In my current, semi-stealth machine learning project, I'm experimenting with using Linux filesystem extended attributes as a sort of "poor man's" database to store annotations in.

I'm not really sure this is turning out better than using, say, a SQLite database, but it's been interesting to try.

In the process, I built my own command line tool for manipulating xattrs, which I'm releasing under a GPL3 license, called Hatter. It's written in Rust since that's what I've mostly been writing the past few months.

There are probably many bugs, but it's working alright for me, so I figured I'd unleash it on the world. Just... don't go crazy

https://git.disroot.org/joshhansen/Hatter