this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2024
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Confidently Incorrect
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When people are way too smug about their wrong answer.
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What I meant is yeah, you are right about that, but no, lossless formats aren't called lossless because they don't lose anything to the original, they're called lossless because, after compressing and decompressing, you get the exact same file that you initially compressed.
Another commenter on this post explained it really well.
They're deemed "lossless" because there are no data losses - the word actually comes from the broader domain of data handling, specifically Compression were for certain things - like images, audio and video - there are compression algorithms that lose some information (lossy) and those which don't (lossless), for example JPEG vs PNG.
However data integrity is not at all what your average "audiophile" would be talking about when they say there are audio losses, so when commenting on what an non-techie "audiophile" wrote people here used that "losslessness" from the data domain to make claims in a context which is broader that merelly the area were the problem of data integrity applies and were it's insuficient to disprove the claims of said "audiophile".
Fake it 'till you make it is not applicable to scientific or technical discussions.
Nice content-free slogan.
I'm not a Sound Engineer, I'm an Electronics Engineer - we're the ones who had to find the right balance between fidelity, bit error rates, data rates and even circuit price when designing the digital audio sampling systems that capture from the analog world the digital data which the Sound Engineers use to work their magic: so I'm quite familiar with the limits of analog to digital conversion and that's what I'm pointing out.
As it so happens I also took Compression and Cryptography in my degree and am quite familiar with where the term "lossless" comes from, especially since I took that elective at the time when the first lossy compression algorithms were starting to come out (specifically wavelet encoding as used in JPEG and MPEG) so people had to start talking about "lossless" compression algorithms with regards to the kind of algorithms what until then had just been called compression algorithms (because until then there were no compression algorithms with loss since the idea of losing anything when compressing data was considered crazy until it turns out you could do it and save tons of space if it was for stuff like image and audio because of the limitations of human senses - essentially in the specific case of things meant to be received by human senses, if you could deceive the human senses then the loss was acceptable, whilst in a general data sense losing data in compression was unacceptable).
My expertise is even higher up the Tech stack than the people who to me sound like Junior Devs making fun of lusers because they were using technical terms to mean something else, even while the Junior Devs themselves have yet to learn enough to understand the scope of usage and full implications for those technical terms (or the simple reality that non-Techies don't have the same interpretation of technical terms as domain experts and instead interprete those things by analogy)
STFU and stop dropping your resume. Nobody gives a shit, and I can tell you I'm FAR more knowledgeable than you.
You literally don't understand the difference between a sensor, data, compression, or anything else. You don't understand energy, physics, or the underlying concepts.
You are not as informed as you personally believe.
Literally STFU
Clearly my point about this being like Junior Devs thinking they know better that the "lusers" whilst not knowing enough to understand the limits of their knowledge hit the mark and hurt.
It's hilarious that you think a background in game making (by the way, love that hypocrisy of yours of criticizing me for pointing out my background whilst you often do exactly the same on your posts) qualifies you to understand things like the error rates in the time and amplitude domains inherent to the sampling and quantization process which is Analog-to-Digital conversion "FAR" better than a Digital Systems Electronics Engineering Degree - you are literally the User from the point of view of a Digital Systems EE.
Then the mention of Physics too was just delicious because I also have part of a Physics degree that I took before changing to EE half way in my degree, so I studied it at Uni level just about long enough to go all the way to Quantum Mechanics which is a teensy weensy bit more advanced than just "energy" (and then, funnily enough, a great deal of EE was also about "energy").
Oh, and by the way, if you think others will Shut The Fuck Up just because you tell them to, you're in for a big disappointment.