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This works great if you are dealing with files, and are disciplined enough to organise them, but in other cases it turns into a big mess. My wife is not discipl

by fy20 5y ago

This works great if you are dealing with files, and are disciplined enough to organise them, but in other cases it turns into a big mess. My wife is not disciplined in that way so her computer has many layers deep of temporary and non-temporary documents on the Desktop, and Windows is constantly complaining there is no disk space. Her iPhone is the same because of podcasts and WhatsApp groups that auto-download media but never clear out the old stuff. The idea of fragments as TFA discusses really resonated with me, because most of my life is not in files. Giving a real example, a few months ago I read a blog post about some house planning software (I'm in the process of building a house), and later needed to refer back to it. I didn't save it anywhere (bookmark, save as PDF, Notion/Roam etc) because it didn't seem that important at the time. Its the same if you watch a YouTube video or read an article here. Sure you could take notes and save those notes in a text file that you can later search, but who has the time to that for every single piece of content they consume? Something like Spotlight is a good start, but it needs much more meta-data. All of your search and watch history needs to be there, but in a world that's becoming every more siloed (how do I record the photo a friend shared with me a few months ago on Facebook Messenger?) that's tricky.

tsimionescu 5y ago
The problem with magical solutions like the fragment idea is that they require magic to implement. Most software can't be bothered to integrate rich paste support (e.g. the way you can paste an Excel spreadsheet into a Word document), and we expect them to implement a complex API to define these fragments in a way where the OS/Spotlight could actually build up that history? This would be a massive undertaking requiring buy-in from every piece of software before it is even marginally usable. It is a pipe dream (and may even be a nightmare if it were realizable).
slightwinder 5y ago
How would one organize better, by flooding the system with even more data? Fragments would be no different than files, just smaller, yet still objects to organize away. Whats neccessary are tools which need to make use if them, and for this there were many many attempts over the years. Several more are still going even now. But all of them fail, because the basic problem still can't be solved by software, which is the responsability of the user to organize their stuff. > Its the same if you watch a YouTube video or read an article here. Sure you could take notes and save those notes in a text file that you can later search, but who has the time to that for every single piece of content they consume? Those already exist. The browser has them all in it's history. Google similar has many if them stored for their services. To some degree they use them for the user, but there is simply limited use for those informations.

by fy20 5y ago

tsimionescu 5y ago

The problem with magical solutions like the fragment idea is that they require magic to implement. Most software can't be bothered to integrate rich paste support (e.g. the way you can paste an Excel spreadsheet into a Word document), and we expect them to implement a complex API to define these fragments in a way where the OS/Spotlight could actually build up that history? This would be a massive undertaking requiring buy-in from every piece of software before it is even marginally usable. It is a pipe dream (and may even be a nightmare if it were realizable).

slightwinder 5y ago

How would one organize better, by flooding the system with even more data? Fragments would be no different than files, just smaller, yet still objects to organize away. Whats neccessary are tools which need to make use if them, and for this there were many many attempts over the years. Several more are still going even now. But all of them fail, because the basic problem still can't be solved by software, which is the responsability of the user to organize their stuff. > Its the same if you watch a YouTube video or read an article here. Sure you could take notes and save those notes in a text file that you can later search, but who has the time to that for every single piece of content they consume? Those already exist. The browser has them all in it's history. Google similar has many if them stored for their services. To some degree they use them for the user, but there is simply limited use for those informations.