Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 16, 2012 20:26 UTC (Tue) by ncm (guest, #165)
In reply to: Plasma Active Three released by aseigo
Parent article: Plasma Active Three released

Aaron, I'm afraid you have so totally missed the point as to have shot off your own foot. I hope it was a result of haste, and not a failure of insight. I was inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt because as you note, you-all are very far from stupid. Tags have proven really useful in organizing photos and e-mail. It's reasonable to speculate that they might serve as well as an overall organizing method for files of all kinds. It's perfectly sensible to knock up a proof-of-concept organizer based on the idea, and publish it so people can try it out.

You write about sorting within a tag, or set of tags. That's not a total ordering, that's a local ordering, and not a stable ordering. Yes, you could model the Dewey system as tags, but such a model would miss most of its value, and anyway would be way too much work for an already otherwise-busy person.

A total ordering is necessarily arbitrary, but it has the virtue of repeatability. A human-animal brain can map its native geographical skills to a repeated presentation, providing an effortless organization that tagging cannot approach. "It was somewhere around here" might mean "perhaps in a folder next to" a known one. What I'm looking for doesn't have tag X; it just showed up in the list a little before something that had tag X. If tags had natural, and optionally imposed, relationships, that could provide a stable total order. That would correspond, organizationally, to putting folders in other folders. If almost everything that was X was also Y, then those that are X but not Y could automatically be grouped without my asking for "X but not Y".

I would feel a lot more confident about your approach if I saw evidence that you were thinking along these lines. What I'm getting, instead, is that these concepts are totally foreign. Are you old enough to remember when Artificial Intelligence based on Formal Logic was right around the corner? When the Japanese national initiative in support of Logic Programming would rocket Japan ahead of us shlubs? When teaching set theory to pre-schoolers would make arithmetic and algebra, when encountered, intuitively obvious to them all?