In case anyone looking through the linked article is also wondering why the images look odd, it's because (buried in the middle): > motivated by early color di

In case anyone looking through the linked article is also wondering why the images look odd, it's because (buried in the middle): > motivated by early color display palettes, we create our own 9-bit color palette to represent pixels. Using this palette yields an input sequence length 3 times shorter than the standard (R, G, B) palette, while still encoding color faithfully. Makes total sense now. In fact, those images remind me so much of how photos looked on the early internet, since many were palletized.