If you’re reading this on a recent Mac or iPhone, the icon above is rendering
brighter than anything else on this page — brighter than pure white.
It’s an ordinary PNG with one trick inside: an HDR color profile.
First — what is Hilo?
Hilo is a proactive AI agent that lives in your channels — WhatsApp above all.
Connect it to your tools and it manages them for you, end to end, including complex
ones like WhatsApp groups. Everything you delegate becomes a thread — Hilo picks it up,
remembers the context, acts, and comes back only when there’s something to decide.
Pick up the thread (Hilo).
See the difference
Standard avatar — sRGBWhite can’t go past the page’s white. This is as bright as normal pixels get.HDR avatar — Rec.2020 PQSame mark, but on an HDR display the pixels push past reference white and glow.
Seeing two identical images? Your display (or browser)
is SDR-only — the profile gets tone-mapped down and the trick politely disappears.
Try Safari or Chrome on a MacBook Pro (XDR display) or a recent iPhone.
How the hack works
1 · An ordinary PNGThe file is a plain 8-bit RGB PNG — no special pixel format, no 10-bit data, nothing exotic. It works everywhere a PNG works.
2 · A lying color profileEmbedded in it is an ICC profile declaring the pixels are Rec. 2020 gamut with the PQ transfer function (SMPTE ST 2084) — the encoding used by HDR video, where code values map to absolute brightness up to 10,000 nits.
3 · The display believes itColor-managed browsers on Apple’s EDR displays honor the profile. Values above SDR reference white get mapped to real extra nits — so the icon renders brighter than #FFFFFF, something CSS alone can’t do.
4 · Graceful everywhere elseOn SDR displays the profile is simply tone-mapped: the icon looks normal, nothing breaks. The glow is a progressive enhancement.
