
Computer Files Are Going Extinct - respinal
https://onezero.medium.com/the-death-of-the-computer-file-doc-43cb028c0506
======
cproctor
To a computer science teacher, this feels like trying to walk up a down
escalator.

First-year CS students (middle school or high school) with experience using
Apple products don't have a concept of a filesystem. The shift to auto-saving
documents also corrodes the intuition that files get stored on disk in some
non-magical way. In the same way that it's now easier to teach networking and
graph theory because youth experience identity and relationships this way,
it's now a lot harder to teach lower-level abstractions. In my experience,
this has changed over the last five years.

~~~
unqueued
I have a very similar anecdote. I had a long conversation with a friend who is
a high school science teacher. She told me that computer literacy has
plummeted in the last ten years.

She has her students go into the field and collect data in the form of photos,
spreadsheets, and typed reports. She wants students to bundle these files in
zip files, and email them to her.

Students have no idea how to do this. Some of them struggle with emails. She
has had to make her tutorials on this longer and longer. And she has also been
forced to start accepting assignments as a pile of attachments, because so few
students understand zip files.

~~~
jedimastert
I might imply that your highschool teacher friend is instead falling out of
computer literacy, and that highshool students are moving away from _her_ form
of a computer-based workflow.

I very rarely send emails at all outside of work. Maybe one or two support
emails. I also fairly rarely create zip files either. Of course, I know _how_
to do these things, but I don't really do it anymore. I haven't needed to, for
the same reason that I don't own a printer.

I haven't needed to "compress" anything since Google Drive and Dropbox meant
that all I needed to do to get someone a file is type their email into a box.

Perhaps instead of email, you teacher friend could find out how her students
send things to each other and meet them half way? Make up a google drive or
dropbox or whatever microsoft or apple are doing instead of insisting on
whatever's most comfortable for you.

In short, I don't think this is an example of students falling behind, but
teachers getting left behind.

It's a little rudde to say it that way, but I really don't know how else to
say it.

~~~
unqueued
> I might imply that your highschool teacher friend is instead falling out of
> computer literacy, and that highshool students are moving away from her form
> of a computer-based workflow.

I suppose, in the same way that people using crayons are moving away from the
printed word.

> Perhaps instead of email, you teacher friend could find out how her students
> send things to each other and meet them half way? Make up a google drive or
> dropbox or whatever microsoft or apple are doing instead of insisting on
> whatever's most comfortable for you.

Isn't the whole point of school to learn new skills? If students have
illegible handwriting and poor grammar, should the teacher really be meeting
the students half way?

I actually told her that she should continue doing what she was doing, because
it was a real boon to her students. They might not ever learn this stuff.

Her students objectively less able to share information with each other. I
have certainly seen kids who have to go as far as taking screenshots of what
an app contains and send a screenshot to someone, than actually be able to
export text.

I could understand if what the students were doing was in some way comparable
in flexibility, but it isn't. They basically only know how to click on the
share button in an app, and text links for someone else to install the app. Or
send them screenshots of them using an app scrolled to the relevant info.

But the biggest benefit is that having assignments in discrete organized
bundles makes the most sense for everyone.

~~~
pnutjam
Email is actually pretty crappy for files. She should setup an https drop and
get a way better experience.

~~~
anderspitman
How would that look for assignment submissions? Something like WebDAV?

~~~
detaro
Just a page with a form you can upload files through. You can setup something
like that e.g. with Owncloud/Nextcloud. And dedicated education tools also
often have it.

For normal document-sized files, email is fine though too IMHO, for university
stuff I never really cared which way was used.

~~~
anderspitman
NextCloud is quite a dependency for a simple file upload.

~~~
detaro
Sure, if you just install it for that. But it's a reasonably common service
(e.g. around here, many universities have it for their employees and students)
with that feature.

------
ACS_Solver
One of my greatest culture shocks in terms of technology was around 6 years
ago when I received an iPad, having no experience with Apple products. After
the initial setup, the first thing I wanted was to transfer some files - TV
episodes and PDFs - to the device. My first attempt was to SSH into it, only
to discover that's not an option, and would require a third-party app store
and jailbreak. Then I just connected the iPad to my PC by cable, expecting to
see a mass storage device. No luck. Likewise, no luck finding a file explorer
on the iPad.

The iPad is strongly tied to the workflow that Apple suggests, and that's a
workflow that removes files as a concept, abstracting them away. It's quite
possibly a genius approach in terms of how accessible it is to non-tech
people, even though it doesn't sit right with me.

~~~
beefhash
I'm not sure if this is _only_ an about accessibility to non-tech people.

Think about it: You can't get files on your device in a useable format
anymore. This means piracy becomes exponentially harder to consume (i.e. you
can't use your iPad [easily] as a reader for your pirated ebooks). Quite
honestly, that's a stroke of genius and likely a secondary motivation for this
workflow.

~~~
RhodaLs
You can very easily use your iPad as a reader for arbitrarily downloaded
ebooks. Go to Gutenberg or Archive.org or the pirate site of your choice.
Select a book. Select the format. Epubs and PDFs have the option of being sent
to iBooks. Mobi can be opened with a compatible reader app if you have one
installed. And the file can be saved to Dropbox or whatever file service you
have installed. With the latest version of iOS (IpadOS) you can save to your
Downloads folder or even to a connected storage device, or to a file share on
your local network. You can also load books via Dropbox, local network, or
connected storage.

I do this all the time. For me, it's convenient to use Dropbox as the
intermediary, but there's plenty of other ways too.

------
_Understated_
> all culture, raging over us, for $12.99 a month (or $15.99 for HD) as long
> as we keep up our payments like good economic entities. When we stop paying,
> we’re left with nothing. No files. The service is revoked.

This is the most frightening thing for me... by far: the concept that I no
longer have control of the destiny of my own shit. Mine. Stuff I created.

I understand the concept of how cloud storage works: "hey, we'll look after it
for you, back it up and stuff, and all you need to do it pay us a small
monthly fee".

Makes sense.

But add to that fact that if you stop paying they'll keep you from your stuff.
Also if they don't like you for practically any reason they'll keep you from
your stuff. Or if they suffer a huge data loss they'll claim that the T's and
C's protect them and they'll still keep you from your stuff.

What the hell are we sleep-walking into here?

Caveat: I'm a tech. I have a local copy, a local backup (that I rotate on an
ad-hoc basis with the other HD at my mum and dads house) and an offsite cloud-
backup (using Sync) so I'm covered but this stuff isn't aimed at me, it's
aimed at my mum and my non-tech friends who just think "hey, it's <mega-corp>.
They've got thousands of people and loads of equipment and they know what
they're doing!"

They sure do!

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Out of all my data, music and video is the thing I worry about least. I'm not
going to lose my business or job because Apple Music stops working or I can't
see the latest Netflix series. The last thing I want to spend my time doing is
managing and worrying about terabytes of media.

~~~
arpa
Well clearly you don't have a library of Alexandria. Not to claim I do, but,
well, i do curate my own library, both in books and in media and I do have
some stuff that isn't easy to come by: mispressed Amorphous Androgynous CDs.
Early Nate Tarrant music. The Screaming Abdabs bootleg - and to me they hold
value just like a family album might hold to some. It's not about money or
what i do, it's about intrinsic value of culture history, and if someone flips
a switch and turns the while internet off, i will still be able to dig out the
old hard drives stored in the basement and show my kid Tarkovskys' Stalker or
Kubricks' 2001\. Hell, i'll watch them again for the 79th time...

But if you just consume it... well, that's good too. Just keep in mind not all
do, and curating a media collection is gardening to some.

------
dangus
The article just felt...unjustifiably alarmist to me.

Most non-technical people I know _cannot manage files_ even after decades of
computing experience. I understand why many services try to abstract or
simplify the concept.

For example, Google or Apple is processing the crap out of your email
attachment image because they know you don’t understand the idea that trying
to send five 10MB photos likely will not fit in an email. All you want to do
is send your photos to Grandma. So instead your iDevice handles it for you and
either compresses them or throws them in a temporary cloud storage location
with a link. Grandma gets her photos - for most people the alternative is a
confusing mail delivery bounce followed by frustration.

Apple added Stacks to the desktop because everyone’s tired of seeing other
people’s computers with a mess of icons smashed together on the desktop,
because that’s the only place files could be conceivably stored in the mind of
a non-technical user. The whole idea of a file hierarchy seems either too
confusing or too labor intensive to that type of user.

Nerds like us always have and had options. We are aware and capable of coming
up with a more friendly solution to us, like a home built NAS or Synology box;
ask a non-technical user what those are and be met with a blank stare.

For most people, they really should be paying someone else to maintain their
data, iCloud, Google or whatever. Nobody’s home back up scheme can match what
these companies are doing in their data centers. And no, these services don’t
just delete your data immediately after your monthly payment method bounces -
you are given time and nags to download your data or renew, often your data
just becomes download-only.

Are we annoyed that most options are not for us, or have to be in a form of a
workaround to a technology stack that’s marketed to non-technical people?
Maybe. It would be wonderful if there was a device as nice as an iPad that
also gave us full access like a Linux PC.

But also, nobody’s forcing us in 2019 to stop using our files as we did in
1999. We didn’t _have_ all these services back then. File management was _the_
option. It is still an option.

And in 2019, Apple finally adds mass storage support to the iPad. Sometimes
things come around.

~~~
apostacy
20 years ago, I thought that learning the basics of a filesystem would be a
staple of education. I painstakingly taught this to my non-technical
relatives. It wasn't that hard. I just assumed that this stuff would start
getting taught in public schools.

Instead, we've been struggling (and often failing) to dumb computers down. The
fact that people still struggle with the same tasks is a testament to that.

I have lost track of the number of people who have lost precious pictures or
documents because they don't understand what device they are stored on, and
threw away their old iPad. By focusing on the most common case "emailing
photos to grandma" we end up introducing all sorts of new problems.

~~~
apostacy
Just to go into a bit more detail: 1) An auntie thought that dragging 100GB of
music into her Dropbox meant that she could just leave on a trip and access
her music, without having to wait for it to sync. 2) An uncle didn't know how
to access his late wife's photos from her iPad. Which cloud were they in? Were
they only on her locked iPad? Who knows! 3) People making public YouTube
videos to share private moments with family. (Pedos exploit this to find
videos of children bathing)

Have we really improved things? I find these new file abstractions we have
created to be much more confusing.

Old people understand the concept of physical media just fine. They know what
a record or a roll of film is. And because of this phobia about educating
users, we hide so much that they don't even know if their data has been
synced, or if it is private.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Have we really improved things? I find these new file abstractions we have
> created to be much more confusing._

We haven't, and here's why: a file system was _one_ abstraction. A simple one,
that made sense, and wasn't very far detached from actual implementation
details. Which meant that weird black magic almost never leaked from
underneath.

What we have now, with the cloud and dumbed down software, is many mutually
inconsistent and sometimes incompatible abstractions, all completely detached
from the reality behind them, which means they have inconsistent corner cases
that make no sense unless you know enough about software to be able to imagine
what those abstractions are backed by.

In the best tradition of commerce, we've helped people avoid having to learn a
simple concept by introducing them to lots of "simplifying" lies.

------
esotericn
You can pry my files from my cold dead hands.

What amuses me about all of this is that it seems to just further cement
software developers as magicians. Back in the day it was the Windows control
panel.

Nowadays? I have direct experience with tons of people navigating cloud
service settings or whatever else via endless GUIs. Just give me the
filesystem. It's all a bunch of JSON configs or whatever anyway. find -name
blah -execdir sed -i blah. Bosh.

Well, I'll never struggle for work at least. Perhaps this is our 'guild'...?

~~~
mukti
I'm often able to mystify people by fixing something by dropping to a shell
and modifying files.. even some developers. I think the one thing that this
article points out is how unaware some developers about what they're doing.
The author had an example where he used NPM to download dependencies and said
"websites were made of files; now they are made of dependencies." While that
is not wrong, its too often how people think, and they forget that the
dependencies are actually just a bunch of files.

I actually end up helping tons of random people in my company use conda,
because they can't get the concept of virtual envs. They don't understand that
the libraries are actually files on the disk, and your virtual environment is
just a directory and some variables.

That's not to say all developers are like this, but I think the numbers that
think like this are growing. Ultimately, I'm like you - they can pry the files
from my cold dead hands, if I didn't know what/where/how files were used, I
wouldn't fundamentally understand how a lot of different technologies even
work.

~~~
Zee2
I think the author's point of "made of dependencies, not files" is that they
are not human files. They are autogenerated webs of dependent repositories,
not to be touched by the user, unless something has gone seriously wrong. I
wouldn't qualify personal files that are directly created and managed by a
human user as being the same thing as a mass of folders curated and managed by
a dependency manager utility.

------
maliker
I don't understand how people can get work done in the post-file world. Any
project I've got that's more complicated than a todo list has text files,
images, code, links to websites, emails, and typeset documents. The only thing
that holds all that stuff, organizes it into folders, lets me edit/run it, and
makes the content searchable is a filesystem. Maybe my standards for usability
are too high.

~~~
faanghacker
That's because the post file world is designed for consumers, not producers.
YouTube creators and software programmers are still using standard computers.

~~~
tomc1985
It'd be nice if desktop computing went back to the nerds. Let the masses have
their mobile, and let computer software not be so dumbed-down.

~~~
pieix
It seems to me that this is the clear trend. MacOS is increasingly
“mobilizing” and Microsoft has already moved to a Windows-as-a-Service [0].
The only sane desktop/workstation choice is Linux and the rift grows wider
every year. As the number of use cases for a workstation OS continue to
diminish and the big players stop catering to that market segment, sooner or
later we’ll reach the fabled Year of the Linux Desktop!

[0] [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/windows/deployment/update/w...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/windows/deployment/update/waas-overview)

------
arch-ninja
There is value in knowing there are 2 demographics: most people use apps and
don't care how the app handles it's data; indeed the app usually alters the
user's behaviour.

Some people run the opposite: they instruct apps and the app had better use
the data given in the format given or the user moves to another app (or writes
their own).

Someday I hope the second demographic's lifestyle is taught in highschools,
because it is socially healthier.

~~~
igornadj
>socially healthier

That's a bold statement, can you elaborate?

People want to go for walks, meet up with friends, share memories, they don't
care how it's done. Having the tools get out of the way and just do those
things is a net benefit to society.

------
BeetleB
This is why years ago I switched to a static site generator. Using something
like Django was fragile. My provider would change some library and poof - the
site is down. I don't use my site often (post on it once every so many months)
- so I simply switched. Never gone down since then.

A few days ago I opened a Jupyter notebook I had authored in 2015 - and it
failed to reproduce my results. I relied on pandas, and pandas has gone
through API changes. Fortunately, it wasn't hard for me to search around for
the newer versions of those APIs and fix things - but this is only 4 years
after I authored it. Can I have any confidence that 20 years from now I could
reproduce the results - or even find _documentation_ for the APIs I used to
understand exactly what I was doing?

I mean sure - I could put the OS and all the libraries needed to reproduce the
work in a container and be guaranteed[1] it'll run later, but the only people
who will do that are those who need to for regulatory compliance[2].

[1] Not really. The software to run the container may no longer be supported,
and the people with the knowledge may charge more than most can afford to get
it to work.

[2] Something we're dealing with at work these days. Writing stuff for the
automotive industry and they expect that any software + tools should work
15-20 years from now. Same level of expectation for availability as any other
car part. Now that there is so much SW in modern cars, this is a good
opportunity for being a consultant 15-20 years from now!

------
jacquesm
Of course they are. That's just part of the pendulum swinging towards
centralization. Files, _your_ files, are an obstacle to centralization so you
should lose your ability to access them.

So no more books in your library, just _access_ to books through a device
under the control of some large - usually American - entity. No more music
collections, just _access_ to someone else's music collection. Ditto for
movies, you don't have your own copies, there is just _access_ on a pay-per-
view basis.

And of course only the 'proper' artists, movie production houses and writers
will be available.

I refuse to play this game. I have my own collection of music, books and
movies. Yes, it takes up space. But that's fine with me, at least no
billionaire will be able to dictate what I can read, view or listen to.

Extending this to your personal files was an obvious move.

------
mellowdream
This is what I'm gonna link to my friends the next time they make fun of me
for being a green-texter.

This is exactly the story I went through a few years back as well. I had an
iPhone 4? 9-ish years ago when I was in a music-kleptomania frenzy (back when
what.cd was around too ;) ), and I remember just how frustrating it was
dragging and dropping shit through iTunes all the time. Same for movies,
photos, and documents! I couldn't see the appeal of using the iPhone at all -
why would somebody use this when they could just plug an Android device into
their PC and use their file explorer? (The update to iOS7 was the nail in the
coffin - I found the neon design just repulsive.)

I guess my question is - has the Apple "ecosystem" gotten better for this? Can
I actually edit metadata for .mp3s and .mp4s and just drop them into an iPhone
or iPad now? And copy them out as well or download them offline, bit for bit?
If so, are dongles still the norm?

*An aside - I've definitely eased up on the file-ownership thing now. I just let YouTube Premium handle everything. It was definitely a waste of time retagging thousands of music files out of some strange ownership OCD. I see it as a net positive overall - now I just find it amazing that someone even uploaded some white-label vinyl-only run-of-100 Foul Play UK garage record (and similar records going for >$100 on discogs - maybe even ownership has its limits?) at 128kbps at all, even if it doesn't stay there forever :)

~~~
dehrmann
> [media file ownership] was definitely a waste of time retagging thousands of
> music files out of some strange ownership OCD

Full disclosure: I used to work for Spotify. When people talk about services
like Spotify and Apple Music, they usually miss how much value is added in the
cataloging and search they do. These are a massive pain to do yourself, it
doesn't scale past ~10,000 tracks, they've put more thought into it, and are
better at handling the song/track/recording ambiguity in search results.

~~~
detaro
> _it doesn 't scale past ~10,000 tracks, they've put more thought into it,_

Spotify also says supporting more than 10000 tracks in "My Library" isn't
necessary, so the people who hit that limit aren't helped by Spotify either

~~~
dehrmann
Except search and playlists still work.

------
submeta
I haven't seen many non-tech people who manage their files in a systematic
way. Most non-tech people don't have a naming convention for their files (seen
many files named "letter.doc" or "shmith.doc" or "smith2.doc"), let alone a
predefined folder structure for their files. What I have seen most of the time
is this: A desktop full of files, hundreds, even thousands of files, some
within folders, some flat. A chaos.

I am a tech person. I do organise my files in folders. And I don't want any
other organizing principle for my documents. But I realize that this concept
does not work for most other people.

------
PavlovsCat
A HN comment from 2 years ago I bookmarked:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15235151](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15235151)

The war on general computing implies disempowering users, rather than
empowering them. But that it's "not surprising" doesn't mean it's good, or
that it can't be reversed.

I wonder what associations for craftsmanship in software, respect for users,
and similar things there are? If there was a web ring about that, I would
browse it.

~~~
jkp56
Heh, that's a possibility, actually. Govs like how software and personal
phones enable global surveillance, but they don't like the power that general
computing devices give (all these encryption protocols, bitcoins and so on).
So obviously some people in the govs are trying to convince the rest to keep
the first and take back the general computing part. We may even see in our
lifetimes how common people will only be allowed access to dumb software (the
Apple model), and general unrestricted software and hardware will be threated
like weapons, with licenses and prison time for software engineers. The
alternative path for society is cheap and powerful general use phones with
quantum coprocessors and a constitutional amendments that defend these rights.
I'm pretty sure that the two alternatives are now being considered somewhere
in DoD offices.

------
amelius
Perhaps one day we can store stuff directly into a transactional database. I'd
actually love to see an OS based on this principle.

~~~
tyingq
MVS is pretty much that.

~~~
amelius
Ok perhaps a little more modern, where the database can be distributed, and
where the transaction handle can be sent to different processes so you can
have multiple microservices running in a single transaction.

------
mpweiher
The reports of the death of the file(system) are grossly exaggerated.

And it's not been for lack of trying.

While I share many of the author's misgivings, files are actually making a bit
of a comeback. After many years of trying to void the very idea of a file,
Apple was essentially forced to introduce the _Files_ app for iOS and
introduce mass-storage support for (some) iPads. This is a good sign.

The anti-file movement has also been very strong and vocal in the programming
world, where many claim that many if not all of our programming problems would
go away if only we put our code in databases, or (Smalltalk) images instead.
Yet the files, they persist.

That doesn't mean that files, or hierarchical filesystems, are perfect.
However, whatever the problems ("Unititled 54.txt", anyone?), the proposed
cures for what ails files invariably appear to be worse than the symptoms. And
almost inevitably, we have to bring back or reinvent the very same concepts
that we gleefully got rid of. That's a resilient concept! One that is
apparently useful and pertinent at a somewhat deeper level than we fully
understand.

So how about we stop trying to "get rid of files", but instead see if we
cannot improve the concept and the mechanism(s) to fix the problems.

------
JulianMorrison
Files were an abstraction that appeared as well as disappeared in my lifetime,
at least on home computers - before them, you were saving direct to the medium
which was mostly audio magtape. And I've honestly never really liked them.

Files get lost in the clutter, get overwritten or corrupted, don't get saved
when you crash, are on this computer and not that one, don't make it across
when you transition to a newer box, have to be mailed around or put on (gasp)
physical media and passed around like a crude lump of plastic. And then your
media gets a virus, oops.

It was an improvement to autosave. It was an improvement to version. It was an
improvement to distribute across redundant backups. It was an improvement, to
be able to get at it from anywhere.

There's UI issues in the new way of doing things, but that seems likely to
shake out with experience. Files were often clunky at first too.

~~~
JulianMorrison
Also it's worth mentioning, if I still had my files from my 486 PC (I don't),
could I even access them? Mostly, not, or not without an emulator and fifty
floppy disks of some ancient app I binned in the 1990s. And a floppy disk
drive. And an adaptor cable.

Files rot, unless they are intentionally low rot by design. Most weren't.

------
carapace
Files and directories are not a great abstraction. Never have been.

E.g. the insides of git are much better (although the abstractions layered on
top are fucking gruesome.)

Something like IPFS is an obvious way forward.
[https://ipfs.io/](https://ipfs.io/)

~~~
dredmorbius
Problem is that we're not getting a better interoperable metadata-rich
relational object storage system. We're getting closed silos in short-lived
cloud surveillance services.

~~~
carapace
I agree, but then the issue is social/political rather than technical.

I'd love it if the WWW was e.g. Xanadu+Prolog.

------
proc0
Non-technical people will not hesitate to adopt online services to manage
their data. I have a dropbox and other services of my own, but I'm talking
about the mainstream apps mentioned in the article that also have a purpose.

People completely ignore the fact you would have no access to this data if you
have no online connection (or access to the account). It's not that files are
going away, it's that they're being increasingly managed by tech companies,
and normal people don't know any better, as evident by the article's title...
it shows the author doesn't what files are for and that they are invisibly
managed by a third party.

------
hakfoo
I wonder if this is a variation on a business anti-pattern we see in a lot of
other places:

"It's better to acquire a new customer at any cost, versus retaining an
existing one."

There are plenty of verticals where if you develop a piece of software that's
blunt, direct, and full of power-user features, it won't take off because it
gets panned as "too hard to use."

Tricks like abstracting where and how the data is stored tend to be appealing
to non-skilled users. They see "look how easy, I don't have to figure out
which files are in the cloud and which are on disc, and can't accidentally try
to open a spreadsheet in the photo editor." New users buy into it, the
developers get their hockey-stick growth chart and everyone declares victory.
After a few months, a small percentage of users end up dropping the product
with a migraine because they can't break out of the jails and abstractions
that are clearly standing in the way of improved productivity.

No real point in satisfying those users anyway-- they've already paid, so
there's no further value they can provide to your ecosystem.

------
Ididntdothis
My major concern is that data backup is getting more and more difficult. I
feel it's increasingly more difficult to figure out what to back up and how to
restore it. I have heard several horror stories from people who messed up
something and had all their cloud data disappear forever.

------
anderspitman
If this resonates with you, I'd invite you to follow my work on MooseDrive
[0]. I'm calling it a "data ownership" company. The product is focused on
storage for developers.

[0] [https://moosedrive.io](https://moosedrive.io)

~~~
roryrjb
To me the whole idea of data ownership and everything this article is talking
about is antithetical to some company somewhere or cloud storage. I personally
collect mp3s. I could easily pay for a Spotify subscription or even have it
included as part of a mobile phone contract at a discounted rate, but I prefer
to have the actual files on my computer, I own them and no one can change that
fact. I religiously catalogue and sort all my files and back them up to
multiple external media constantly. I am currently working on a couple of
projects that are all to do with organising files locally via their metadata
(mp3s, JPEGs, et al). I avoid anything cloud. I am slowly but surely migrating
away from the cloud.

~~~
anderspitman
The vision for the product is for you to be able to do everything you just
described, and still have the files available for sharing and publishing
through the cloud. Note, that doesn't mean _stored_ in the cloud, unless
that's what the user wants.

------
verdverm
Would read, but alas, behind the medium paywall...

Aren't all things in computers eventually a file (descriptor)?

And with the rate of data volume increasing, things going the opposite of the
headline?

And with the cloud, they are being replicated multiple times there and
locally?

~~~
KineticLensman
> The file has been replaced with the platform, the service, the ecosystem.
> ... When we stop paying, we’re left with nothing. No files. The service is
> revoked

------
anderspitman
> Years ago websites were made of files; now they are made of dependencies.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Similar to the ongoing trend of turning every product into service, both on-
line and off-line. It turns ownership into relationships, which is something I
consider strongly negative. Ownership doesn't require as much maintenance and
is much more forgiving, and I can own a lot of things, but there's only so
many relationships I can be in before my mind is no longer able to keep track
of them all.

------
rhizome
File this next to "Mouse buttons are going extinct, because Apple."

------
brian_herman
Can medium go extinct first?

------
whyleyc
"Files are dead" is an oft-quoted meme, but they aren't going away anytime
soon.

I wrote a piece offering a counterpoint to this view five years ago (in
response to a similar article by Fred Wilson) and I think most of the points
still hold true today:

[https://blog.zamzar.com/2015/01/02/why-fred-wilson-is-
wrong-...](https://blog.zamzar.com/2015/01/02/why-fred-wilson-is-wrong-files-
arent-dead/)

------
mark_l_watson
I couldn’t read this medium article, it said that I had read too many free
articles this month, but hopefully this is relevant: files “are back” in
iPadOS. Most iPad apps had interoperability with data in other apps, when it
made sense but now with the new File app, I am increasingly doing more on my
iPad Pro. I have a GPU rig for deep learning, and use a MacBook for Lisp and
Haskell hacking, but now most of my time is spent on an iPad doing research,
writing, and entertainment.

------
thrower123
I find myself very frustrated using newer versions of the Microsoft Office
suite. When I want to save a file, I just want the tried-and-true Windows file
dialog popped up, but instead I have to click around and avoid going into
weird Onedrive dialogs.

I save everything to OneDrive anyway, but I'm a not-so-old fogey that is more
comfortable using the filesystem myself, rather than crummy layers stuck on
top of it.

------
smitty1e
> Files are skeuomorphic. That’s a fancy word that just means they’re a
> digital concept that mirrors a physical item.

So, the digital equivalent of
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onomatopoeia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onomatopoeia)

------
neonate
[http://archive.is/2t5BK](http://archive.is/2t5BK)

~~~
cosmojg
For a better reading experience and for those using Cloudflare's DNS:
[https://outline.com/yU64Cu](https://outline.com/yU64Cu)

~~~
elliekelly
I do use Cloudflare’s DNS but I’ll admit I don’t know much/anything about how
it really works... can you explain why the DNS server would matter here?

Somewhat related, I have made a deal with the devil and use Comcast and, until
yesterday, I was using their combo modem/router. Comcast doesn’t let you
change the router’s DNS settings (which are, of course, set to Comcast
servers) but I was under the impression that the DNS settings closest to the
client always prevailed. But fiddling around with WireShark yesterday I could
clearly see my DNS requests going to 75.75.75.75 (Comcast) even though my
laptop was set to use CloudFlare. Is that even possible? Could the router have
been set by Comcast to somehow override my settings or to intercept & reroute
DNS requests?

~~~
jwilk
archive.is inaccessible via Cloudflare DNS:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317)

------
lewisjoe
Remember "Worse is Better" by Gabriel? Lisp was a correct, consistent and
complete system, prioritizing these over simplicity. C, on the other hand, was
a simple system but not nearly as much complete, consistent or correct as
Lisp. Nevertheless, Lisp lost to C.

This is what happens when Capitalism meets Software. When it comes to winning
markets, shipping simple stuff is always better than shipping a slightly more
complex (in terms of code as well as UX) but correct stuff. That is why most
companies prioritize feature development over bugfixes. That is why selecting
multiple items from a list is still inconsistent across the web. That is why
XMPP lost and Whatsapp and Messenger are winning.

There are efforts like Solid
([https://solid.inrupt.com](https://solid.inrupt.com)) by Tim Berners-Lee
himself that's trying to bring back the concept of files and data-ownership to
end-users, to enforce correctness and consistency. But I'm still skeptical if
the efforts will ever win the market.

------
anaphor
Your database (in the context of things like blogs and so on) is a filesystem,
it's just built on top of a higher level abstraction than traditional
filesystems.

------
nintendo1889
It reminds me of Stallman's best quote: the computer industry is more
fashionable than the women's fashion industry.

~~~
dredmorbius
For much the same reasons.

[https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=information+th...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=information+theoretic+fads&restrict_sr=on)

------
dehrmann
Some of this is that the file/folder abstraction is inadequate for organizing
large amounts of data.

------
jradd
files are an abstraction and reference to objects in memory. The only problem
I see is storage life cycle without cache in volatile plus redundant non-
volatile memory. Same problem for blocks and segments, no?

------
pointerpointer
I can imagine corporations totally like the idea of users not being able to
save their own precious data to a file. In the end they want to own and
control your data as much as possible for profit and power. And they sell that
idea by telling you it's more convenient. As if it were not possible to create
great file management tools or maybe even your own files as a database that
you can manage easily.

Same with the 'cloud'. What's the difference between running your own FTP
server and a cloud server? Technically not that much IMAO, only the latter
means the data is controlled by some corporation running that server. And why
is there hardly any progress in the area of building a private turn-key
'cloud' server so you don't need gmail, dropbox, github, etc..? I'm sure it
can be made, easy to setup, robust, with backup, you name it, just like a Mac
pc that's made for non technical people. We know how to build it, but we don't
do it, we build for corporations instead.

The further we go down this road the less control we will have, and the
ramifications of that don't look pretty to me to say the least.

~~~
acolumb
With the advent of database-managed, self-hosted personal clouds (i.e
Nextcloud/Droppy,) the difference is even smaller. It's developing into a
self-hosted "just works" personal cloud ecosystem.

------
psilocipher
Files will never go "extinct". Files exist. They will continue to exist. You
people are insane.

~~~
rasz
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS)

~~~
wetpaws
Does not exist in the wild, probably for a reason.

------
aurora72
The author says "everyone started to use Spotify" Everyone? Yeah everyone with
their shiny $1000+ iFon toys in their hands doing touch gestures.

~~~
njovin
Spotify has 215m users. I’d assume that is more than the group that used to
download MP3s and burn CDs (which would require some technical knowhow and a
CD burner).

~~~
ZoomZoomZoom
You're seriously exaggerating. In the past, almost everyone had a CD-burner.
You could use just a couple of clear as day GUI programs, a dozen of clicks
and one drag and drop to download an album and burn a CD. Eleven year olds
were doing it no problem.

