31–40 of 150 posts
The idea that filesystems are not just a flavor of database management systems was always a mistake. Maybe with micro-kernels we'll finally fix this.
1. Distributed filesystems do often use databases for metadata (FoundationDB for 3FS being a recent example)
2. Using a B+ tree for metadata is not much different from having a sorted index
3. Filesystems are a common enough usecase that skipping the abstraction complexity to co-optimize the stack is warranted
I’ve found that starting with a plain old filesystem often outperforms fancy services - just as the Unix philosophy (“everything is a file” [1]) has preached for decades [2]. When BigQuery was still in alpha I had to ingest ~15 billion HTTP requests a day (headers, bodies, and metadata). None of the official tooling was ready, so I wrote a tiny bash script that: 1. uploaded the raw logs to Cloud Storage, and 2. track…
I’ve found that starting with a plain old filesystem often outperforms fancy services - just as the Unix philosophy (“everything is a file” [1]) has preached for decades [2]. When BigQuery was still in alpha I had to ingest ~15 billion HTTP requests a day (headers, bodies, and metadata). None of the official tooling was ready, so I wrote a tiny bash script that: 1. uploaded the raw logs to Cloud Storage, and 2. track…
I’ve found that starting with a plain old filesystem often outperforms fancy services - just as the Unix philosophy (“everything is a file” [1]) has preached for decades [2]. When BigQuery was still in alpha I had to ingest ~15 billion HTTP requests a day (headers, bodies, and metadata). None of the official tooling was ready, so I wrote a tiny bash script that: 1. uploaded the raw logs to Cloud Storage, and 2. track…
If VectorVFS obscures retrieval logic behind opaque embeddings, how do users debug why a file surfaced—or worse, why one didn’t?
Does VectorVFS do retrieval, or store embeddings in EXT4?
Is retrieval logic obscured by VectorVFS?
If VectorVFS did retrieval with non-opaque embeddings, how would one debug why a file surfaced?
Fun idea storing embeddings in inodes! Very clever! I want to point out that this isn’t suitable for any kind of actual things you’d use a vector database for. There’s no notion of a search index. It’s always a O(N) linear search through all of your files: https://github.com/perone/vectorvfs/blob/main/vectorvfs/cli.... Still, fun idea :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every single time this has been tried it has gone wrong, but sure. Almost all of the operations done on actual filesystems are not database like, they are close to the underlying hardware for practical reasons. If you want a database view, add one in an upper layer.
BeOS got it right with BeFS. An Email client was just a folder. MP3s could be sorted and filtered in the file system. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12309686
That obviously has a lot of interesting use cases, but my first assumption was that this could be used to quickly/easily search your filesystem with some prompt like "Play the video from last month where we went camping and saw a flock of turkeys". But that would require having an actual vector DB running on your system which you could use to quickly look up files using an embedding of your query, no?
I’ve found that starting with a plain old filesystem often outperforms fancy services - just as the Unix philosophy (“everything is a file” [1]) has preached for decades [2]. When BigQuery was still in alpha I had to ingest ~15 billion HTTP requests a day (headers, bodies, and metadata). None of the official tooling was ready, so I wrote a tiny bash script that: 1. uploaded the raw logs to Cloud Storage, and 2. track…
If I understand correctly, this is attaching metadata to files in a format that LLMs (or any tool that can understand the semantic embedding vector) can leverage to understand what a file is without having to actually read the contents of the file. That obviously has a lot of interesting use cases, but my first assumption was that this could be used to quickly/easily search your filesystem with some prompt like "Play…