Exactly. What is the information that you need to preserve. When you think of this, the notion of lossy compression becomes much more understandable from a huma

Exactly. What is the information that you need to preserve. When you think of this, the notion of lossy compression becomes much more understandable from a human+computer perspective. Another way to view the problem of compression is a quest to lower to kolmogrov complexity of the program that needs to run to generate the output that “represents” the original work “faithfully”. It is true that for lossless compression there are constraints on the size of the input and the size of the compressed artifact+decoder, but I believe for lossy compression, the fourth element is the perceptive capabilities (or preferences) of human minds.