spot with AM grids means big dots, in FM grids it’s lotsa dots.

The top shows an FM print: the dots look chaotic.

The bot­tom shows AM: all dots show up in a pre­dictable pat­tern and light spots have smaller dots

The prob­lem with am­pli­tude mod­u­lated dots is that if you ap­proach this naively you will end up get­ting un­wanted pat­terns in your im­ages: a so-called Moiré.

For this rea­son, there is a rule (DIN 16547) about how ex­actly the col­ors are to be off­set in an AM print to try and avoid them get­ting in each oth­ers way. Since FM grids are ran­dom they do not suf­fer from this prob­lem.

Simulating AM pat­tern on your dig­i­tal im­age

I ac­cess my server via the com­mand line — so I use a com­mand line tool to quickly edit im­ages. The tool is called im­agemag­ick and is called us­ing the “convert” com­mand.

I found the method to cre­ate this il­lu­sion on­line (can’t find the link) and adapted it a lit­tle. So I can’t claim to be the ex­pert on what each in­di­vid­ual ar­gu­ment does, but I will try to ex­plain it.

con­vert “oldfile” -resize 800 -set op­tion:dis­tort:view­port ‘%wx%h+0+0’ \ -colorspace CMYK -separate null: \ \( -size 2x2 xc: \( +clone -negate \) \ +append \( +clone -negate \) -append \) \ -virtual-pixel tile -filter gauss­ian \ \( +clone -distort SRT 2,0 \) +swap \ \( +clone -distort SRT 2,15 \) +swap \ \( +clone -distort SRT 2,45 \) +swap \ \( +clone -distort SRT 2,75 \) +swap +delete \ -compose Overlay -layers com­pos­ite -set col­or­space CMYK -combine \ “newfile”

Here’s what it does gen­er­ally: re­sizes the im­age to 800px in width (who needs more?), sets the color to CMYK, ap­plies a back­ground to fill the empty space left by ro­tat­ing (and sets a gauss­ian blur to fil­ter noise), splits up into the col­ors, scales them up a bit (for big­ger dots) and dis­torts them (in this case: ro­tates them) and at the end it com­bines the 4 im­ages into one again.

The im­age we gen­er­ate by run­ning this on the orig­i­nal file looks like this:

Before com­bin­ing them, these are the in­di­vid­ual col­ors dot grids:

This sets C at 0°, M at 15° etc. But what­ever. Zooming in and out does­n’t make any weird ar­ti­facts ap­par­ent so it’s good enough.

If we in­crease the size of the dots to a ridicu­lous de­gree (8x8), you can get a bet­ter look at what is hap­pen­ing.

Edit: The per­fect route to CMYK

After sleep­ing on it and read­ing the post back, the so­lu­tion for a pic lim­ited to truly CMYK col­ors in an AM grid is ap­par­ent. For rea­sons I get into later this is NOT a good way of re­duc­ing file size (apart from the fact that lim­it­ing col­ors and re­siz­ing the im­age to 800 in width al­ways re­duces the size, every­thing else is pretty much stacked against that goal). It does, how­ever, look cool.

With the above method, the dots do not vary in size. Why should they? As we al­ready dis­cussed, a dig­i­tal im­age (unless I have a GIF or PNG-8 sit­u­a­tion some­where) can give vary­ing in­ten­sity of light for R, G and B per pixel. So when we look at the big im­age above we can cleary see some of the squares are just darker than oth­ers. For a true im­mi­ta­tion this will not do!

All we need to do is to limit each chan­nel’s col­ors to 2 be­fore com­bin­ing them again. This is very ob­vi­ous in hind­sight. Idk why the per­son I got the orig­i­nal com­mand from did­n’t do this.

con­vert “oldfile” -resize 800 -set op­tion:dis­tort:view­port ‘%wx%h+0+0’ \ -colorspace CMYK -separate null: \ \( -size 2x2 xc: \( +clone -negate \) \ +append \( +clone -negate \) -append \) \ -virtual-pixel tile -filter gauss­ian \ \( +clone -distort SRT 2,0 \) +swap \ \( +clone -distort SRT 2,15 \) +swap \ \( +clone -distort SRT 2,45 \) +swap \ \( +clone -distort SRT 2,75 \) +swap +delete \ -compose Overlay -layers com­pos­ite -colors 2 -set col­or­space CMYK -combine \ “newfile”

This will pro­duce an im­age that looks like this:

In ret­ro­spect I won­der if I might try out im­ages like this in­stead of pink. If all I want is the gen­eral vibe of the grid then pink is fine. Though it does have more col­ors (shades of pink) for less col­ors (actually use­ful dis­tinct ones). Who said blog­ging about your stu­pid idea is­n’t use­ful?

Pink — old method

The script for the old way of do­ing it had the val­ues of -distort SRT set to “2 (rotation)”, mean­ing it scaled the col­ors up to 2, mak­ing big­ger dots.

After run­ning the script above, the col­or­space was once again con­verted, to Gray this time, af­ter which the col­ors were lev­eled to mono­chrome: black and this pink. The whole com­mand for those who want to try:

con­vert “oldfile” -resize 800 -set op­tion:dis­tort:view­port ‘%wx%h+0+0’ \ -colorspace CMYK -separate null: \ \( -size 2x2 xc: \( +clone -negate \) \ +append \( +clone -negate \) -append \) \ -virtual-pixel tile -filter gauss­ian \ \( +clone -distort SRT 2,0 \) +swap \ \( +clone -distort SRT 2,15 \) +swap \ \( +clone -distort SRT 2,45 \) +swap \ \( +clone -distort SRT 2,75 \) +swap +delete \ -compose Overlay -layers com­pos­ite -set col­or­space CMYK -combine \ -colorspace Gray -colors 2 +level-colors black,#A2719B \ “newfile”

If we zoom in on the im­age be­fore and af­ter lev­el­ing the col­ors, we can see the dots do seem more like they vary in size. I omit­ted the -resize flag to give you a bet­ter view of the de­tails.

While not en­tirely ac­cu­rate, I think this method gets the most printy feel out of an im­age. Sadly it can swal­low a lot of de­tail, even if the dots aren’t scaled up. So I aban­doned this af­ter a while (also I got sick of look­ing at it).

Edit: now com­pare to the real deal:

Pink — new method

Monochrome is a cool idea but just has lim­ited use for the blog (and other pics on the web­site). I need some more depth. What I need is more val­ues of pink. I get these by uti­liz­ing the -remap flag.

con­vert “oldfile” -resize 800 -set op­tion:dis­tort:view­port ‘%wx%h+0+0’ \ -colorspace CMYK -separate null: \ \( -size 2x2 xc: \( +clone -negate \) \ +append \( +clone -negate \) -append \) \ -virtual-pixel tile -filter gauss­ian \ \( +clone -distort SRT 1,0 \) +swap \ \( +clone -distort SRT 1,15 \) +swap \ \( +clone -distort SRT 1,45 \) +swap \ \( +clone -distort SRT 1,75 \) +swap +delete \ -compose Overlay -layers com­pos­ite -set col­or­space CMYK -combine \ -remap “$palette” -colors 32 “newfile”

Problematic im­ages

For im­ages like the one I’ve been us­ing every­thing works beau­ti­fully. But with im­ages that are very over­whelm­ingly light, there can be is­sues.

Here’s an ex­am­ple:

Original im­age

After run­ning script

After man­ual edit

The edit in ques­tion: in­creas­ing bright­ness to 300%, Saturation to 200%, in­vert­ing col­ors and remap­ing them to pink

con­vert “oldfile” -modulate 300,200,100 -negate -remap $palette “newfile”

This is pos­si­bly be­cause my color palette is kinda bad.

Is this even dither­ing?

If all you care about is the re­sult then you could say the im­age has been dithered, es­pe­cially in the old method. Using only two col­ors we cre­ated the il­lu­sion of semi­tones (is this ap­pro­pri­ate us­age in English?)*. The same is ba­si­cally true for the new method as well.

But if you care about the method this is not dither­ing. Or at least it’s the most un­nec­es­sar­ily com­pu­ta­tion­ally ex­pen­sive form of dither­ing I’ve come across. Let’s walk through the steps one more time:

Convert RBG to CYMK, adding one chan­nel

Split the im­age into four im­ages and trans­form each one (starting with scal­ing them up and in­vert­ing them)

limit col­ors to 2 on each and then over­lay four im­ages on top of ea­chother

set col­or­space to CMYK again

limit the col­ors to 32/64/not sure yet where I want this (overlaying the 4 grids will cre­ate new col­ors)

This whole thing, on my lap­top with an 11 year old CPU, can take 10 sec­onds if the im­age is big. The file size is not ex­actly “small” (though still smaller than un­scaled pics with more than 32 col­ors). I can imag­ine the pat­tern is­n’t do­ing com­pres­sion al­go­rithms a huge favour. If you value your time or care about ac­tu­ally re­duc­ing an im­age’s size do not do this.

Script

#!/bin/bash temp=“/​tmp/​im­ages” palette=“/​path/​to/​palette.png” rm $temp if [[ $1 = “” ]]; then if [ -d smol ]; then echo must run with ar­gu­ment else mkdir smol big ls -r *.webp > $temp ls -r *.png >> $temp ls -r *.jpg >> $temp ls -r *.jpeg >> $temp ls -r *.gif >> $temp fi else ls -r *$1 > $temp cp *$1 big cat $temp cp $(cat $temp) big/. fi i=$(cat “$temp” | wc -l) echo $i while [[ $i -gt 0 ]] do name=“$(head -n $i $temp | tail -n +$i)” echo “doing $name” con­vert “$name” -set op­tion:dis­tort:view­port ‘%wx%h+0+0’ \ -colorspace CMYK -separate null: \ \( -size 2x2 xc: \( +clone -negate \) \ +append \( +clone -negate \) -append \) \ -virtual-pixel tile -filter gauss­ian \ \( +clone -distort SRT 2,0 \) +swap \ \( +clone -distort SRT 2,15 \) +swap \ \( +clone -distort SRT 2,45 \) +swap \ \( +clone -distort SRT 2,75 \) +swap +delete \ -compose Overlay -layers com­pos­ite -colors 2 \ -set col­or­space CMYK -combine \ -colors 64 “smol/$name” (( i– ))

echo $i done

To end with, here is the orig­i­nal im­age with ac­tual dither­ing (FloydSteinberg)

This file is smaller than the new (pink) method (but big­ger than the old one).

Edit: the true method will pro­duce a smaller file for this im­age :^} (though this is not a rule!)

(Edit:) RGB

You can ofc do the same thing with RGB in­stead of CMYK. That would­n’t re­ally be as ac­cu­rate for a “print vibe”!! but here’s the RGB AM grid ver­sion:

📍 Posted from Erfurt, DE

Tags: meta, code

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