> QOI is fast. It losslessly compresses images to a similar size of PNG, while offering 20x-50x faster encoding and 3x-4x faster decoding.
> QOI is simple. The reference en-/decoder fits in about 300 lines of C. The file format specification is a single page PDF.
It's amazing to me how we much we can fill in the blanks to make something recognizable with such little data.
I think the MozJPEG compression optimisations deserves a mention, as does where we started, with RLE encoding for printer things.
Also important for my personal understanding of JPEG is the context: slow CPUs and analogue screens. OG JPEG was optimised for this, MozJPEG changed the look up tables and the ubiquitous 'turbo' JPEG library to use a few more CPU cycles and save a few more bytes, whilst fixing the banding that was actually okay in the analogue days of old CRT monitors.
Bookmarked the article for re-reading.