Comment by usrbinbash
3 years ago
> The endgame is a machine with only an OS.
This was tried multiple times already, and in each case, it turned out that the ability to easily store and organise data locally was both desired and required among the wider audience. Cloud storage is a nice feature to complement local storage, but will not replace it any time soon.
Typically this has been because file sizes have either caused network issues or storage cost issues on the server side. We are approaching (or are already there) the place where the biggest consumer file formats (videos) don’t have this constraint. At my house already it is very nebulous what is stored locally and what is stored on a remote server.
I’m sure there is some consumer technology coming around the bend that will make local storage again compelling but I think we are on the cusp of another server centric file storage era not the reverse.n
I can easily see a db file system being the default in for remote resources in consumer devices while traditional local file systems are reserved for specialized use cases.
Why is local storage not compelling anymore for you?
It's faster, cheaper and often more reliable than someone else's computer.
> Typically this has been because file sizes have either caused network issues or storage cost issues on the server side
And because of privacy concerns. And because people want to use their computers even when they cannot connect to the internet. And because people want the security of being sure they can access their files even if a company goes bankrupt/has an outage.
And because, no matter how fast networks get; I somewhat doubt that it will be faster to load a 2GiB 4k video file or a 7GiB pytorch checkpoint from cloud storage, than via the SATA or PCIe bus.