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Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

madalitso.me

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Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#141

Post by packetlost »

prmph wrote: post #128
packetlost wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That works but has strict length limits and is visibly ugly. Fine for very limited cases I guess

Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#142

Post by jmathai »

prmph wrote: post #128
packetlost wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I have used this approach with exiftool to add custom tags for “album”.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/68284922

Here is my source file for it. It was so long ago I don’t recall all the details but you can retrieve this information using exif commands.

https://github.com/jmathai/elodie/blob/master/configs/ExifTo...

Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#143

Post by hbarka »

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.

I would add that it’s largely due to LLM’s extraordinary ability to infer. Natural plain language live in files and we no longer have to worry about structure. Legibility is the spec and anyone decent enough to be legible will write to a file. REPL away.
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