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by jcattle 78 days ago
Also, you usually have context for the file. Like "Hey, can you send me this blueberry crumble recipe?".

I do this quite frequently. I know which person knows, I know I've asked them before and usually a quick keyword search is enough to find whatever I'm looking for again.

So this thing has at least two more information points I can search for to pinpoint the file than a simple file on my PC. It tells me who, and more context on what.

1 comments

Yes, I think "Gen Z doesn't understand file systems" is at least partially an indictment of file systems.

Hierarchy was always a poor substitute for tagging. You have to either decide a bunch of arbitrary parent / child relationships to encode your tags in a deep directory structure or just stuff them all into the file name and filter with regex.

I actually have similar frustrations with emacs org-mode. I get paralyzed by tree-structure decisions and I'm realizing that a tree structure is just not what I want. A flat collection of knowledge items festooned with every conceivable piece of metadata that might help me find them later is.