Funny, decades ago (mid-80s), I had to write a onetime fix on a what would be now a very low memory system, the data in question had a unique key of 8 7bit-ascii characters.

Instead of reading multi-meg data into memory to determine what to do, I used the file system and the program would store data related to the key in sub directories instead. The older people saw what I did and thought that was interesting. With development time factored in, doing it this way ended up being much faster and avoided memory issues that would have occurred.

So with AI, back to the old ways I guess :)

nice, esp. liked - "our memories, our thoughts, our designs should outlive the software we used to create them"

I was having exact same observation, albeit from a bit diffrent perspective: SaaS. This is where as the code tends to be temporary and very domain specific, the data (files) must strive to be boring standards.

The problem today is that we build specific, short-lived apps that lock data into formats only they can read. If you don't use universal formats, your system is fragile. We can still open JPEGs from 1995 because the files don't depend on the software used to make them. Using obscure or proprietary formats is just technical debt that will eventually kill your project. File or forget.

As TFA basically says: files on a filesystem is a DB. Just a very crude one. There aren't nice indexes for a variety of things. "Views" are not really there (arguably you can create different views with links but it's, once again, very crude). But it's definitely a DB, represented as a tree indeed as TFA mentions.

My life's data, including all the official stuff (bank statements, notary acts, statements made to the police [witness, etc.], insurance, property titels), all my coding projects, all the family pictures (not just the ones I took) and all the stuff I forgot, is in files, not in a dedicated DB. But these files are a definitely a database.

And because I don't want to deal with data corruption and even less want to deal with synching now corrupted data, many of my files contains, in their filename, a partial cryptographic checksum. E.g. "dsc239879879.jpg" becomes "dsc239789879-b3-6f338201b7.jpg" (meaning the Blake3 hash of that file has to begin with 6f338201b7 or the file is corrupted).

At any time, if I want to, I can import these in "real" dedicated DBs. For example I can pass my pictures as a read-only to "I'm Mich" (immich) and then query my pictures: "Find me all the pictures of Eliza" or "Find me all the pictures taken in 2016 on the french riviera".

But the real database of my all my life is and shall always be files on a filesystem.

With a "real" database, a backup can be as simple as a dump. With files backuping involve... Making sure you keep a proper version of all your files.

I'd say files are even more important than the filesystem: a backup on a BluRay disc or on an ext4-formatted SSD or on an exfat formatted SSD or on a tape... Doesn't matter: the files are the data.

A filesystem is the first "database" with these data: a crude one, with only simple queries. But a filesystem is definitely a database.

The main advantage of this very simple database is that as long as the data are accessible, you know your data is safe and can always use them to populate more advanced databases if needed.

Does everyone just use AI to write these days? Or is the style so infectious that I just see it everywhere? I swear there needs to be some convention around labeling a post with how much AI was used in its creation.

This article said some things I couldn’t put into words about different AI tools. Thanks for sharing.