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Comment by falcor84 | Hacker News Reader

Files are an abstraction that was very useful in the last several decades, but that just isn't as relevant in the current world. Those videos and documents you mentioned are likely managed via object storage in a distributed database, itself possibly using block storage directly, with no actual "file" in an old-school filesystem anywhere in sight.

I still personally cling to files personally, but I have no real reason to believe that they are a fundamental abstraction that is more true than cloud lambdas.

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Sure, call them byte streams or blobs, that's fine too. I'm not disagreeing, but the point I wanted to make was that recently, people seem to have gotten the idea that their objects are semi-magical things locked into some app or some cloud service. Which is fine by the SaaS providers, or course. But it doesn't really foster understanding of the world around you.

Like kids thinking corn comes from the corn factory.

I think that part of the reason for my thinking is that I've recently been playing around with USD (Universal Scene Description). It is currently mostly based on files, but I find the underlying representation - of layers of atomic properties being composed together in a massive tree - to be very elegant, and it can be managed in a database without any files or blobs anywhere.

As another example: in the early web, behind every url was a file (with an actual file extension), but then we abstracted them into resources, and I feel that this coincided with an evolution of the field.

The concept of a file or blob will probably still be useful in some capacity for decades to come, but I wouldn't want it to hinder us from realizing better abstractions.

When I was a kid I used to think that pasta came from a pasta factory.

Hah, so young and foolish. Everyone knows pasta grows on trees: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8scpGwbvxvI

When we were children we were taught about the spaghetti harvest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVo_wkxH9dU

Until you try creating one of those videos, and now you need .movs and .mp3s and .pngs and a place to store the render output.

Files have a way to go yet.

Also, replying to myself, have you ever had a job? At a place? Where the primary function isn't coding?

Files are everywhere. They are every-thing. Except now, thanks to the disaster that is SharePoint, nobody has a fucking idea where they are any more. Because they've been abstracted away by some genius on the Teams team.

So nobody can find what they were just working on. Or they have no idea if the thing they find is the right version. It's a total shambles.

A hierarchical file system was boring, but it worked. And it still does.

Disclosure: I'm Johnny.Decimal and my business depends on files still being a thing.

I can't believe I'm seriously reading a discussion around the existence of files, what is this, an SNL sketch?

This very site is being served from a file system.

I don't think the comment was about the "file system", more like about the "humans" that dump every file they have to whichever folder they find available, and in the end of the day/week/month/year nobody knows where that file is.

And then the person leaves the company/org and this file will float in space (SharePoint) forever, never to be recalled again, never to be read again, alone, in a cold world (computer room).

Speaking about SNL sketch.. it reminded me James Cameron's reaction on the Papyrus sketch --> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wm1-k__LF40

>And then the person leaves the company/org and this file will float in space (SharePoint) forever, never to be recalled again, never to be read again, alone, in a cold world (computer room).

It will likely eventually be used as training data for an LLM and get an afterlife. Resistance is futile.

You’d be surprised! With many apps on the iPhone you can get by

Edit a video? Built in app, or your social media app is already loaded with that and you can save state instead of posting

Reverse a video? There’s an app for that which just goes back into your Photos app to let you tried that content

and so on

people dont need to have that mental model until something breaks

Right, but those videos are amateur and get 200 views on TikTok.

You want to produce a video of any quality at all? You're using files.

source quality and editing prowess doesnt matters at all for views

and you can edit in high quality on an iphone, higher than what’s necessary to view on an iphone

so, two premises that arent substantiated

Show me a million-view TikToker that does it unedited with no files.

They might exist. I don’t watch TT, I’m happy to be wrong.

But MKBHD, Justine, Mr. Beast, CGP Grey — you name ‘em, they use files to edit a production.

That’s such a random bar with such random outliers

Someone that doesn’t watch tiktok thinks a millions views is a lot there

Stick with YouTube your worldview isn’t relevant this decade

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