[functionmouse]

> theres a big difference between 99% quality and 30%.

sure

> if you treat it in a binary way where everything short of 100 falls into one "lossy" bucket you lose all the practical differences that make one encoding much better than another.

no; lossless is an inherently binary term. and I don't lose all the practical differences of better lossy encoders by understanding that; I'm not just going to start using mp3 96k because I have an understanding of lossless vs lossy encoders...

Lossless is an objectively binary term.

[ttoinou]

Lossless is objective for information theory. To get from the real world to digital world you need an analog to digital converter, this process is by definition lossy. We are interested in the real world, and information is pure but never represents exactly reality.

Lossyness is baked into our problem statement here.

Using terms like near lossless means we think we are very close to reality for what we’re trying to do

[functionmouse]

ok

mp3 is near lossless