61–70 of 144 posts
Notable mention: Plan 9 from Bell Labs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs
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.
The article gets some fundamentals completely wrong though: file systems are full graphs, not strict trees and are definitely not acyclic
Digression: a file system is a terrible abstraction. The ceremonial file tree, where branches are directories and you have to hang your file on a particular branch like a Christmas ornament. Relational is better. Hell, and kind of unique identifier would be nice. So many better ways to organize data stores.
nice, esp. liked - "our memories, our thoughts, our designs should outlive the software we used to create them"
Digression: a file system is a terrible abstraction. The ceremonial file tree, where branches are directories and you have to hang your file on a particular branch like a Christmas ornament. Relational is better. Hell, and kind of unique identifier would be nice. So many better ways to organize data stores.
I've been wondering this too: for us, UUIDs are super opaque. But for an agent, two UUIDs are distinct as day and night. Is the best filesystem just blob storage S3 style with good indexes, and a bit of context on where everything lives? One thing directories solve: they're great grouping mechanisms. "All the Q3 stuff lives in this directory" I bet we move towards a world where files are just UUIDs, then directory st…
Digression: a file system is a terrible abstraction. The ceremonial file tree, where branches are directories and you have to hang your file on a particular branch like a Christmas ornament. Relational is better. Hell, and kind of unique identifier would be nice. So many better ways to organize data stores.
All files are represented in a table with rows and columns. "Directories" simply have a special "directory = true" attribute in a row (simplified).
The hierarchy is for you, the human.
Like many file systems, NTFS also contains a log for recoverability/rollback purposes.
It's not quite relational but it doesn't make sense to be relational. Why would you need more than one 'table' to contain everything you need to know about a file? Microsoft experimented with WinFS, which wasn't a traditional file system (it was an MSSQL database with BLOB storage which sat ontop of a regular NTFS volume). Performance was bad and Skydrive replaced the need for it (in the view of MSFT).
Digression: a file system is a terrible abstraction. The ceremonial file tree, where branches are directories and you have to hang your file on a particular branch like a Christmas ornament. Relational is better. Hell, and kind of unique identifier would be nice. So many better ways to organize data stores.
The best compromise is what modern OSs have: a tree-like structure to store files but a database index on top for queries.
Production grade systems might be written by agents running on filesystem skills, but the production systems themselves will run on consistent and scalable data structures.
Meanwhile the UI of AI agents will almost certainly evolve away from desktop computers and toward audio/visual interfaces. An agent might get more context from a zoom call with you, once tone and body language can be used to increase the bandwidth between you.
I don't think this paradigm will last, or be what becomes the more common structure in the future. This will still suffers from conflicts of persona and objective, plus has the issue that individual apps will need protected file hierarchies to prevent malicious injections. I don't see this as a solution, just a deck chair shuffle. I've been researching and building with a different paradigm, an inversion of the tool…
I personally use a graph like format but organized like a simple text file, each node prefixed with [id] and inline referencing other nodes by [id], this works well with replace, diff, git and is navigable at larger scales without reading everything. Every time I start work I have the agent read it, and at the end update it. This ensures continuity over weeks and months of work. This is my take on file system as memory - make it a graph of nodes, but keep it simple - a flat text file, don't prescribe structure, just node size. It grows organically as needed, I once got one to 500 nodes.