WHY DO WE NEED DITHERING?

Summary from the TLDR Dev newsletter

Dithering was initially necessary to simulate more colors than available in early computing due to memory limitations. It involves using limited palettes and adding noise with neighboring colors to create gradients, tricking the eye into perceiving a smoother transition. Ordered dithering uses a threshold map, while error diffusion algorithms, like Floyd-Steinberg, distribute the error to neighboring pixels for a less patterned result.