I'd be worried if my head was about 12 pixels
this post was submitted on 01 May 2026
38 points (97.5% liked)
Dull Men's Club
4191 readers
112 users here now
An unofficial chapter of the popular Dull Men's Club.
1. Relevant commentary on your own dull life. Posts should be about your own dull, lived experience. This is our most important rule. Direct questions, random thoughts, comment baiting, advice seeking, many uses of "discuss" rarely comply with this rule.
2. Original, Fresh, Meaningful Content.
3. Avoid repetitive topics.
4. This is not a search engine
Use a search engine, a tradesperson, Reddit, friends, a specialist Facebook group, apps, Wikipedia, an AI chat, a reverse image search etc. to answer simple questions or identify objects. Also see rule 1, “comment baiting”.
There are a number of content specific communities with subject matter experts who can help you.
Some other communities to consider before posting:
5. Keep it dull. If it puts us to sleep, it’s on the right track. Examples of likely not dull: jokes, gross stuff (including toes), politics, religion, royalty, illness or injury, killing things for fun, or promotional content. Feel free to post these elsewhere.
6. No hate speech, sexism, or bullying No sexism, hate speech, degrading or excessively foul language, or other harmful language. No othering or dehumanizing of anyone or negativity towards any gender identity.
7. Proofread before posting. Use good grammar and punctuation. Avoid useless phrases. Some examples: - starting a post with "So" - starting a post with pointless phrases, like "I hope this is allowed" or “this is my first post” Only share good quality, cropped images. Do not share screenshots of images; share the original image.
.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I've been rabidly protecting my privacy ever since I understood what Big Tech had in store for us in 1999 thanks to this idiot who spilled the beans - but somehow nobody grasped the importance of what he said back then - and I'd rather be safe than sorry. A tinge of paranoia has served me well over the decades.
Definitely. If I had any discipline, I'd be right there with you.
A tinge of paranoia has served me well over the decades.
In that case, use black bars or solid cover, like an emoji, instead of pixelation.
It's possible to reconstruct the image behind the pixels(or blur). Interesting article, YT video and demonstration here: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/its-easier-ever-de-censor-videos/
I'm aware of this, but it only works if the image under the pixelation is static and the pixelation is moving over it somehow. When I pixelate my face in a video, my face isn't static. Also, the clearer my face, the coarser I choose the pixelation level.
(I don't seriously think this is anything that you have to worry about, at all. It's just a neat topic!)
I went down the rabbit hole after watching that video.
It is much easier with text, because the search space is constrained (there's only so many letter/font combinations to look through) you can pixelate each possible character and compare them to the original until you find the closest match.
With enough frames, memory and compute you can extract detailed images through temporal accumulation. Instead of using a lookup table of various characters you can use one of two different methods of motion estimation (Horn-Schunck and Lucas-Kanade [Wikipedia warning: Here thar be mathematics]) and then, once you know the motion, you can use reconstruction algorithms like MAP estimation, or IBP to approximate the high res image that created the low res pixelation. Each frame additional would allow you to refine your 'guess' until you arrived at a unique solution
This would be computationally expensive, on the order of several petaFLOPS and 50-100GB of RAM for even a short video.
A fork of something like this: https://github.com/rafaelmaeuer/MultiFrameSuperResolution taking into account that you don't need to reconstruct the entire image, just a small area.
There are some AI tools that claim to do this as well, but they're just doing image generation and hallucinating the details.
This is too interesting!
How thick is the suit? I usually dive in a 3/2, but have a 5mm for spring water. 0 degrees is drysuit territory.
It's a 5mm suit. Some water gets in but not too much. It's perfectly fine in icy water.