I'm not even 30 and by now I've already got (allegedly) better ideas for:

- a package manager
- a desktop environment
- a content delivery network
- a cross-platform video game runtime
- a dating app
- a file system
- a donation/crowdfunding platform
- a programming language
- a conlang and its writing system
- ...

They keep nagging at me, and begging me to implement them.

But considering each of them would take years to implement, my current plan is to develop early-onset Alzheimer's.

@Naughtylus I'm intrigued by the "file system" part because I've been thinking about that as well. Mind sharing some more?

@dcz Nooo please don't feed them 😱 😂

Well it's actually part of a larger reflection on how to view and organise data, and expands upon the concepts of symlinks (hard or soft) and content deduplication.

The main idea is the ability to reference/include (subsets of) files into other files.

It could e.g. enable literate programming for any language without dedicated tooling, where you could have the code, the explanation, the final game, and the assets all in the same document, and auto-updated

@Naughtylus Sounds kind of similar to Unison, although I don't see a single obvious way of packing many things into the same document.

@dcz I wrote "auto-updated" but it's not the right word: The data would be at the same physical location.

This idea also goes hand in hand with composable graphical interfaces to display the data (like being able to show a PNG inside a source code comment).

What are your ideas for a better file system?

@Naughtylus Drop hierarchy. It's rarely the right abstraction for organizing pieces of data. Directories force you to make stupid decisions, like "is the data more important, or the project name?".

A file system should be fully relational and queryable.

It's not an original idea, I think mainstream phones use something like that. But I think there should be more awareness among nerds that we're stuck in a local optimum.

@dcz My thoughts exactly. It became very clear to me when trying to organise pictures: Should I sort them by date? By people present ? By location?

@dcz @Naughtylus People tried to do that in the past. BeOS, iirc. And yes, it would be nice, but noone got it to work so far.

@pavel @Naughtylus The failure of WinFS is also one example.

I kinda want to give it a try, but replacing paths with unordered metadata means that all participating applications would need to update their file access APIs.

Nevertheless, I did some experiments already.

@dcz @Naughtylus Well, I guess it would all start with userland prototype. It would be quite useful for managing music collection, for example.

@pavel @Naughtylus I'm writing a FUSE library in Rust. There's no way forward without a compat layer with all the data/software that's already there.

So far it can be used to turn data into content-addressable chunks and maintains a hierarchical view.

It's for my GPS track collection, where I tend to have the same file in multiple copies due to clock and naming issues.