https://colossal.com/wp-content/themes/colossal/img/dodo/her... seems to be the main culprit: 10MB of JPEG at 2880x2400, absolutely unnecessary given that a simple re-export at 70% quality (imperceptible differences) takes it down to 385KB and a rescale to 1440x1200 takes it down even further to 72KB. Makes you wonder how many petabytes are pointlessly running between continents. Although in this case WordPress should have taken care by default to optimize the images.

JPEG quality 70% absolutely wrecks the noise for me. This is quite perceptible at the size the image is used at. If the noise is really neccessary for the page is another question but surely there are better options than turning the JPEG quality down to 'ass'.

I don't know what you mean. Tell me if the original is left or right: https://postimg.cc/3dxJTJQT

original: https://postimg.cc/GBX9Y8Cq

optimized: https://postimg.cc/23hrNbKM

literally imperceptible

right

Correct.

So it's not "literally imperceptible". I'm not even running a high DPI monitor and I can tell.

Open the images in two tabs and switch between them, there are indeed literally imperceptible differences, as viewed normally, not zoomed x800.

I managed 115KB with my normal AVIF settings at full size, maybe closer to 130KB if using artificial noise regeneration.

...or at least warn authors and provide a one-click button to optimize...

Hope that they are better with their genomes and don't put excess "stuff" in...

(Hollywood showed me that could be a bad thing. Frogs, Cuttlefish...)

I have a sneaking suspicion HN putting this on the front page will teach someone this lesson.

Looks like Google Cloud CDN.

Cache egress $0.02-$0.20 per GiB

Getting on the front page of Hacker News might hurt their "pocket's" a bit.