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Comment by jl6 | Hacker News Reader

Files are a fundamental freedom because they enable users to have custody of data, thus enabling ultimate sovereignty of confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

We should recognize files as an essential pillar of digital liberty, on par with FOSS licensing.

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Indeed, that's why it bothers me that major technology vendors, especially Apple, would like to do away with the very concept of files, at least for non-power users.

They make it seem like data is bound up with apps, and should not have an independent existence. They also make it hard to import/export data, except via backups, which a very crude way of taking control of your personal data.

I'm working on a tool to work around these issues to the extent possible, allowing users to extract their information, as granular files, from device backups into their personal digital library. For immutable data, archival is ok, but for editable data, the biggest challenge is how to make the extracted data "live", i.e., available and editable on the devices again, preferably in the same apps used to create them. There seems to be no good solutions.

Apple keep their casual users on a short leash, but for those willing to tinker, iOS device backups are actually quite good for that archive use case, as you can extract most of your important data in the form of SQLite database files. The whole process is high friction and very user-unfriendly, and open documentation of these databases is lacking, but the fact that this route still exists at all is encouraging (in the sense that all hope is not yet lost). They could very easily have hidden all these files behind an Apple-managed encryption key. On the other hand, this niche affordance may serve to placate the power users who would be most likely to cause noise and revolt if our personal needs were not met. On the gripping hand, the device backup mechanism via iTunes feels so ancient that they probably just haven’t thought about it.

> The whole process is high friction and very user-unfriendly, and open documentation of these databases is lacking

Yeah, that's what I want to abstract way. There are tools that do this to some extent, but they stop at backup extraction, without helping you to integrate the extracted data into a proper personal digital library with easy retrieval.

I would say it is more than than.

Configuration files are the greater than a central repository like Windows Registry. They allow temporary changing and ease of sharing how an application operates. They also create a well defend meaning of the settings.

This is why I do not like how Windows has been implemented, they treat files like a 3rd class citizen versus a 1st class.

This seems a pretty fundamental idea within Microsoft.

The original, much more ambitious version of Vista, Longhorn, was shifting more responsibility for metadata from files to a DB.

I would add that it’s largely due to LLM’s extraordinary ability to infer. Natural plain language live in files and we no longer have to worry about structure. Legibility is the spec and anyone decent enough to be legible will write to a file. REPL away.

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