this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2024
323 points (97.6% liked)
Technology
59285 readers
4222 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Why would they need to know what a folder/directory is? It’s a remnant from meat space and was replaced by tagging and is being replaced by LLM search/AI.
Why wouldn’t they be able to upload it directly to canvas?
I really empathize with people that didn’t have to figure out how to rip a CD at 2x speed or take a class on card catalog systems. They skipped a lot of critical problem solving learning opportunities.
The directory remark is unrelated to the Canvas one. I guess they didn't have the app set up on their phone in that case.
Anyway, have directories been replaced? I'm having a hard time remembering any filesystem without directories. And we don't need to put AI in every fucking thing.
Gmail was the first to get mainstream support for a directory-less method of organizing.
Music, photo, video apps have no need for directories. Many phone apps have no need in general.
Even your documents folders. It’s easier for me to use search than to drill down through folders.
I actually use tags as directories in GMail. I can't find shit otherwise. (Tangent: just how shitty is the search in Outlook? I can never find anything unless labeled in advance.)
I agree for the apps. But then they shouldn't deal with files anyway. They should just access certain directories as permitted by the system, and those should also be exposed to the user.
Hard disagree on the documents (or anything else, really). One ends up emulating folders using tags anyway, and there's no real way of doing it in a platform-independent way. Also, searching can be very annoying in many cases. For my research, I end up working with the same files for a few weeks straight. It's much better if they're in a folder, rather than searching them every time.
You do you, though.
Google docs doesn’t really use folders, and neither does o365. Especially when in a mobile device. Sure you can use folders but it’s limiting compared to tags.
Directory hierarchies are absolutely not a remnant from meatspace. The world "folder" is, but IRL folders are a totally different beast because they're not nestable. Tags and searching serve useful purposes but they don't replace directory trees.
Folders are absolutely nestable.
The problem with virtual folders is you can’t have one document in multiple folders without causing chaos because of how limiting that hierarchy is. This is why tagging is better.
How does tagging deal with file locations and permissions?
Location is irrelevant and a legacy method of thought. Why would a digital file need to be held down to a single location? Sure, you could symlink it but that’s a crutch.
Tags can have permissions.
It’s all metadata.
Yeah I grok it I just have no idea how you are going to solve all the issues this involves. Like memory mapped I/O or air gapped networks where the file is in a physical location etc. it feels like you will just have to reinvent directory structure inside tags.
Dunno know, maybe make your own *nix that works this way and try to get attention to it.
The internet already runs on it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_storage
Tell me you've never used a filing cabinet...
For about a year I worked in a filing room. I saw a decent amount of filing methods.