I did this on a VM once - it's fun for about 15 minutes... then burn it all and start from scratch.

Is there a way to save and revert such metadata? I can’t think of anything that stores just FS metadata.

FreeBSD does! You can rescue yourself from this with mtree. Something like:

> cd /

> mtree -U -f /etc/mtree/BSD.root.dist

> mtree -U -f /etc/mtree/BSD.var.dist

> mtree -U -f /etc/mtree/BSD.include.dist

> mtree -U -f /etc/mtree/BSD.sendmail.dist

> mtree -U -f /etc/mtree/BSD.usr.dist

I think rsync has an option to copy everything but file contents. Couple that with 'find' running 'touch' and it should be fine. (create blank files, copy attributes to them)

Awesome, I've been wanting something like this for a while now - any plans to get it working on Android?

Unfortunately not, I had to write most of it in Swift so cannot cross-compile.

Gibson is cool and all, but why post this?

Why post anything? Because I was recently reading Neuromancer, looked up Gibson, and found his biography interesting.

HN needs a TIL tag.

(Would probably reduce the flow by 80%)

Wake me up when you have a readily available libraries to implement this in multiple programming languages.

There are libraries for SVD in any language you'd want to use.

You don't need libraries to train word vectors in all languages, you can just load precomputed vectors. In order to measure similarity between two vectors you only need 3 lines of code (it's a simple sum of products for a couple hundred real values).