Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@deobald
Created May 26, 2020 11:48
Show Gist options
  • Save deobald/d29b1fda7dd439095274931160e8e4c3 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Save deobald/d29b1fda7dd439095274931160e8e4c3 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.

@yuvipanda I'm guessing that Evernote is the closest thing to this vision I've had for decades, but I think what I've always wanted (but never badly enough to bother building) was the thing you've roughly described in your post. My mental codename for this project I never even started was always Heap (before heap.io ever existed).

My first inklings toward this sort of tooling emerged when the first real versions of Gmail were released. I started shoving all sorts of weird data in there because it was easy to email a thing to myself and the search was medium-pretty-good. "Oh, that was harder to find than I thought." :Reply-to-email-to-self with some keywords smashed in haphazardly: It was certainly good enough and it was free-er or as-free as Evernote so I never bothered paying money for a thing I barely trust to proprietary software anyway.

At some point I realized that what I wanted was the digital equivalent of Samus Aran's Locker: https://metroid.fandom.com/wiki/The_Locker ...just a place to shove all my crap. Bookmarks, receipts, documents, Something Very Important, phone numbers, images, whatever. That Nintendo comic was written at a time when people still owned things that weren't commodities but... that's not true anymore. None of us owns something special. Our clothes and homes and computers and cars are all the same as everything else. If they aren't, they probably should be. Commodities are great for markets and, as a side benefit, super beneficial to mental health. If there's nothing precious to gain, we stop worrying about gathering precious things.

Data sort of works this way. I can see where Ankur is coming from: I've plugged in an old magnetic hard drive only to find out that all my "precious things" from 2001 are gone forever. It's very possible to be attached to data and information and JPEGs just as it is possible to be attached to cars and jeans.

But they also behave in an inverse way. I keep a $500 pair of jeans in my closet and save it for special occasions because of greed and lust. But I throw data into Evernote or Gmail or Heap because I want to forget about it. Usually. And if Heap and Gmail didn't exist, I'd put that data on an ATA spinning disk and treat the disk as a proxy for the data... and then the disk becomes a pair of jeans. Having a Samus Aran Locker for data would, in some ways, mean I can combine mental off-loading and hoarding into one activity. Being attached to my data (or not) is not a factor of whether I save it or not. Detachment is an orthogonal exercise altogether and the only way to measure it is if all the Heap datacentres are bombed at once and I lose everything. But throwing things in the Heap is akin to writing things down, which is a great way to clear your head.

I do wish this existed.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment