mikrogoat

Announcement - Upscaling Thumbnails for Gold Tier

Added 2025-06-15 01:02:59 +0000 UTC

Just for full disclosure, I'm going to be using ESRGAN -- a local hardware, lightweight upscaling MLM to make the thumbnails in Basil 3 bigger. This is 4 year old tech and is technically Ai (all of you should know I hate Ai and its impact on the environment) but this should have zero impact on the environment as its running off of my hardware natively with the same energy cost as exporting a png. It also is not trained off of copyrighted images as it is just resampling the pixels that exist already to achieve the result. This tech was originally made to upscale anime for blu rays. It's old technology but I wanted let you all know what was happening to be clear on what it is and what my thinking was utilizing it. I am not going to some shady Ai-bro website to get this result.

Left (photoshop upscaler) VS right (ESRGAN)

This is just to make things a bit more readable for people since the original thumbnails are quite small.

Let me know in the comments if you have any concerns.

Best,
Mikro