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I don't consider folders spatial. At all. The only hard relation is hierarchical, and in a folder, there's no inherent order or spatial relationship. I find

I don't consider folders spatial. At all. The only hard relation is hierarchical, and in a folder, there's no inherent order or spatial relationship. I find it a pain to navigate. Actual spatial arrangement of data (and code) is something I've wanted to try for a long time now though. It's incredibly how you can take a map that shows the entire planet, and in a few seconds zoom in to the building you're in. And in a few more seconds, zoom in to the the house you lived in when as a child in a different town. I'd like to try build a similar map of personal data and code.

marginalia_nu 5y ago
It is a bit like the original Myst, which was made of a bunch of "places" that you could walk between along pre-defined paths. But that's also how we conceptualize space. One place is my bedroom, it connects to a space that's a corridor, which connects to a few spaces like the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room. In one of these spaces is a bookshelf, which contains a shelf for sci-fi, a few shelves worth of computer science and physics, then a few shelves of philosophy. I don't know the Cartesian coordinates of the particular books, but I know if I want to get a book, I walk the path connecting the bedroom, to the corridor, to the living room, and then look in the bookshelf. Then if I want to say read Dune, I know it's in the bottom-most shelf where I keep the sci-fi. That procedure conceptually translates to $ cd .. $ cd livingroom $ cd bookshelf $ cd bottom-shelf $ cat Dune
- foxfluff 5y ago
  Yeah these hierarchies are something that really slow me down. Was it arch/aarch64/dts? Arrgh no, arch/aarch64/boot/dts? No, actually arch/arm64/boot/dts.. Similarly, I couldn't decide on a hierarchy for my apartment. What's above living room? If root is your entire house, does that mean you can skip into any room without going through another? I can't go to the bedroom at the other end of my apartment without going through corridor..ish thing and the living room. I can't place room above the other because none contain the other. So I guess root is the whole house then. What does cd .. in my bedroom do? Do I get out of the apartment, so that I can enter another room? That's just weird. But ok, I'll take it: I can magically teleport out of my room and "into the apartment" and just warp into another room. Convenient, could we also flatten the bookshelf and bottom shelf into my apartment so that I can warp straight to them without first thinking about "livingroom"? Hierarchy begone :) And still there is no spatial relationship between items under livingroom. It's unorganized chaos. I have more than one bookshelf.. I can refer to the bookshelf on the left or bookshelf on the right but in a folder? It gets interesting when you try to draw the line between living room and kitchen since they're kinda one and the same but not really. They're spatially separated but it's hard to say where one ends and the other begins. On a map, where I can see continents, countries, cities, all at one glance. What shallow hierarchy there is, you can also see right through it; it's merely a guideline, not an obligation. You can see through multiple layers of hierarchy and your vision is not restricted to one branch. I can slide from Finland to Sweden near Tornio without having to first back up in some artificial hierarchy. I could do that even if Finland and Sweden were considered to be on different continents for some weird reason.
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    You do get into delineation problems when you investigate the conceptual notion of space, as well as overlapping concepts, but I don't really see this as a problem. The world as it is, and the world as we conceptualize it is not the same thing. Our conceptual view of the world does not play by the same rules as the things in themselves. Anyway, given a google maps view of the entire world, completely unstructured, Where's Waldo? You get exactly the same problem you had with arch/aarch64/dts, except now you don't even have a hierarchy to go on. He could be in Tokyo among 13.5 million people, he could be in Siberia, he could be on a boat on the ocean. Heck, he could be in a mine underground. He could be on the International Space Station.

marginalia_nu 5y ago

It is a bit like the original Myst, which was made of a bunch of "places" that you could walk between along pre-defined paths. But that's also how we conceptualize space. One place is my bedroom, it connects to a space that's a corridor, which connects to a few spaces like the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room. In one of these spaces is a bookshelf, which contains a shelf for sci-fi, a few shelves worth of computer science and physics, then a few shelves of philosophy. I don't know the Cartesian coordinates of the particular books, but I know if I want to get a book, I walk the path connecting the bedroom, to the corridor, to the living room, and then look in the bookshelf. Then if I want to say read Dune, I know it's in the bottom-most shelf where I keep the sci-fi. That procedure conceptually translates to $ cd .. $ cd livingroom $ cd bookshelf $ cd bottom-shelf $ cat Dune

foxfluff 5y ago
Yeah these hierarchies are something that really slow me down. Was it arch/aarch64/dts? Arrgh no, arch/aarch64/boot/dts? No, actually arch/arm64/boot/dts.. Similarly, I couldn't decide on a hierarchy for my apartment. What's above living room? If root is your entire house, does that mean you can skip into any room without going through another? I can't go to the bedroom at the other end of my apartment without going through corridor..ish thing and the living room. I can't place room above the other because none contain the other. So I guess root is the whole house then. What does cd .. in my bedroom do? Do I get out of the apartment, so that I can enter another room? That's just weird. But ok, I'll take it: I can magically teleport out of my room and "into the apartment" and just warp into another room. Convenient, could we also flatten the bookshelf and bottom shelf into my apartment so that I can warp straight to them without first thinking about "livingroom"? Hierarchy begone :) And still there is no spatial relationship between items under livingroom. It's unorganized chaos. I have more than one bookshelf.. I can refer to the bookshelf on the left or bookshelf on the right but in a folder? It gets interesting when you try to draw the line between living room and kitchen since they're kinda one and the same but not really. They're spatially separated but it's hard to say where one ends and the other begins. On a map, where I can see continents, countries, cities, all at one glance. What shallow hierarchy there is, you can also see right through it; it's merely a guideline, not an obligation. You can see through multiple layers of hierarchy and your vision is not restricted to one branch. I can slide from Finland to Sweden near Tornio without having to first back up in some artificial hierarchy. I could do that even if Finland and Sweden were considered to be on different continents for some weird reason.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  You do get into delineation problems when you investigate the conceptual notion of space, as well as overlapping concepts, but I don't really see this as a problem. The world as it is, and the world as we conceptualize it is not the same thing. Our conceptual view of the world does not play by the same rules as the things in themselves. Anyway, given a google maps view of the entire world, completely unstructured, Where's Waldo? You get exactly the same problem you had with arch/aarch64/dts, except now you don't even have a hierarchy to go on. He could be in Tokyo among 13.5 million people, he could be in Siberia, he could be on a boat on the ocean. Heck, he could be in a mine underground. He could be on the International Space Station.