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Just to go into a bit more detail: 1) An auntie thought that dragging 100GB of music into her Dropbox meant that she could just leave on a trip and access her m

Just to go into a bit more detail: 1) An auntie thought that dragging 100GB of music into her Dropbox meant that she could just leave on a trip and access her music, without having to wait for it to sync. 2) An uncle didn't know how to access his late wife's photos from her iPad. Which cloud were they in? Were they only on her locked iPad? Who knows! 3) People making public YouTube videos to share private moments with family. (Pedos exploit this to find videos of children bathing) Have we really improved things? I find these new file abstractions we have created to be much more confusing. Old people understand the concept of physical media just fine. They know what a record or a roll of film is. And because of this phobia about educating users, we hide so much that they don't even know if their data has been synced, or if it is private.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
> Have we really improved things? I find these new file abstractions we have created to be much more confusing. We haven't, and here's why: a file system was one abstraction. A simple one, that made sense, and wasn't very far detached from actual implementation details. Which meant that weird black magic almost never leaked from underneath. What we have now, with the cloud and dumbed down software, is many mutually inconsistent and sometimes incompatible abstractions, all completely detached from the reality behind them, which means they have inconsistent corner cases that make no sense unless you know enough about software to be able to imagine what those abstractions are backed by. In the best tradition of commerce, we've helped people avoid having to learn a simple concept by introducing them to lots of "simplifying" lies.