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.

If one thinks a lot, likes to learn and, maybe more important, thinks about knowledge and learning things, that person will probably get there.

A certain educational background probably helps but is neither required nor sufficient, IMHO.

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.

There are wankers everywhere and it doesn't take that many wankers as a proportion of the population to screw things up for everybody else.

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"

Strictly speaking, as soon as an analog signal is quantized into digital samples there is loss, both in the amplitude domain (a value of infinite precision is turned into a value that must fit in a specific number of bits, hence of finited precision) and on the time domain (digitalization samples the analog input at specific time intervals, whilst the analog input itself is a continuous wave).

That said, whether that is noticeable if the sampling rate and bits per sample are high enough is a whole different thing.

Ultra high frequency sounds might be missing or mangled at a 44.7 kHz sampling rather (a pretty standard one and used in CDs) but that should only be noticeable to people who can hear sounds above 22.35kHz (who are rare since people usually only hear sounds up to around 20kHz, the oldest the person the worse it gets) and maybe a sharp ear can spot the error in sampling at 24 bit, even though its miniscule (1/2^24 of the sampling range assuming the sampling has a linear distribution of values) but its quite unlikely.

That said, some kinds of trickery and processing used to make "more sound" (in the sense of how most people perceive the sound quality rather than strictly measured in Phsysics terms) fit in fewer bits or fewer samples per second in a way that most people don't notice might be noticeable for some people.

Remember most of what we use now is anchored in work done way back when every byte counted, so a lot of the choices were dictated by things like "fit an LP as unencoded audio files - quite luterallyplain PCM, same as in Wav files - on the available data space of a CD" so it's not going to be ultra high quality fit for the people at the upper ends of human sound perception.

All this to say that FLAC encoded audio files do have losses versus analog, not because of the encoding itself but because Analog to Digital conversion is by its own nature a process were precision is lost even if done without any extra audio or data handling process that might distort the audio samples even further, plus generally the whole thing is done at sampling rates and data precision's fit for the average human rather than people at the upper end of the sound perception range.

Studies have shown that something as simple as being tall makes people be more likely to be looked towards as leaders.

Make nuke mad enough and nuke blows off.

I'm pretty sure the few survivors in the resulting wasteland would get bored pretty fast of making Non Credible Defense jokes about the waves of cockroaches trying to take over the World from humans.

Best not argue with nuke.

Yeah, but the way things are going soon it will be cheaper to buy a B-52 to live in than a house.

The Guardian absolutely is capitalist (neoliberal, even). Just go check back on their campaign against Corbyn (a leftwinger who won the Labour Party leadership from the New Labpour neoliberals some years ago) which included such memorable pieces of slander like calling a Jewish Holocaust Survivor an anti-semite because of him in a conference about Palestine comparing some of the actions of the government of Israel with those of the Nazis, this done in order to slander Corbyn by association since he was in the same panel in that conference.

Also you can merely go back a few months to see how The Guardian supported Israel well into their Genocide (though they seem to have stop doing it quite as eagerly in the last few months).

Last but not least they very openly support in British elections the Liberal Democrats (who are neoliberals) and the New Labour faction of the Labour Party (also neoliberals) and very often have pro-privatisation articles on UK subjects and are never for bringing things back into public ownership even when privatisation has failed miserable to give better services or lower prices.

I lived in Britain for over a decade and read The Guardian for most of it, so maybe The Guardian's political slant is clearer for those familiar with British Politics.

I do agree on The Intercept and Democracy Now! though.

Can't really speak for the others with any knowledge.