LLMs 'drop data recoverably' via four mechanisms:
1. Residual stream (accumulate, never drop — workspace not compressor)
2. Superposition (pack N features into d<N, exact only when k-sparse)
3. Attention (soft retrieval, KV eviction = explicitly lossy)
4. Quantization (drop bits, recover approximately)
Law: recoverable ⟺ sparse/redundant. Same wall as every compression
branch. Dense/random data → recovery fails → entropy floor.
Pipeline connection:
- QR decomposition (O-AMMR) IS compressed sensing
- GW ringdown at 30dB: k=5 sparse, d=9 < RIP bound → lossy → 1.5x
- Order-2 PPM: 256 contexts packing 65K transitions → interference
on dense data → 3.088 b/B residual
- Mass number = honesty tag for what was kept vs lost (receipt)
Doctrine consistency: 'MassNumber = recoverability RECEIPT' confirmed.
LLM superposition = same mechanism, same RIP bound, same lossy floor.