This is what happens when you rely on a service you have no control over. It'll happen now, it'll happen later, but at some point, somebody is going to decide they make more money turning the thing you rely on off.
The risk is always that they decide the service you're relying on is too niche/is being replaced by something else and you need to adapt.
Which is a thing that happens.
The big stuff like EC2 isn't likely to go away before Amazon itself goes away, but there are piles of other smaller services that may or may not. It's not Google in terms of getting rid of capabilities, but they sunset APIs and capabilities all the time. For good reason! It's probably not a good idea to be running Python 2.7 today, and there's no reason why they should want to support it.
So you're being snide but yes, this is a concern, and the deprecation schedule is solely under Amazon's control.
If at some point the cloud goes bust because on-prem is the new hotness (what's old is new again) in 10 or 20 years, you bet your damn bippy AWS will pull the plug when it makes sense for Amazon to do so.
And that's a product you pay for. If you're not paying for the product (I don't know if Twitter was offering free access to its APIs) then you're relying on the good will and support of the person/company providing the product/API and at any moment they can change their mind. As we've seen here.
If you rely on someone else's platform, you are at their mercy. If you don't believe me, wait another few days for yet another app developer to complain about getting locked out of an app store, or some payments platform locking them out of their account to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Pro Tip: Don't build "your life's work" around a third-party API over which you have no definitive control. Moving forward, the author would do well to keep that "top of mind."
His "life's work" is a fresh coat of paint on someone else's creation, which is of questionable value to begin with. And using his mother's death as a comedic prop in a public rant doesn't exactly engender sympathy.
you do realise that twitterific shaped a LOT of twitter in the early days, like he says in the article? that the concepts they pioneered in their app, which twitter didn't have (they didn't have a first party app for quite a while) are integral concepts to the very foundations of twitter?
i don't think his mum's death was a comedic prop, it was a storytelling device. what kind of person looks at that metaphor and says: i don't like this person, i will belittle their entire life?
Calling it a comedic prop is the charitable interpretation.
> We loved this app like I loved my mom.
He genuinely loves an app like his own mother? It says a lot about his opinion of his mother that an app can be on the same level in his estimation. For his sake and his mother's I hope this was an attempt at gallows humor, but it's a pretty horrible one.
> what kind of person looks at that metaphor and says: i don't like this person, i will belittle their entire life?
I'm not belittling his life, I'm belittling the phrase "life's work" used by the parent commenter. I wonder if the article's author would even consider it his life's work. He appears to run an entire company with a number of other projects.
I'm aware of the innovations. Personally I don't find them all that profound, but either way, it's just an alternate UI for a social network that isn't a particularly positive influence on the world. People in this thread painting it as some sort of magnum opus are being a bit grandiose, don't you think?
Look, if I was this guy I'd be pissed too. But elevating a Twitter client to the level of his recently deceased mother is in unbelievably poor taste, no matter how "groundbreaking" it was.
Normally I would agree 100%, but in this case the target has more than earned it and the tone matches the impact on the author so I give them a pass on it.
Yeah, I had a hard time getting through it. At least, I don't get the point the author is trying to make.
Is this really a surprise given the direction social data has gone in the past decade or so? APIs will only remain public as long as they are useful.
Elon sees an upside to making the API at twitter more private, in order to maintain control over Twitter's direction. You can argue as much as you want for, or against this, but don't add noise and make me rake through it.
Why? I loved reading something that was heartfelt and unfiltered. Does everything have to be sanitized to that it doesn't offend anyone's sensibilities? Because I find that offensive.
Being coarse on purpose to express yourself is perfect valid. It's not like he's being asked to critique Schopenhauer and his reply is "Fuck that shit." He's responding to having years of work rendered moot for no apparent reason beyond one man's preference.
Do you really think that "Space Karen" is a clever insult? It's such a boring meme. You might as well just print a "Spaceman Bad" t-shirt so that everyone knows your approach to technology is motivated by politics.
I don't have any opinion on it. I was explaining why I think the author used the language he did. Even if I did have an opinion on it, I don't think it's an insight into my politics, any more than simping for Musk would be an insight into yours.
Why is this hard to understand without bringing your politics into it?
If you build an app that depends on an API, it really sucks if that API is taken away. But we all know it happens. Even so, most companies care enough about goodwill that they will give some advance notice so that you can prepare for it.
In this case, the API was revoked with absolutely no advance warning for people like TapBots, who have been selling and supporting TweetBot for literally years, and now have to clean up the unexpected mess.
That's why, on their merits, Twitter the company and Musk the owner are complete dicks here.
Can you understand that, or is basic common decency too much woke orthodoxy for you?
I thought Dorsey was a doofus whose part-time management contributed to the utter stagnation of the product. And their API changes in 2012 were a shitty thing to do to developers, but perhaps less cowardly than the current changes.
I don't use it much these days, but hopefully it'll stick around, even if only as a Parler clone with $5B in debt, mostly populated by angry reply guys whining about wokeness. I'm sure you'll be happy there.
This is an absurd gotcha. If someone is pointing out that someone else is employing a political buzzword for that argument, that's somehow having a "propaganda driven mind"?
Everyone knows using the word "woke" like this is a cheap shot pejorative that has no substance, but pointing out someone using it like this is some kind of "obsession"? If the original poster didn't intend to be so provocative, maybe they shouldn't have leaned on using the words "woke orthodoxy" to make such a lazy point for them.
