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Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

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Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#121

Post by zozbot234 »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #120
mieubrisse wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm building an agent orchestrator (plug: https://github.com/mieubrisse/agenc ) and asked Claude what prior art exists. It pulled back Plan 9, and I was shocked: this is exactly what we need today, as I'm convinced we need to think about minimizing agent permissions the exact same way companies do. Plan 9 was just too early.

It was too dogmatic. Lowest common denominator meant APIs had to shove square pegs through round holes. Unix had already partially gone down that path and stopped. IMO with good reason. Then again, perhaps in this era of ever expanding storage and compute, maybe someone can make it work even better?

There's nothing "dogmatic" about containerization and providing services through userspace (IPC that's modeled as interaction with custom filesystem trees) rather than bespoke syscalls whenever feasible, which are basically the foundations of the plan9 approach. We do strive to do both in modern systems, but the approach to the problem space is clumsily bolted over the original system interfaces, and becomes overly complicated rather than elegant.

Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#122

Post by zozbot234 »

andai wrote: post #99
packetlost wrote: post #62

We once again discover that Plan9 and UNIX were right. The most powerful, lowest common denominator interface is text files exposed over a file system. Now to get back to making 9p2026. The article gets some fundamentals completely wrong though: file systems are full graphs, not strict trees and are definitely not acyclic

So what are Plan 9's killer features, and can they be bolted on with FUSE or is there a deeper magic at play?

The deeper magic is that the kernel interface is completely rewritten compared to *nix or even Linux. Most programs in plan9 are expected to issue requests through userspace-provided services, not bespoke syscalls.

Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#123

Post by jl6 »

Files are a fundamental freedom because they enable users to have custody of data, thus enabling ultimate sovereignty of confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

We should recognize files as an essential pillar of digital liberty, on par with FOSS licensing.

Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#124

Post by Dylan16807 »

ciupicri wrote: post #26
TacticalCoder wrote: post #6

As TFA basically says: files on a filesystem is a DB. Just a very crude one. There aren't nice indexes for a variety of things. "Views" are not really there (arguably you can create different views with links but it's, once again, very crude). But it's definitely a DB, represented as a tree indeed as TFA mentions. My life's data, including all the official stuff (bank statements, notary acts, statements made to the p…

Why Blake3 and not say XXH3 64/128 bits ( https://xxhash.com/ )?

The full hash will never have collisions, while still being way faster than you need for filesystem purposes.

Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#125

Post by zbyforgotpass »

Files work as long as you can find them. This means search and/or indexes - at some scale they start breaking. The question is: how big your agent operated knowledge base needs to be?

Files are practical now - but I think we should more analyze this from first principles. Here is my attempt at that: https://zby.github.io/commonplace/notes/a-good-agentic-kb-ma... (just entry point - the whole kb is about this).

Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#126

Post by hrmtst93837 »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #6

As TFA basically says: files on a filesystem is a DB. Just a very crude one. There aren't nice indexes for a variety of things. "Views" are not really there (arguably you can create different views with links but it's, once again, very crude). But it's definitely a DB, represented as a tree indeed as TFA mentions. My life's data, including all the official stuff (bank statements, notary acts, statements made to the p…

[flagged]

Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#127

Post by prmph »

jl6 wrote: post #123

Files are a fundamental freedom because they enable users to have custody of data, thus enabling ultimate sovereignty of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. We should recognize files as an essential pillar of digital liberty, on par with FOSS licensing.

Indeed, that's why it bothers me that major technology vendors, especially Apple, would like to do away with the very concept of files, at least for non-power users.

They make it seem like data is bound up with apps, and should not have an independent existence. They also make it hard to import/export data, except via backups, which a very crude way of taking control of your personal data.

I'm working on a tool to work around these issues to the extent possible, allowing users to extract their information, as granular files, from device backups into their personal digital library. For immutable data, archival is ok, but for editable data, the biggest challenge is how to make the extracted data "live", i.e., available and editable on the devices again, preferably in the same apps used to create them. There seems to be no good solutions.

Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#128

Post by prmph »

packetlost wrote: post #111
whartung wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know some systems leverage the modern file meta data (extended attributes), but it's clearly not successful enough that folks can use them for an application like this. Ostensibly, things like MacOS Spotlight can bring real utility and value to the file system, and extended attributes through the sidecar indexing, etc. But Spotlight is infamous for its unreliability. The other issue with file systems is simply that…

Yeah, IMO extended metadata attributes are fine for caching data that can be recovered via other means but generally violate the principal of least surprise. For them to be successful a standardized transparent container format or something would be necessary, but at that point the FS abstraction is leaking.

What about using the file name itself as the metadata storage?

Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#129

Post by jl6 »

prmph wrote: post #127
jl6 wrote: post #123

Files are a fundamental freedom because they enable users to have custody of data, thus enabling ultimate sovereignty of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. We should recognize files as an essential pillar of digital liberty, on par with FOSS licensing.

Indeed, that's why it bothers me that major technology vendors, especially Apple, would like to do away with the very concept of files, at least for non-power users. They make it seem like data is bound up with apps, and should not have an independent existence. They also make it hard to import/export data, except via backups, which a very crude way of taking control of your personal data. I'm working on a tool to wo…

Apple keep their casual users on a short leash, but for those willing to tinker, iOS device backups are actually quite good for that archive use case, as you can extract most of your important data in the form of SQLite database files. The whole process is high friction and very user-unfriendly, and open documentation of these databases is lacking, but the fact that this route still exists at all is encouraging (in the sense that all hope is not yet lost). They could very easily have hidden all these files behind an Apple-managed encryption key. On the other hand, this niche affordance may serve to placate the power users who would be most likely to cause noise and revolt if our personal needs were not met. On the gripping hand, the device backup mechanism via iTunes feels so ancient that they probably just haven’t thought about it.

Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#130

Post by anthk »

packetlost wrote: post #102
andai wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what are Plan 9's killer features, and can they be bolted on with FUSE or is there a deeper magic at play?

Plan9 doesn't really have a single killer feature beyond 9P and the universal consistency and simplicity of its APIs. It has a very clean syscall interface and takes "everything is a file" to its logical conclusion and does it well (IMO). Pretty much everything is a file(system) and it's all accessed via the 9P protocol. You could sorta bolt these features on with FUSE, but to see real benefits you'd want something c…

FUSE is dog slow and it's a bad hack compared to mount anything anywhere in 9front without root permissions.

Also the API is much simpler than POSIX.

Hurd with settrans made things much easier than the classical Unix, but it's still in alpha and it still has to implement POSIX for convenience.

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