How My E-Reader Lost Its Stripes

A tiny Xteink X3 e-reader with open-source CrossPoint firmware showed vertical stripes when displaying greyscale images. The author used GPT-6 Astra and Fable 5.1 to debug, uncovering a missing grey nudge waveform and a bug that made dark grey render as black. The stripes appeared only when grey pixels had neighbours of different shades, and were eventually traced to the greyscale rendering pipeline.
Our supposedly four-shade reader was definitely displaying three shades; this wasn’t just my aging eyes.
- ainch
Sorry for the tangent, but as a chart nerd it is so interesting to me the way that LLMs produce charts for articles like this - it's like they have no concept of a 3rd party (the reader). So the writing and the vis gets overloaded with the particular context of the conversation, even if it would be irrelevant to a reader.
Like the x-axis label of the first plot mentions that it shows gridlines every 8 ticks - I don't think that's a choice I've ever seen a person make. The next plot does the same thing, but in the title: "(dotted lines: evenly spaced reference)". Again, would anyone making a chart ever include such a specific detail in the title? Probably not beyond undergrad level.
I encounter a similar thing when trying to work with LLMs to write articles - they cannot help including information or detail from the conversation, rather than empathising with the reader and filtering out what they might already know or not care about. They may be capable of solving decades-old maths problems, but on this particular axis they seem to be floundering at the level of a fresh graduate that's desperate to talk about what they've done rather than what their audience needs to know.
- asveikau
I got an X3 a couple of weeks ago, they are dirt cheap and the form factor is amazing. It's so easy to leave it in the pocket and just pull it out when you have an idle moment somewhere out in public. I wasn't certain how comfortable reading would be on such a small screen but it works well. With crosspoint, you can sync your page position with koreader on a larger form factor device.
- jareklupinski
those LookUp Tables are the most difficult thing to get from a display manufacturer; never thought to let an AI tune one itself using image feedback, incredible!
- mikestew
Related to the Xteink X3 reader mentioned in TFA:
- jwrallie
I assume these fixes did not go yet in the latest release (1.6.0) and are going to be part of a later release? Looking forward to it, specially since anti-aliasing improvements were mentioned.