71–80 of 144 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As the author I can assure you there’s a human behind these words. Interesting times me live in though, I find myself questioning what’s AI and what’s not often too and at the moment we’ve offloaded that responsibility to the good will of authors or platform policy which might have to change soon
As in, you used 0 AI to write or edit this text? Or some AI? I’d like to calibrate myself.
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Yes, this! Please label AI generated content. Pull request written by an AI? Label it as ai generated. Blog post? Article generated with AI? Say so! It’s ok to use AI models. Especially if English is your second language. But put a disclaimer in. Don’t make the reader guess.
Eg:
> This content was partially generated by chatgpt
Or
> Blog post text written entirely by human hand, code examples by Claude code
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.
Filesystems have a property that changes preserve locality. A change made to one branch of the tree doesn't affect other branches (except for links). Databases lack this property: any UPDATE or DELETE can potentially affect any row depending on the condition. This makes them powerful but also scary. I don't want that every time I delete a file it potentially does a rm -rf / if I mistype the query. The best compromise…
So often we want to look up 'the last file I printed' or 'that message I got from Bob'. Instead of just creating that lookup, we have to go spelunking.
Hell, every major app creates it's own abstractions because the OS/Filesystem doesn't have anything useful. Email systems organize messages and tags; document editors have collections of document aspects they store in a structured blob. Instead of asking the OS to do that.
Not knocking the article in any way but from the headline I was expecting - perhaps hoping - this would be about some innovation in filesystems research like it was the 90's again. That's not what this is. It's about how filesystems as they are (and have been for decades) are proving to be powerful tools for LLMs/agents.
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…
All good.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Filepath is just unique name that model can identify easily and understand grouping. Uuid solves nothing but requires another mapping from file to short description.
You can have several versions of the same set of data object at once - an entire source set for a build, all the names duplicate but tagged with 'revision' so they can be distinguished.
Hard to do that without a UUID at root, to use for unique identification of the particular 'particle' of the particular data set.
Not knocking the article in any way but from the headline I was expecting - perhaps hoping - this would be about some innovation in filesystems research like it was the 90's again. That's not what this is. It's about how filesystems as they are (and have been for decades) are proving to be powerful tools for LLMs/agents.
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.
NTFS has a database, the MFT. It can index attributes, such as file names, which are a b+tree. A file's $DATA is also placed into the MFT, unless it doesn't fit, then NTFS allocates virtual cluster numbers (more MFT attributes) which point to the on-disk data structure of the file. All files are represented in a table with rows and columns. "Directories" simply have a special "directory = true" attribute in a row (si…