Yea, it's hard to disagree!
… and I don't think it's plausible to completely move away from folders (thinking about all those GitHub repos I've cloned or `git init`ed).
Otoh, there are some abstractions that I would favor or at least like to explore for some (categories of) tasks.
Think of Miro or Prezi, for example… they combine a zoomable UI, allowing you to navigate through your content that's meaningfully grouped. If I compare that to Google Drive, which is a combination of files and folders, plus files shared with me by numerous people who all have their own preferences for naming conventions, etc., it feels disorganized by default and requires the mundane work of organizing, which could be abstracted by novel technologies that "understand" the meaning of files.
Hey! Thanks for taking the time to comment.
I don't think it's that much of a magic with modern multimodal embedding models that are available out there.
As you mentioned:
> /…/ The same with photos: you organize them once in the input stage or periodically, and then you can search for them easily later on. /…/
As a hobby photographer, I take lots of photos. For example, I know I've taken photos of my cats, tractors, bridges, forests, etc., but I never bother manually tagging them beyond basic editing (contrast, white balance, etc.).
A system should be able to recognize what's in these photos and allow me to search for them not only by their content but by vibe as well. And once I find a photo I like, I'd really like to see similar photos (this in particular is very helpful for photographers curating their exhibitions). This is possible to achieve these days.
Also, I fully understand your point of view on `find`, `fd`, `grep`, `cat`, etc., but in reality it's only us nerds who ever open a terminal.
Otoh, there are some abstractions that I would favor or at least like to explore for some (categories of) tasks.
Think of Miro or Prezi, for example… they combine a zoomable UI, allowing you to navigate through your content that's meaningfully grouped. If I compare that to Google Drive, which is a combination of files and folders, plus files shared with me by numerous people who all have their own preferences for naming conventions, etc., it feels disorganized by default and requires the mundane work of organizing, which could be abstracted by novel technologies that "understand" the meaning of files.