> You consented to people reading your code and learning from it when you posted it on Github.
And if I never posted my code to github, but someone else did? What if someone had posted proprietary code they had no rights to to github at the same time the scraper bots were trawling it? A few years ago some Windows source code was leaked onto Github - did Microsoft consent then?
My gut reaction to this was "isn't that just sqlite"?
I don't think this is what you were thinking of, but I do kind of love the idea of formalizing sqlite file formats where the "metadata" is standardized and the "file" is stored inside. Like a file format for a recipe, or a picture, or ...
Isn’t that just a container format, like what video and audio files have used for decades?
I don’t know of any existing container formats with support for a relational DB as one of the embedded streams, but the whole point of container formats is that you can add arbitrary metadata, which of course can be a whole database.
Of course, the way BeOS does what OP is talking about is by having many DB columns within the filesystem itself! (The filesystem is a queryable database).
Yes, I totally get the distinction (and I was among those amazed by BeOS back in the day - I still show the old demo videos to friends who haven't seen it). I hadn't considered the container formats used by media, but in my head it would be the other way around - each file would be a sqlite file first so that they all share some commonality around access and inspection (I'm assuming in my ignorance that the media container formats are different).
Are there any database filesystems today? I haven't really looked, but the last one I heard of was the one that MS abandoned years ago. Actually I suppose Haiku probably still has one? I can't imagine how difficult it would be to get a DB Filesystem as a mainstream choice on Linux, let alone across OSen.
If you want something more tangible than old demos, try HaikuOS. It works wonderfully from a usb drive.
I’m too young to have known BeOS (well I was a kid in the nineties so not too young but afaik, BeOS was pretty rare (overall and) at home. However I’m old enough to have known OSes that were build around offline usage and that’s what I loved trying Haiku is that it remembers me when your OS was made to use your computer, not to be an internet client.
I feel that having your emails as files is a good example of that : you connect to the internet to get your mails. You disconnect. You want to work to those mails on another computer ? No problem, just copy paste them on a USB d… I mean floppy disk, answer your mails put the answers on your floppy disk and send them tonight when you’re back home.
It may feel pretty cumbersome when we have today’s tools but that’s the feeling I feel I lost : owning my data not only legally but physically. And not only physically but physically in a useful way.
It remembers me the time when you just had to understand simple abstractions like files and folders and windows to own the computer (and you were just learning some programming language away to master it).
Every filesystem is by definition a database system.
Out of extant systems, the closest to BeFS outside of Haiku is NTFS as implemented in Windows. In fact, you can run pretty much all of the BeOS behaviors on NT since ~1994 or so, it's an issue of programs not using it. Part of that is allegiance of user applications to Classic Windows-compatible APIs.[1] Part of the "WinFS" efforts was to break with the old approaches totally and push more indexed/searchable APIs etc. but in the end all we have is pretty robust internal search engine that is sadly underused (just like the extended attributes support). It really doesn't help that Explorer.exe is in many ways ridiculously outdated, with Windows95/98 peeking out from various corners when you look deeper into how it acts.[2]
Then ZFS but the ZPL/DMU APIs do not include indexing layer IIRC (also on systems that use Irix-style xattr APIs you lose full scope of resource forks).[3]
Both OS/2 (with HPFS) and OSX do some work with integrating metadata in filesystem, with various level of usage and end-user accessibility.
And of course there's some level of integration in AmigaOS Workbench and .info files, but that's arguably the most niche by now and never evolved to this level of use.
[1] Know the regular posts about how you can't create a file named "CON:" or "COM1:" etc in Windows? In Windows NT you actually can, but a) the only way to do it "safely" is to use alternate NTFS namespace b) I bet most people have never heard there was more than one namespace c) Win32 applications will usually only see Windows95 LFN-compatible one (in two versions, UCS and ASCII) unless they get out of their way to get access to other namespaces
[2] It's not the most egregious though - at least explorer.exe internally uses paths that work with default APIs of the system. In 2021 I ended up having to dig out an AppleScript for converting MacOS Classic paths to POSIX ones, because it turns out Finder AppleEvents API returned only Classic paths. Or at least neither I, or anyone I could find, knew how to get Finder to return a path that wasn't Classic HFS one
[3] Irix-style xattr API is limited in capabilities to only add short K/V data to a file. Solaris instead effectively gives you a complete directory attached to a file, while WindowsNT on NTFS treats everything including main content of file as "extended attribute" and opening file as normal is essentially "open the $DATA attribute of the file".
> In fact cookie banners show this. People hate them because they force meaningless choices on them. If you make a website with tracking as an opt-out option, almost everyone clicks "accept all". If you make a website with tracking as opt-in, almost every one clicks accept all. That shows that opt-in/out or consent does literally nothing ot reflect people's preferences, the act of making a choice completely dominates the actual decision.
I disagree with this interpretation - the banners force themselves in front of the user before accessing the content. And then the choice is almost always "Accept all" and "complete a checklist mini-game of things you don't want cookies for". It's not a shock that people when confronted with this will click the easy button, and that doesn't mean it reflects their actual interests. It's just fatigue. If the "accept our cookies" button was off to the side of the page, and defaulted to "none" unless the user did something otherwise, I wonder what the "accept all" numbers would look like then. Actually, I don't.
> It's not a shock that people when confronted with this will click the easy button, and that doesn't mean it reflects their actual interests.
Yes, but that was my actual point. If one simple UI design trick is enough to completely flip the choices of users, then consent forms aren't a robust way to collect preferences at all. In fact if you wanted to genuinely and in good faith provide access to granular preferences, giving a more complicated set of choices would be the only way to go about it, and that fatigue is still real even if the design has a legitimate purpose.
What you're saying is true, the only way for the choice to be representative would be to have like a binary yes/no choice because that's simple, but that's not even necessarily what the user wants either. You're going to get a significantly more accurate view of people's real preferences by collecting data, like what Firefox is doing here, and then setting defaults accordingly.
If anyone out there has questions about VM Squared, I'm happy to try to answer them.
Typo aside, the title certainly gives you the jist, but this is a great chance to move VM workloads off of VMware and onto something that's easy to use, rock solid table, with a great API and built by a company that's not antagonistic to its customers.
As someone who's nearly exclusively used Firefox since before it was called Firefox, I would not say that the product itself has been neglected. It continues to get better, from my point of view. Like seriously if you're reading this and at all interested, just try to switch to it for a week, it's great.
However it is factual that its marketshare (and thus, relevance (and thus, influence on the web)) has dramatically declined over the past decade or so. People complain about Mozilla's tech side quests (and occasionally people complain about their social-cause chases), but this is the real honest complaint. Firefox is trending toward irrelevancy, while Google has gradually taken control of this market. Meanwhile, CEO compensation has gone up (amid layoffs in the ZIRP era, for that matter).
The jist of what you're saying is in the Free Culture movement/philosophy, I think, and it resonates with me as someone who does not like what AI has done with copyrighted works but also dislikes copyright.
The "rent-seekers" is the problem. We collectively inherit and own our shared culture, but large corporations have always wanted to sell it back to us. AI companies are arguing they should have no limitations on their usage of the culture, but that the same shouldn't apply to them. Selling tickets to the commons is anti-commons.
Perhaps if these companies were themselves arguing for the end of copyright and IP for everyone, the conversation would be different.
Right, I think we’d be having a very different conversation if products of AI could not be sold (what’s taken for free must be given for free and free for others to use as they see fit). Companies will fight this tooth and nail though because that flushes any prospective profit produced by firing humans down the drain.
I think copyright lawsuits against AI companies will force them to develop attribution models. They will do the work of indexing all ideas to their authors. This will also reveal what is common knowledge, and who borrowed from who without attribution.
In order to make attribution models we need text+author+timestamp. We can get that from books, newspaper articles, scientific papers and social network posts. Then we extend to the rest of the training set.
But then we can also make AI models that cleverly avoid infringement while the same strict checking is going to be applied to human made content. Humans are not that good at avoiding pitfalls.
Because a shocking number of services don't actually require you to verify you control the email address. I'm talking about mainstream services like Spotify.
I'm in a similar situation, except in my case, the person providing the wrong email address never controlled it - it's firstnamelastname@gmail.com, which I signed up for when gmail was still invite only.
If I go to sign up for a service that someone else has signed up for with my email, I just do a password reset, and take control of the account. Either by transferring it to another email address that doesn't exist and then creating a new account, or if that doesn't work I just nuke the data.
I work for a competitor that has actually been shipping a similar product for quite some time now.
Yes, companies are really going to trust a startup for a stack like this. Will they go all in for 100% of their infra? Of course not, but as a test against a similar infra stack at a lower cost with an appealing feature set? Why not?
And if I never posted my code to github, but someone else did? What if someone had posted proprietary code they had no rights to to github at the same time the scraper bots were trawling it? A few years ago some Windows source code was leaked onto Github - did Microsoft consent then?