Comment by segfaultbuserr
3 years ago
> Confidently exclaiming that downscaling, gaussian blur, and taking a picture of screen showing that from far away can easily be restored by deconvolution...
I don't think HN (or Reddit) posters are arguing that deconvolution was actually being used, or that it would be practical to do so. Instead, they're just nitpicking about the technical correctness of this particular statement - "the (ir)reversibility of a perfect digital gaussian blur" - even if it doesn't affect the conclusion of the experiment.
It's just the standard nerd-sniping as seen in all tech communities... If the debate on whether you can "reverse a photo of a gaussian blur taken by a camera from the monitor" became hot enough, eventually someone may even spend a weekend to code a prototype to show how it actually works better than most people's imagination, with the solely purpose to win an argument on the Internet.
Except it’s not actually reversible with finite precision, which is sufficiently implied by “digital”.
But they didn't get an image that is 100% like the initial image. It's something in between the original image with high resolution and the horrible photo of a blurred and saturated image in a monitor.