Aceticon
Just spreading the ground beef around rather than keep it in the form of meat patties would’ve yielded something more pizza-like whilst using the exact same ingredients (though it would probably still be an excessive amount for a non-cheese topping).
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)
A PNG is indeed an imperfect representation of reality. Are you claiming that the lossness in the data domain of the compression algorithm in a PNG means its contents are a perfect representation of reality?!
(Funnilly enough, the imperfections in the data contained on a PNG are noticeable for some and the lower the “sampling rate” - i.e. number of pixels, bits per pixel - the easier it is to spot, same as audio)
As I’ve been trying to explain in my last posts, a non-Techie “audophile” when they claim FLAC is not lossless aren’t likely to be talking about it’s technical characteristics in the data domain (i.e. that data that you take out of a FLAC file is exactly the same as it goes in) but that its contents don’t sound the same as the original performance (or, most likely, a recording made via an entirelly analog pathway, such as in an LP).
Is it really that hard to grasp the concept that the word “lossless” means different things for a Technical person with a background in digital audio processing and a non-Technical person who simply compares the results of a full analog recording and reproduction pathway with those of a digital one which include a FLAC file and spots the differences?
This feels like me trying to explain to Junior Developers that the Users are indeed right and so are the Developers - they’re just reading different meanings for the same word and, no, you can’t expect non-Techie people to know the ins and outs of Technical terms and no they’re not lusers because of it. Maybe the “audiphile” was indeed wrong and hence “Confidently Incorrect”, but maybe he was just using lossless in a broader sense of “nothing lost” like a normal person does, whilst the other one was using the technical meaning of it (no data loss) so they were talking past each other - that snippet is too short to make a call on that.
So yeah, I stand by my point that this is the kind of Dunning-Krugger shit junior techies put out before they learn that most people don’t have the very same strictly defined technical terms on their minds as the junior techies do.
On my world account which I left a while ago I have various posts with like 20+ votes for and 20+ votes against because they were insulting/hurtful for the political tribalists but did actually make sense for those whose love for the tribe did not overrode their thinking ability.
Way too many people grow a purely emotional relationship with a politial party so never actually analyse what they do and have knee-jerk reactions to criticism of their beloved party, which paradoxically leads that party to become worse over time because in the absence of criticism of it, the shit done inside the party by the sociopaths than naturally seek power, goes on unchallenged and festers.
Granted, it’s easier to analyse US politics from the outside, but I actually behave the same when it comes to the politics of my country and even the leadership and membership of the political party I’m a member of here.
Zionism is as much “Jews” as Nazism was blue-eyed blonde people: they’re both very similar ethno-Fascist extremely-racist ideologies which glue themselves to an ethnic group claiming to represent them even while plenty of members of that ethnic group very overtly say “They do not represent me”.
Never believe Fascists when they claim to represent a nation (in the case of the traditional Fascists) or a race (in the case of the ethno-Fascists). In fact, the more general rules is “Never believe Fascists”.
The Theatre Of Identity on both sides of the aisle in the US was always bullshit to try and get more votes, if done differently:
- Most of the Democracts don’t really care about Equality (especially not in the Wealth domain, though they pay lip service to the fight against a few non-Wealth inequalities), they care about themselves and the ultra-rich.
- The Republicans don’t care about America or The American People, they care about themselves and the ultra-rich.
Mind you, this is a pretty common pattern in other countries with electoral systems that boost a pair of “center” parties - there will be a “Right” one preaching some kind of nationalist pro-nation message and a “Left” one preaching anti-discrimination along racial/gender/sexual-orientation (but never wealth) lines, but they both serve the interest of the same people and will even get together to pass legislation that increases their own salaries, reduces the effectiveness of the fight against corruption or benefit some large well entrenched “regime” corporations who (by an amazing coincidence) employ in highly paid positions lots of politicians when they retire.
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”.
I think it’s a general thing with highly capable persons in expert and highly intellectual domains that eventually you kinda figure out what Socrates actually meant with “All I know is that I know nothing”