[kragen]

Yes, of course it's impossible to losslessly compress all possible images by even a single bit. But how predictable is the content of typical images? How much structure do they have? They certainly have a lot more structure than PNG or even JPEG exploits. Some of the “loss” of lossy JPEG is just random sensor noise, which places a lower bound on the size of a losslessly compressed image, but we have no idea how much.

[lisper]

Doesn't matter. Whatever you do to compress losslessly you can always do better if you're allowed to discard information. And the structure is part of the reason. For lossless compression you have to keep all the noise, all the invisible details. With lossy compression you're allowed to discard all that.

[kragen]

Yes, that's what I said.

[lisper]

Just for the record: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22272837