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Computer Files Are Going Extinct

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Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#371

Post by z3t4 »

eecc wrote: post #108
cproctor wrote: post #74

To a computer science teacher, this feels like trying to walk up a down escalator. First-year CS students (middle school or high school) with experience using Apple products don't have a concept of a filesystem. The shift to auto-saving documents also corrodes the intuition that files get stored on disk in some non-magical way. In the same way that it's now easier to teach networking and graph theory because youth ex…

Frankly, we’ve been fantasizing of moving away from the file-system-as-tree abstraction since forever, wanting to embrace a metadata rich database approach. Can’t happen soon enough imho

Almost all file systems have metadata. Its up to the apps what metadata to store and display. Music files have artist, album etc. photos have location, camera settings etc. The tree structure is just a feature. You can for example make one file appear in many folders. User rights are often linked to the tree structure, which is very useful.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#372

Post by mpweiher »

pm90 wrote: post #184
the_pwner224 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pretend to promote CS in college Potentially because that means in 5-20 years they'll have a much bigger pool of labor available? They've already done illegal market-manipulating collusion which resulted in billions of dollars of salaries not being paid: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19666545 ; in the end they got hit with fines for a few million bucks and some developers got a paycheck for a few thousand bu…

I think you're reading too much into conspiracy theories. That can be fun and all but I can assure you these things are emergent and not some concerted effort to keep wages lower. The Steve Jobs market manipulation was def a dick move, but.. well, its Steve Jobs. There will be other such efforts too, but that alone doesn't indicate the kind of concerted market manipulation that you think exists. The emphasis on codin…

> The Steve Jobs market manipulation

It wasn't "Steve Jobs", it was most/all of the tech giants colluding.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#373

Post by singingfish »

robocat wrote: post #323
smolder wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's definitely a mix of good and bad as language changes. Losing the word "meme" to the colloquial definition is a loss and a massive disappointment to me, because I think the gene analogy is insightful. When I talk to people about memes-as-in-memetics they're bound to get confused or even disbelieve me that it had any other meaning. I've been accused of man-splaining in situations where I am legitimately being h…

> Losing the word "meme" to the colloquial definition is a loss and a massive disappointment to me I love "The Selfish Gene", but it make me happy that memes and virality are modern metaphors for chunks of thought transmitted by wet symbolic processors. I believe that children now bellyfeel the meanings which is fantastic, even if they don't know the exact sense. > Literally should mean literally, and only literally…

The selfish gene is a great book. I read it when it was about 15 and it really resonated with me.

Except the last chapter about f$%#ing memes. Hated it. It was like taking the core idea of the book and providing a cumbersome over-extended metaphor about ideas. So the colloquial meme is just as bad because it constantly reminds me of the original shit-house idea.

Climbing Mount Improbable was good, but I can't rate Dawkins' later work. The Extended Phenotype I found impenetrable, and I've tried reading it a few times. The God stuff ... omg, just please stop shouting about your Daddy issues.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#374

Post by mpweiher »

The reports of the death of the file(system) are grossly exaggerated.

And it's not been for lack of trying.

While I share many of the author's misgivings, files are actually making a bit of a comeback. After many years of trying to void the very idea of a file, Apple was essentially forced to introduce the Files app for iOS and introduce mass-storage support for (some) iPads. This is a good sign.

The anti-file movement has also been very strong and vocal in the programming world, where many claim that many if not all of our programming problems would go away if only we put our code in databases, or (Smalltalk) images instead. Yet the files, they persist.

That doesn't mean that files, or hierarchical filesystems, are perfect. However, whatever the problems ("Unititled 54.txt", anyone?), the proposed cures for what ails files invariably appear to be worse than the symptoms. And almost inevitably, we have to bring back or reinvent the very same concepts that we gleefully got rid of. That's a resilient concept! One that is apparently useful and pertinent at a somewhat deeper level than we fully understand.

So how about we stop trying to "get rid of files", but instead see if we cannot improve the concept and the mechanism(s) to fix the problems.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#375

Post by htfu »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #369
htfu wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright, you're talking philosophy and me more about practical usage. But why do you think apps own CSV any more in Files than in Finder? That's where a lot of my confusion stems. Your view of x-callback seems off too, it's a way for apps to expose functionality in a generic way, so the opposite from being dependent on the relationship between any specific app vendors. Since there are many apps that let you glue toge…

> Alright, you're talking philosophy and me more about practical usage. It's very practical. I know we're talking Apple now, but to give an example of a thing that happened to me last week: I couldn't send my wife a PDF with transaction details via e-mail "on the go", from my Android phone, because there was no chain of sharing that would link my bank's app and Fastmail. I could open (not save, just open) a PDF from…

Wow, peculiar. But ties into my point - there's now "Save to Files" _everywhere_ on iOS (even where it makes little sense) and yeah def a pain when apps that can clearly handle a filetype haven't registered as a target for it.

BUT prior workaround was as simple as a basic Workflow share action accepting any input then giving a list of options - Dropbox/Drive, push to desktop over SSH, try "open with" (? can't remember) which for some reason would have a slightly different list of targets... So, file manager is good, obviously, but you weren't crippled before it.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#376

Post by gyuserbti »

nostrademons wrote: post #96
unqueued wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a very similar anecdote. I had a long conversation with a friend who is a high school science teacher. She told me that computer literacy has plummeted in the last ten years. She has her students go into the field and collect data in the form of photos, spreadsheets, and typed reports. She wants students to bundle these files in zip files, and email them to her. Students have no idea how to do this. Some of th…

I'm curious if this is actually computer literacy plummeting or if it's a wider population of students being expected to understand computers. When I was in high school the vast majority of my peers understood how to bundle up a bunch of photos, documents, etc. into a zip file and e-mail them. This is because my peers were nerds, and we were excited about this new computer technology and eager to learn everything we…

Eh as a college professor something has changed, not just the population. My experiences parallel the GP. I noticed it first with filename conventions; it rapidly changed from there.

This is in the same population of students. I noticed basically that IO tasks were eating up an increasingly big fraction of effort and time early on in courses, reflecting problems that didn't exist previously.

This seems to be for the reasons stated, that file IO stuff is being abstracted away. What used to be typical necessary computer fluency is now "low level" for many.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#377

Post by whyleyc »

"Files are dead" is an oft-quoted meme, but they aren't going away anytime soon.

I wrote a piece offering a counterpoint to this view five years ago (in response to a similar article by Fred Wilson) and I think most of the points still hold true today:

https://blog.zamzar.com/2015/01/02/why-fred-wilson-is-wrong-...

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#378

Post by thrower123 »

I find myself very frustrated using newer versions of the Microsoft Office suite. When I want to save a file, I just want the tried-and-true Windows file dialog popped up, but instead I have to click around and avoid going into weird Onedrive dialogs.

I save everything to OneDrive anyway, but I'm a not-so-old fogey that is more comfortable using the filesystem myself, rather than crummy layers stuck on top of it.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#379

Post by perl4ever »

XorNot wrote: post #318
nostrademons wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My dad taught me parts of an engine, along with how to service them, when I was in elementary school (mid-80s). I was on a big "learn how cars work" kick at the time, so he figured he'd indulge me and maybe teach a few practical skills at the same time. I've owned my car for 10 years now, and the total number of times I have had to change my oil, air filter, spark plug, or any other part of the engine is zero . My A1…

It's also just...literally not worth your time to do anything else. Servicing your own car rapidly gets into needing a ton of tools, takes a bunch of time, and makes you no money while taking away your free time. If you genuinely enjoy the process, and it is cathartic and serves the function free time and leisure needs to in your life, then fantastic. But otherwise it's a false economy.

It can be difficult bordering on impossible to find a trustworthy independent mechanic. Even an honest one is not necessarily going to be able to be as thorough and have the attention to detail that the owner might. And even though they are faster, they also have to spend less time than might be optimal.

I have a 30 year old car and there are one or two specialists in my city that people recommend. One of them told me I needed an engine rebuild due to an oil leak, when it was actually a specific seal that was relatively minor to replace, and the other correctly diagnosed the problem, and apparently fixed it for a reasonable price, but insisted the oil I was using was too thin, and when I deferred to their expertise, they put an even thinner oil in (I found out later) and lied about it...maybe because they thought I would come back with more leaks...so the only local mechanic I currently trust is a dealer that will work on classic cars and they charge a ridiculous amount.

So, comparing cost and expertise and tools is kind of missing the point. I would always take a new or newish car to a dealer. I have no idea how to find a decent independent mechanic, and I've tried quite a few over the years. If it takes me several times as long to do something, it doesn't really matter if that's my only practical way to get it done right.

Re: Computer Files Are Going Extinct

#380

Post by pasabagi »

beerandt wrote: post #330
pasabagi wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I frequently write to my grandma, who is fairly well-educated, and her writing is technically good. It is, however, bad writing. It's a pattern I've noticed quite a lot with older people. They write perfectly-formed garbage. I think the amount of time people spend writing today is greater than at any time in history, and I think it shows. That's my intuition. But I'd also note, your points (1, 3 for example) contradi…

Are you sure it's not just generational misunderstanding? A lot of people describe dialogue from early movies in a similar way, just because it's difficult to understand. Especially the early noir stuff. They're speaking perfect English, but it might as well be a foreign language to most English speakers today.

Pretty sure. I read a lot, a lot of which is old. I enjoy a wide variety of writing styles.
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