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Your File System Is Already A Graph Database

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Re: Your File System Is Already A Graph Database

#51

Post by embedding-shape »

weitendorf wrote: post #50
embedding-shape wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think maybe you're misunderstanding the issue here. I have loads of data, but I'm unwilling to send it to 3rd parties, so that leaves me with gathering/generating the training data locally, but none of the models are good/strong enough for that today. I'd love to "send them to go looking for stuff for you", but local models aren't great at this today, even with beefy hardware, and since that's about my only option,…

Right, that's exactly the situation I'm in too and "send them to go looking for stuff for you" without it going off the rails is the problem we've been working on. Basically you need a squad of specialized models to do this in a mostly-structured way that ends up looking kind of like a crawling or scraping/search operation. I can share a stack of about 5-6 that are working for us directly if you want, I want to keep…

> that ends up looking kind of like a crawling or scraping/search operation

Sure, but what I'm talking about is that the current SOTA models are terrible even for specialized small use cases like what you describe, so you can't just throw a local modal on that task and get useful sessions out of them that you can use for fine-tuning. If you want distilled data or similar, you (obviously) need to use a better model, but currently there is none that provides the privacy-guarantees I need, as described earlier.

All of those things come once you have something suitable for the individual pieces, but I'm trying to say that none of the current local models come close to solving the individual pieces, so all that other stuff is just distraction before you have that in place.

Re: Your File System Is Already A Graph Database

#52

Post by weitendorf »

embedding-shape wrote: post #51
weitendorf wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, that's exactly the situation I'm in too and "send them to go looking for stuff for you" without it going off the rails is the problem we've been working on. Basically you need a squad of specialized models to do this in a mostly-structured way that ends up looking kind of like a crawling or scraping/search operation. I can share a stack of about 5-6 that are working for us directly if you want, I want to keep…

> that ends up looking kind of like a crawling or scraping/search operation Sure, but what I'm talking about is that the current SOTA models are terrible even for specialized small use cases like what you describe, so you can't just throw a local modal on that task and get useful sessions out of them that you can use for fine-tuning. If you want distilled data or similar, you (obviously) need to use a better model, b…

Understood. I guess I'm saying "soon" but definitely agreed its not "now" yet. I will say though, with 96GB, in a couple months you're going to be able to hold tons of Gemma 4 LoRa "specialists" in-memory at the same time and I really think it will feel like a whole new world once these are all getting trained and shared and adapted en-masse. And also, you could set up personal traces now if you want. Nobody can make you, but in its laziest form it can be literally just taking screenshots of your screen periodically as you work, and that'll have applications soon

Re: Your File System Is Already A Graph Database

#53

Post by gchamonlive »

embedding-shape wrote: post #7

I've been playing around with the same, but trying to use local models as my Obsidian vault obviously contain a bunch of private things I'm not willing to share with for-profit companies, but I have yet to find any model that comes close to working out as well as just codex or cc with the small models, even with 96GB of VRAM to play around with. I've started to think about maybe a fine-tuned model is needed, specific…

Models are lossy, so fine-tune can only take you so far with small models. What we need is reasonably capable local models with a huge context window and a method to make efficient use of token and cram as much info as possible in the context before degrading the output quality.

Re: Your File System Is Already A Graph Database

#54

Post by vinaigrette »

stared wrote: post #13

Filesystem is a tree - a particular, constrained graph. Advanced topics usually require a lot of interconnections. Maybe it is why mind maps never spoke to me. I felt that a tree structure (or even - planar graphs) were not enough to cover any sufficiently complex topic.

Isn't text a basic linear structure that can cover sufficiently complex topics ?

Re: Your File System Is Already A Graph Database

#55

Post by embedding-shape »

weitendorf wrote: post #52
embedding-shape wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that ends up looking kind of like a crawling or scraping/search operation Sure, but what I'm talking about is that the current SOTA models are terrible even for specialized small use cases like what you describe, so you can't just throw a local modal on that task and get useful sessions out of them that you can use for fine-tuning. If you want distilled data or similar, you (obviously) need to use a better model, b…

Understood. I guess I'm saying "soon" but definitely agreed its not "now" yet. I will say though, with 96GB, in a couple months you're going to be able to hold tons of Gemma 4 LoRa "specialists" in-memory at the same time and I really think it will feel like a whole new world once these are all getting trained and shared and adapted en-masse. And also, you could set up personal traces now if you want. Nobody can make…

> And also, you could set up personal traces now if you want. Nobody can make you, but in its laziest form it can be literally just

But again, you're missing my point :) I cannot, since the models I could generate useful traces from are run by platforms I'm not willing to hand over very private data to, and local models that I could use I cannot get useful traces from.

And I'm not holding out hope for agent orchestration, people haven't even figured out how to reliably get high quality results from agent yet, even less so with a fleet of them. Better to realistically tamper your expectations a bit :)

Re: Your File System Is Already A Graph Database

#57

Post by stared »

vinaigrette wrote: post #54
stared wrote: post #13

Filesystem is a tree - a particular, constrained graph. Advanced topics usually require a lot of interconnections. Maybe it is why mind maps never spoke to me. I felt that a tree structure (or even - planar graphs) were not enough to cover any sufficiently complex topic.

Isn't text a basic linear structure that can cover sufficiently complex topics ?

Yes. And precisely for this reason reading a dictionary is not a way of learning a language.

Re: Your File System Is Already A Graph Database

#58

Post by iwontberude »

kenforthewin wrote: post #43

I keep harping on this, but the question is not "can you use your filesystem as a graph database" - of course you can - but whether this performs better or worse than a vector database approach, especially at scale. The premise of Atomic, the knowledge base project I'm currently working on, is that there is still significant value in vectors, even in an agentic context. https://github.com/kenforthewin/atomic

Oh neat! Whenever I was working on RAG proof of concepts vector databases seemed to generate noisiest outputs that happened to include my information from my chunks but it was unable to draw reasonable contextual associations. I swap RAG out with a web search tool, all of a sudden the quality goes way up. Is RAG ever going to be easier to hold or should lay people like me just stay moving on?

Re: Your File System Is Already A Graph Database

#59

Post by aleksiy123 »

I’ve been thinking about this in a couple of contexts and pretty much how I’ve come to think about it.

Folders give you hierarchical categories.

You still want tags for horizontal grouping. And links and references for precise edges.

But that gives you a really nice foundation that should get you pretty damn far.

I also now am telling the llm to add a summary as the first section of the file is longer.

Re: Your File System Is Already A Graph Database

#60

Post by pyinstallwoes »

kenforthewin wrote: post #43

I keep harping on this, but the question is not "can you use your filesystem as a graph database" - of course you can - but whether this performs better or worse than a vector database approach, especially at scale. The premise of Atomic, the knowledge base project I'm currently working on, is that there is still significant value in vectors, even in an agentic context. https://github.com/kenforthewin/atomic

Cool project.
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