this effect is accomplished by alternating these two grayscale ramps in a checker pattern btw:
"▁▂▃▄▅▆▇█"
"▏▎▍▌▋▊▉█"

@aeva I know ASCII space isn’t guaranteed to be the same width as the block characters, but how about the ideographic space “　“ or em space “ “?

@jkaniarz there are (or should be) no spaces in either quotation. I didn't like how it looked when I added a regular space in the lowest position of both, because it was kinda visually jarring I guess

@aeva @jkaniarz Also, if you use space as well, you get 9 elements in your ramp, so you end up dividing by 9, and that makes people sad.

@aeva @drj It’s actually a nicer divide. 9 elements means 0 to 8, which lets you divide by 8 to get 0.0 to 1.0 range. A lot of dithering algorithms have trouble with pure black or pure white because you need 2^n + 1 color values to balance it out.