An alternative method

Hi Evan! I saw a post on Hacker News about you making thumbhash. But I think there already exists a simple compression method for tiny images, called BC1 (DXT1) texture compression - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_Texture_Compression. It uses 4 bits per RGB pixel, I believe a decompressor can be made in under of 500 Bytes of code.

I wrote a comment about it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35268000 , and somebody actually implemented it - https://i.imgur.com/eIYZAmj.png (these are 8x8 pixel images, 32 Bytes each, enlarged with a bilinear interpolation).

It exists for decades and I wonder if you are aware of it. Maybe you could mention it in your repository, or do some comparison.