so you're right its not exactly the same (and it might not even be a very similar implementation ala how docker is), but the bullet points are the same.
ephemeral, instant boot strap, append only (I'm pretty sure I was the first person to use ephemeral computing this way, at the time I couldn't find anything that touched it. People used containers, ala ZFS/Zones, but they were generally meant for long term computing and not for bringing up an environment for a very small period of time and then tearing it down.)
though we also approached recording and forking your computation at will - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1323293.1294289 (I'm proud of coining the name), though it strongly relates to Microsoft's recall so it would probably be viewed less positively today (in fact, this might be closer in implementation to what they are doing than the above).
with that said, it was a bit more tongue in cheek than anything.
as an aside, I sort of wonder in the age of AI and the ability to reproduce anything easily, we might have to expand patents (related to comment below that got downvoted), but dont have strong thoughts on this yet.
I have to try it but I am very well interested in the decentralized agents mentioned there, I am tired of scattered agents and sessions across multiple OSes and harnesses I have, I just need one say an LXC that I can self host and automatically sync (or rather async like push/pull) all my harnesses, regardless wherever the previous session was.
The evergreen observation; The most self-promote-y among us are mostly using AI to reinvent solutions and disguise them as new designs. These address solved problems, which are themselves disguised as new agentic problems.
Celebrating and promoting this stuff does not help us get better at discovering and building actually new things; change my mind.
I disagree. Its full of AI slop. Too much animation (cute but distracting) I literally tried for 20 minutes and couldn't focus on reading. I just couldnt comprehend anything.
The difference is this one (layerfs) was vibe coded™ and the other (btrfs) is battle tested in mission critical systems for years in the Linux kernel and used by many companies in the SNP 500.
Do not be fooled by the "vibes" of the website design which many here are. If it is too good to be true, it most likely is.
That's what I was concerned about. An unstable filesystem is worse than no filesystem at all; I'd really like to switch to bcachefs but it simply needs to have a few more years under its belt before I'll be comfortable with it (particularly for some of its best use cases, where it becomes responsible for backups).
It's fine if you stay away from it's raid5/6. And realize it isn't going to let you know when you have a mirror fail until you try to boot it and it won't come up.
Been there (16 years ago), done that (15 year ago), patented it (13 years ago) :) almost the same name too.
https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenix-atc-10/apiary-easy-...
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa11/tech/full_papers/...
https://patents.google.com/patent/US8589947B2/
Would you mind ELI5’ing the similarities? I’m seeing only high level concepts that sound the same.
so you're right its not exactly the same (and it might not even be a very similar implementation ala how docker is), but the bullet points are the same.
ephemeral, instant boot strap, append only (I'm pretty sure I was the first person to use ephemeral computing this way, at the time I couldn't find anything that touched it. People used containers, ala ZFS/Zones, but they were generally meant for long term computing and not for bringing up an environment for a very small period of time and then tearing it down.)
This paper with bellovin applied it to system administration - https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa09/tech/full_papers/...
though we also approached recording and forking your computation at will - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1323293.1294289 (I'm proud of coining the name), though it strongly relates to Microsoft's recall so it would probably be viewed less positively today (in fact, this might be closer in implementation to what they are doing than the above).
with that said, it was a bit more tongue in cheek than anything.
as an aside, I sort of wonder in the age of AI and the ability to reproduce anything easily, we might have to expand patents (related to comment below that got downvoted), but dont have strong thoughts on this yet.
Here’s an alternative that runs on your browser: https://nicobrenner.github.io/lossy-git/demo.html
PS: it’s just a fun play on memory/storage and AI. Hope you enjoy :)
This was more interesting/amusing than the OP!
I have to try it but I am very well interested in the decentralized agents mentioned there, I am tired of scattered agents and sessions across multiple OSes and harnesses I have, I just need one say an LXC that I can self host and automatically sync (or rather async like push/pull) all my harnesses, regardless wherever the previous session was.
Dumb javascript is preventing me from seeing the footer, by scrolling back up to some content it thinks I shiould see.
How is it v1 with an architecture page coming soon? I'm really having a hard time gauging the maturity of software & services these days.
This website behaves very strangely... scroll hijack. Also everything is suuuuuper stretched out.
If you scroll down enough, you can't scroll up anymore!
EDIT: If you scroll down to the commit graph and have your mouse inside the big commit graph rectangle, you can't scroll up anymore!
UnionFS and overlay2, and the concept of layer filesystems existing makes this naming unfortunate and confusing.
Kudos. We did/built something internally to solve similar-ish problems https://www.shayon.dev/post/2026/283/versioned-filesystem-fo...
ShowHN: WoolJ.ai the virtual wool jersey tailor-made for your most special coding agents
We went from copy/paste this | sudo bash --> Copy this large prompt that installs stuff | AI Agent
The evergreen observation; The most self-promote-y among us are mostly using AI to reinvent solutions and disguise them as new designs. These address solved problems, which are themselves disguised as new agentic problems.
Celebrating and promoting this stuff does not help us get better at discovering and building actually new things; change my mind.
Nice website, but that's about it
> Nice website
I disagree. Its full of AI slop. Too much animation (cute but distracting) I literally tried for 20 minutes and couldn't focus on reading. I just couldnt comprehend anything.
I'm so glad someone else couldn't focus I thought I was losing my mind here.
ho yes please hack my browser scroll so I can't read your site (MacOS Safari)
How is this any different than something like btrfs?
The difference is this one (layerfs) was vibe coded™ and the other (btrfs) is battle tested in mission critical systems for years in the Linux kernel and used by many companies in the SNP 500.
Do not be fooled by the "vibes" of the website design which many here are. If it is too good to be true, it most likely is.
That's what I was concerned about. An unstable filesystem is worse than no filesystem at all; I'd really like to switch to bcachefs but it simply needs to have a few more years under its belt before I'll be comfortable with it (particularly for some of its best use cases, where it becomes responsible for backups).
I would not trust btrfs with anything mission critical.
It's fine if you stay away from it's raid5/6. And realize it isn't going to let you know when you have a mirror fail until you try to boot it and it won't come up.
> is battle tested in mission critical systems for years
And still crashes and corrupts filesystems all the time.
(I have one server platform where just doing `insmod btrfs` immediately locks up the server, hard, without even any kernel panic or log message.)
How recent is that code?
Or this https://arxiv.org/html/2602.08199v1