For me it's the opposite. Lossy ones (the ones that seem to maintain quality while lowering size by a lot) are magic to me but lossless is understandable.

What do you mean "treat this image as a wave and do an inverse Fourier transform on it in order to discard the high frequency low amplitude noise". wtf? Straight up magic.

[–] LegoBrickOnFire@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I guess there are two kinds of magic. There is the magic of Fourrier which is lossy with funny math. But it is understandable that one can get higher compression ratios when it's lossy. But I find it even more magic that we can still find better ways to encode images losslessly. I would have thought we had already long found the optimal way

[–] LeFantome@programming.dev 1 points 6 days ago

Look at everyday things that occasionally improve. We have probably not found the optimal way for almost anything.

Most of us just are not smart enough to find a better way.