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Comment by torginus | Hacker News Reader

Why do people keep reinventing OS features?

There's Docker, OverlayFS, FUSE, ZFS or Btrfs snapshots?

Do you not trust your OS to do this correctly, or do you think you can do better?

A lot of this stuff existed 5, 10, 15 years ago...

Somehow there's been a trend for every effing program to grow and absorb the features and responsibilities of every other program.

Actually, I have a brilliant idea, what if we used nodejs, and added html display capabilities, and browser features? After all Cursor has already proven you can vibecode a browser, why not just do it?

I'm just tired at this point

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This exact thing solves a huge problem with SEA binaries as he points out in his post. You can include complicated assets easily and skip an ugly unpack step entirely. This is very useful.

One of the worst is media players that all insist on grafting their own "library" on top of my already-working OS filesystem. So I can't just run the media player and play files. No, that would be too simple. I have to first "import" my media into a "library" abstraction and then store that library somewhere else on my filesystem. Terrible!

There's a legitimate problem they're trying to solve there: there are several ways to sort media that don't match up well with a hierarchical filesystem¹. They solve it badly. Good players maintain a database for efficient queries of media metadata, and periodically rescan the folders to update it. Shitty media players try to manage the files themselves, and still end up needing to maintain a database. The worst of these use the database to manage the contents of their storage files (or store the files themselves in the database), if something isn't in the database they delete the files. Adobe Lightroom Classic does this, if your database gets corrupted it deletes all your RAW files!

¹E.g. if you've got music, and it's sorted `artist/album/track<n>.extension`, and two artists collaborate on an album, which one gets the album in their folder? What if you want to sort all songs in the display by publication date? Even if they use the files on your filesystem without moving them, some sort of metadata database will be needed for efficient display & search.

> two artists collaborate on an album, which one gets the album in their folder?

Both. Links exist

> What if you want to sort all songs in the display by publication date

You click on the "pub date" column

> metadata database will be needed for efficient search

Yes, nothing can beat caching as illustrated by Everything.

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