That’s a feature of jpeg. Somewhat simplified jpeg encodes images in blocks of 8×8 pixels. It computes a discrete cosine transform of those blocks and quantizes the resulting coefficients. An interesting side effect is that one of those transformed values happens to be the average value of the 8×8 block. So by putting all of those values at the front of the file you can get a low res approximation before having downloaded the entire file.
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