4 ms·

The problem with hierarchical filesystems is people who can't organize in a hierarchical manner, regardless of presence or absence of excuse or responsibility,

by VLM 11y ago

The problem with hierarchical filesystems is people who can't organize in a hierarchical manner, regardless of presence or absence of excuse or responsibility, make a mess of size X. And likewise the problem with tagged data is likewise the people who can't organize tags is arguably an equal or larger group and they end up with a huge steaming mess, although its of size 1000 times X especially WRT human effort required to clean up and curate. The classic analogy is you unleash genealogists on a village cemetery and have them produce a family tree and the output is actually useful information. Unleash the same team and ask them to digitally tag tombstones, and you just get a pile of useless, error filled data, packed with duplicates and weird capitalization issues. This is a classic "information vs data" misunderstanding. Another problem with hierarchical vs tagged is we have somewhat obtuse yet usable set of tools to handle truly immense spammy hierarchical filesystems, but strategies for handling and scaling tagged filesystems usually are hand waved away with "it'll never happen" or "we'll sprinkle magic AI dust on it, then it'll evaporate away". A classic "make the simple easier, while making the more difficult impossible". No thanks. Much as there's nothing really new under the sun in IT, a generation or two ago this was "sure sendmail configuration is complicated, but all it needs is a GUI because in the small subset of problem domains that are a match for GUIs and people with a problem simple enough to be handled in a GUI, it works well, therefore its perfect for everyone to do everything in" Also data typing is just a subset of tagging. Or rephrased a type is a very poorly implemented limited single tag. Ditto the above with a "decent shell language" again we're dealing with people who can't handle paper calendars without a book telling them how (GTD, 42 folders, etc). They're just going to mess things up quicker with automation, while people who can handle the cognitive challenge will likewise jump into org mode or crontab without any serious effort on their part... You "could" write a noob gui for a nuclear reactor, or a UI for even newborn babies to use matches, but you probably shouldn't. As a meta observation this is a classic "future is already here just unevenly distributed" problem, I use databases and git all the time. However see the comment about the GUI for sendmail... Much like some people are unqualified to be handed an acetylene cutting torch or a beryllium-Pu neutron source, some people should not be handed relational DBs or KV stores or version control, and if they had the background to understand and safely use those tools, the existing tools aren't really all that hard to use for folks of adequate cognitive level.

jtlien1 11y ago
Cool stuff. We've come a long way since I ran around the office at night upgrading everyone from a version of Windows that didn't allow a user to type Format C: return when they meant Format A: (floppy disk), and immediately reformatted their hard disk by mistake. Progress is being made but it seems slow at times.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
To your last part - I have a problem with the current software trend that's present both in web and mobile. Everything is being dumbed down, so that it can be used from the get-go. It is stupid. The only way you can make someone an expert of a new tool in 15 seconds is by making the tool so simple that it's completely useless. There's a reason you get a few dozen hours of training before you are allowed to drive a car around. Or fly a plane. If you want to have a simplified car UI, then one exists too - it's called a taxi. The reason of course is the competitive market pressure. The primary interest of a company is to sell the product, not for the product to be useful. And so most of current design effort is about making software easier to sell, not about making it actually useful. It's absurd to expect people to figure out by themselves how to use their file systems, databases or - yes - even their paper calendars. All of those are tools that require some learning to use effectively. We need to make people read manuals again, and stop expecting everything to be usable out of the box by an untrained monkey.
- toyg 11y ago
  >We need to make people read manuals again If you've ever read a technical manual, you're probably in the 1% of the population. People don't even read two-lines popups, and you expect them to read complicated manuals? What you really need is adaptive interfaces that grow in complexity as requirements expand, reliably detecting the newbie / power user / hacker progression. That's what works best. Hackers ridicule UIs that bury stuff under "Advanced" modes, but they're actually the best approach. Doing three (or four, or five) times the work, though, is no fun for developers, so we go from "you're a dumb user, be happy with limited options" to "you're a clever user, surely you can read a 1000-pages bible before launching a command", because building multiple interfaces for the same routines is boring.

by VLM 11y ago

jtlien1 11y ago

Cool stuff. We've come a long way since I ran around the office at night upgrading everyone from a version of Windows that didn't allow a user to type Format C: return when they meant Format A: (floppy disk), and immediately reformatted their hard disk by mistake. Progress is being made but it seems slow at times.

TeMPOraL 11y ago

To your last part - I have a problem with the current software trend that's present both in web and mobile. Everything is being dumbed down, so that it can be used from the get-go. It is stupid. The only way you can make someone an expert of a new tool in 15 seconds is by making the tool so simple that it's completely useless. There's a reason you get a few dozen hours of training before you are allowed to drive a car around. Or fly a plane. If you want to have a simplified car UI, then one exists too - it's called a taxi. The reason of course is the competitive market pressure. The primary interest of a company is to sell the product, not for the product to be useful. And so most of current design effort is about making software easier to sell, not about making it actually useful. It's absurd to expect people to figure out by themselves how to use their file systems, databases or - yes - even their paper calendars. All of those are tools that require some learning to use effectively. We need to make people read manuals again, and stop expecting everything to be usable out of the box by an untrained monkey.

toyg 11y ago
>We need to make people read manuals again If you've ever read a technical manual, you're probably in the 1% of the population. People don't even read two-lines popups, and you expect them to read complicated manuals? What you really need is adaptive interfaces that grow in complexity as requirements expand, reliably detecting the newbie / power user / hacker progression. That's what works best. Hackers ridicule UIs that bury stuff under "Advanced" modes, but they're actually the best approach. Doing three (or four, or five) times the work, though, is no fun for developers, so we go from "you're a dumb user, be happy with limited options" to "you're a clever user, surely you can read a 1000-pages bible before launching a command", because building multiple interfaces for the same routines is boring.