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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

#31

Post by antonvs »

orsorna wrote: post #11
q3k wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone's trying to be the new thought leader enlightened technical essayist. So much fluff everywhere.

What's wild is that with a few minutes of manual editing it would give exponential return. For instance, a lead sentence in your section saying "here's why X" that was already described by your subheading is unnecessary and could have been wholly removed.

IME many people aren't very capable of editing their own work effectively. It's why "editor" exists as a profession.

Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#32

Post by bsenftner »

alexjplant wrote: post #27
bsenftner wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of early data driving approaches. Early CD based game consoles had memory constraints, which I sidestepped by writing the most ridiculous simple game engine: the game loop was all data driven, and "going somewhere new" in the game was simply triggering a disc read given a raw sector offset and the number of sectors. That read was then a repeated series of bytes to be written at the memory address given by…

Which games were these out of interest? I enjoy reading about game dev from the nascent era of 3D on home consoles (on the Saturn in particular) and would love to hear more.

Tiger Woods Golf PSX was one, RoadRash3D0 another. Dozens that were never popular too.

Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#34

Post by antonvs »

sethev wrote: post #12
tacitusarc wrote: post #7

[flagged]

LLMs were trained on stuff that people wrote. I get there are "tells", but don't really think people are as good at identifying AI generated text as they think they are...

Good chunks of the article don't trigger this for me, but I would bet money on the final paragraph involving AI:

> That's not a technical argument. It's a values argument. And it's one that the filesystem, for all its age and simplicity, is uniquely positioned to serve. Not because it's the best technology. But because it's the one technology that already belongs to you.

Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#35

Post by rzerowan »

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…

Were it more portable BeOS/Haiku's BeFS would have been a perrfect fit in this instance.Seeing that it is a filesystem thah has database properties via extended attributes[1] and indexing.

Were Haiku mor mature/stable would have been a nice fit for the OS for the LLM/Ai personal use cases.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/the-b...

Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#37

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

Can we bring back Plan9 architecture now? It had what was essentially MCP. You make a custom device driver, and anything really can be a file. Not only that, but you network them, so a file on local disk could be a display on a remote host (or whatever). Just tell the agent to read/write files and it doesn't need to figure out either MCP or tool calls.

Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#38

Post by alanbernstein »

jmathai wrote: post #14
korbatz wrote: post #5

I was having exact same observation, albeit from a bit diffrent perspective: SaaS. This is where as the code tends to be temporary and very domain specific, the data (files) must strive to be boring standards. The problem today is that we build specific, short-lived apps that lock data into formats only they can read. If you don't use universal formats, your system is fragile. We can still open JPEGs from 1995 becaus…

My 10+ year old photo management system [1] relies on the file system and EXIF as the source of truth for my entire photo library. It’s proven several times over that it’s the correct approach. Abstractions (formerly Google photos, currently Immich) should just be built on top - but these proprietary databases are only for convenience. For work, I’m having the same experience as the author and everything is just mark…

Thanks for sharing, I might have too much NIH syndrome to use it but I'd love to check it out.

Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#39

Post by coliveira »

heavyset_go wrote: post #33
tacitusarc wrote: post #7

[flagged]

[flagged]

I'm not a fan of AI and try to avoid it, but there is a difference from AI output published by someone knowledgeable and any other AI output that you run by yourself. If an expert looked at the result and found it to be ok, then you can have some assurance that it at least makes sense. Your own AI run doesn't mean anything, it could be 100% hallucination and a non-expert will buy it as truth.

Re: Files are the interface humans and agents interact with

#40

Post by whartung »

jmathai wrote: post #14
korbatz wrote: post #5

I was having exact same observation, albeit from a bit diffrent perspective: SaaS. This is where as the code tends to be temporary and very domain specific, the data (files) must strive to be boring standards. The problem today is that we build specific, short-lived apps that lock data into formats only they can read. If you don't use universal formats, your system is fragile. We can still open JPEGs from 1995 becaus…

My 10+ year old photo management system [1] relies on the file system and EXIF as the source of truth for my entire photo library. It’s proven several times over that it’s the correct approach. Abstractions (formerly Google photos, currently Immich) should just be built on top - but these proprietary databases are only for convenience. For work, I’m having the same experience as the author and everything is just mark…

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 the user (potentially) has "direct access" to them, in that they can readily move files in and up and around whimsically. The "structure" is laid bare for them to potentially interfere with, or, such as the case with the extended attributes, drag a file to a USB fob, and then copy it back -- inadvertently removing those attributes.

And thats how we end up with everything being stuffed into a SQLite DB.

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