Well it IS pretty useful; that's why most of my documents start with a date part like "160822 Something Something"; they'll still be sorted by /creation time/ next time I make a change.

Also very useful for photographs for example, when you can edit the EXIF without the whole lot becoming randomly sorted.

Once you go YYYY-MM-DD_HH-MM-SS for photographs, you'll never go back (having the exact millisecond would be neat though)

s/photographs/your documents/g

Yeah, I use creation time all the time on OS X. Meanwhile I can't imagine what access time would be used for.

atime is heavily used by traditional mail clients like mutt, to determine which mailboxes have new mail: If atime < mtime, then there has been a write to a file since the last read.

Because updating atime on every file access carries an IO overhead, there's a mount option "relatime" that only updates atime if atime < mtime. This preserves the "new mail" feature of mutt, but doesn't require atime writes for every file read operation, which is a decent compromise.

relatime has also been the default on Linux for many years.

I've been wanting to write a program that checks atime on stuff like music and then looks for bitcoin addresses to send micropayments to (so you get something like a generalised peer to peer Spotify). I've started a couple times but kept throwing it out, all my FSs that support it are still mounted with atime. I guess I've never knowingly used it for anything else though.

We use atime at work as a proxy for "does this file really need to exist?" on our cluster's scratch disks.

> This is why every project maintainer dreams of being Linus...

Most people who try do it poorly though. You have to be super smart to reject unneeded stuff while still allowing useful features to go through.

No you don't, you just have to fight for it.

Fighting hard isn't en end in itself. We'd have idiots fighting to the bitter end for cruft they happen to be personally invested in. It's really about taking responsibility for all the consequences of your decisions seriously.

Idiots fighting to the bitter end is a large part of what molds society today, unless I have severely missed something. Please educate me if I have.

I'm not sure "it's" really about taking responsibility for all the consequences of your decisions seriously, as much as it is creating the space and mechanisms for your ideas to come to fruition. We cannot "see" the consequences of our actions, but we can create systems that stabilize the world. Perhaps this is what you're talking about?

Really true.. People do many things, because they can