Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by coder543 1473 days ago
> Common sense suggests that "visually lossless" means no detectable difference by the naked eye ever, not in "almost all test cases".

Common sense suggests no such thing. When you buy a bottle of “water”, it actually has a bunch of stuff in it that isn’t water. How dare they?! When someone says “I’ll be there in 15 minutes”, it is highly unlikely that they will show up in exactly 900 seconds. Such liars! Why are you even meeting them? When people say airplanes are “safe”, you might angrily point out how many people have died, not realizing that “safe” is relative to other things and not an absolute in that context. This is common across basically everything in life. “There are no absolutes.” If you think common sense is to automatically assume every statement that even looks remotely absolute is intended to be taken absolutely… that is not common. Short statements will come off as absolute, when they are just intended to be taken as approximate, but even absolutes are usually meant to be taken as slightly less than absolute.

“Visually lossless” is a description of the by far most common experience with DSC. They’re not describing it as truly lossless, so you know there is some loss occurring. It is natural to assume that in extraordinary circumstances, that loss might be noticeable side by side… but you don’t have a side by side when using a monitor most of the time, so the very lossy human vision system will happily ignore small imperfections.

> so not only is "visually lossless" a lie, the name itself is propaganda.

Your whole comment shows that you don’t understand how communication works. It is “visually lossless” as far as people are concerned. The study shows that! This is not at all what propaganda looks like.

When Apple labeled their iPhone screen a “retina screen” because people would no longer notice the pixels, I suppose you called that a “lie” as well because you could lean in really close or use a microscope? The retina display density achieved its stated goal.

There is literally no point in continuing this discussion when you take such an absolutist position and refuse to consider what alternative communications would look like. How about “99.9% visually lossless”? That would be even more confusing to people.

Communicating complicated concepts succinctly is a lossy process. Language is lossy. As they say, “all models are wrong, but some are useful.”

1 comments

I understand perfectly that "visually lossless" was chosen to emotionally manipulate people by triggering positive associations with the word "lossless", despite not actually being lossless, or even transparent. Language is lossy, but that does not excuse corporations twisting it further in their attempts to exploit you.
Who is being exploited in this situation? I've never heard of anyone successfully selling a product because DSC is "visually lossless". It's a short explanation for a complicated technology, on the rare occasion that anyone googles DSC to try to understand what it is.

Your continued use of inflammatory and frankly incorrect language isn't helping your case. If this is "exploitative" marketing language that is "lying", you should file a case with some consumer protection body. You have also failed to demonstrate how you would communicate the overwhelming effectiveness of DSC that the study showed.

"High fidelity lossy" would be an honest name.
Sure, that name would have been fine too.

I don’t think “honesty” is an issue at play here either way, as I have discussed in great detail (and with many examples that you surely have encountered), given how people (unfortunately?) communicate in the real world.

If the study had shown something substantially different (or if people online were frequently having bad experiences), I would totally have been onboard with calling it marketing overreach and lies.