I remember when some company started advertising “BURN-proof” CD-R drives and thinking that was a really dumb phrase, because literally nobody shortened “buffer underrun” to “BURN”, and because, you know, “burning” was the entire point of a CD-R drive.

It worked though. Buffer underruns weren’t a problem on the later generations of drives. I still never burned at max speed on those though. Felt like asking for trouble to burn a disc at 52x or whatever they maxed out at. At that point it was the difference between 1.5 minutes and 4 minutes or something like that. I was never in that big a rush.

It’s a real post on Reddit. I don’t know what combination of screenshotting/uploading tools leads to this kind of mangling, but I’ve seen it in screenshots from Android, too. The artifacts seem to run down in straight vertical lines, so maybe slight scaling with a nearest-neighbor algorithm (in 2025?!?) plus a couple levels of JPEG compression? It looks really weird.

I’m curious. If anyone knows, please enlighten me!