The hero image on the linked page, which consists of a muted teal background with the words "Introducing Muse Spark", weighs in at 3,5MB. I don't even...

"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

- Hacker News Guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Good catch - looks like it's a PNG image, with an alpha channel for the rounded corners, and a subtle gradient in the background. The gradient is rendered with dithering, to prevent colour banding. The dither pattern is random, which introduces lots of noise. Since noise can't be losslessly compressed, the PNG is an enormous 6.2 bits per pixel.

While working on a web-based graphics editor, I've noticed that users upload a lot of PNG assets with this problem. I've never tracked down the cause... is there a popular raster image editor which recently switched to dithered rendering of gradients?

lol it literally took me 2s to google search "optimize image for website" and 10s to upload and get a smaller sized image.

The result for that specific image is: 500kb. 85% decrease in size

For me it's 213 kB. Did they replace it?

Someday our robot overlords will be intelligent enough to ... optimize images!

(But today is not that day.)

And it doesn't even look high-res.

complaining about sand on the beach