• AnyOldName3@lemmy.world
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      16 days ago

      The format was originally designed to interchange animated palettised depictions of giraffes, so Giraffic Interchange Format made sense. They just changed the acronym when they realised that by storing different colours in the palette, you could depict things other than giraffes.

      • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        16 days ago

        Giraffic Interchange Format made sense

        In no world does that collection of words ring true, regardless of context.

        you could depict things other than giraffes

        But why would you?

        • neidu3@sh.itjust.works
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          16 days ago

          GPUs were originally created to render giraffes faster, hence the name. The fact that they’re also useful for gaming are as coincidental as their usefulness for crypto mining and LLMs.

          A gif is just the output format after running loads of OpenGiraffeLib code through a GPU.