The Unofficial "Elon Musk trying to "Save Everyone" from Themselves (except his Step-Sister)" Thread...

[Pwyl]

I'm unfamiliar with the Twitter apis. Are they used to both search and post?  And I'm surprised they have no free tier.  And those prices per tier are stupid. Even Google has a free tier on their maps api, for example. 

[mistertim]

10 minutes ago, tshile said:

@mistertim

so at $oldjob we had a developer that would make a db call for every field on a record. so instead of a call to say 'get me this person' and having the entire record, it was "get first name", "get last name", "get dob" etc. and of course he didn't close his connections either. it was discovered when a ticket was put in to figure out why the database kept crashing 

 

but i'm guessing the enterprise rate is going to be a lower price per call, but not a flat monthly fee for unlimited access. essentially what the cloud computing model currently.

 

so wait till some dev ****s up and makes a loop of calls no one knows about until the gigantic bill comes in. 

 

 

 

That reminds me of an old job where we had built a bunch of private openstack cloud instances in our own datacenters. Then the bean counters decided we should forklift everything to AWS (without talking to any of the engineers).

 

So all of these devs were used to spinning up tons of VMs and just letting them sit there, because that's what they were used to doing and there was no penalty for it, since it was our own openstack instances.

 

And of course they just kept doing the same thing in AWS. I remember when the first bill came in and the ELT absolutely blew a gasket because they were estimating the bill to be around $400,000 and it was something like $4,000,000. 

 

I wonder if Twitter might be banking on people making these sort of ****ups, or if they just cut you off after you get to the limit you paid for (which means your entire application probably breaks until you pay for an upgrade).

[tshile]

2 minutes ago, Pwyl said:

I'm unfamiliar with the Twitter apis. Are they used to both search and post?  And I'm surprised they have no free tier.  And those prices per tier are stupid. Even Google has a free tier on their maps api, for example. 

 

They're used for anything thats done outside of logging into their website or using their mobile app.

 

The API is just a programmatic way to interface with the service. So instead of opening the app and searching for Pwyl's tweets since 1/1/2022, i can write a code to pull it.

but it's also used for pushing content as well - news orgs are the best example. their writer writes the article, editor does their thing, its approved and then the publish it. when they publish it, they have the option to:

- send it to production for the print paper stuff

- push it to their website

- send out email/text/push notifications to their people who subscribe to it

- push it to social media platforms like twitter/facebook/etc

and whatever the hell else they might need.

 

All these organizations don't have people manually opening up the twitter app, typing things in, and hitting submit. it's all automated.

 

Possum every hour guy isn't doing that manually. he has a library of pics and once an hour he has a service running that grabs a pic and posts it to the account.

 

but yes they're also used to research. you can pull geo locations of tweets, device information, you can also do things like:

- grab all the posts in the last hour that came from <country> or <city> - this is useful for tracking breaking news (among other things, like research)

- grab all the posts that occur between 2am eastern and 3 am eastern, every day, for the last 6 months

- get me a list of followers for this set of people (say you're tracking white supremesists for example)

 

law enforcement undoubtedly uses them. at least the ones smart enough to understand the value, and have a need to know whats going on with twitter.

 

there's a lot of things the API does. and for a platform not run by a ****stick, that list of things would grow over time as the platform matures. because basically they write these things for internal use anyways, they just publish them publicly when they decide there's value there.

 

 

[Cooked Crack]

How long till Elon breaks embeds?

[Pwyl]

I know what apis are and how they work lol.  I've been writing, consuming, and complaining about stupid implementations of them for 20 years.  (Really Aruba networks... Cookies in what is supposed to be a REST implementation??) 

 

Your answer was good though, tshile, thanks for the info.  

[tshile]

7 minutes ago, Cooked Crack said:

How long till Elon breaks embeds?

He likely doesn’t have any control over that. The embed stuff, if it is working on api access, could also just scrape the actual tweet. 
 

I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re all currently using apis for that as it would be way clearer than scarping the site, so it’s a question of who would be willing to rewrite it to scrape and how long would that take and how buggy will it be

Just now, Pwyl said:

I know what apis are and how they work lol.  I've been writing, consuming, and complaining about stupid implementations of them for 20 years.  (Really Aruba networks... Cookies in what is supposed to be a REST implementation??) 

 

Your answer was good though, tshile, thanks for the info.  

Sorry I was trying to answer what they’re used for on Twitter. It’s been a while since I’ve used them. But things I used them for was geo location stuff for comp sci projects in college. 
 

twitter was a really good place to practice data mining

 

[Jumbo]

26 minutes ago, mistertim said:

 

That reminds me of an old job where we had built a bunch of private openstack cloud instances in our own datacenters. Then the bean counters decided we should forklift everything to AWS (without talking to any of the engineers).

 

So all of these devs were used to spinning up tons of VMs and just letting them sit there, because that's what they were used to doing and there was no penalty for it, since it was our own openstack instances.

 

And of course they just kept doing the same thing in AWS. I remember when the first bill came in and the ELT absolutely blew a gasket because they were estimating the bill to be around $400,000 and it was something like $4,000,000. 

 

I wonder if Twitter might be banking on people making these sort of ****ups, or if they just cut you off after you get to the limit you paid for (which means your entire application probably breaks until you pay for an upgrade).

 

This post has more terms I didn't understand than in my entire first semester in neuroscience. 

[CousinsCowgirl84]

1 hour ago, tshile said:

 

 

 

but i was really talking about this notion of yours that it should be paid for, that it costs twitter money, etc.

 

 

twitter isn't providing tools. it isn't providing faster access to anything. it's simply letting you interact with the site the same way you can with your app - but in a way to makes many tasks incredibly easier.

 

 

Any access of twitters servers cost something. Automated calls to twitters servers will happen more frequently that if a user had to visit the site, so there is an added cost involved with allowing access to Twitter API.

The Twitter API (of any API) is a set of tools that allow you to interact with the site. And it allows you to access info easier. So I think Twitter can possibly charge for that. You don’t. It has nothing to do with knowing about APIs. 

 

56 minutes ago, tshile said:

 

 

I mean i could see some just paying it,

 

 Except you do think Twitter can charge for it; you just disagree with them on cost (which I also agree is too high)

 

i used to do some hobbyist level work with a few APIs (I think accuweather) and they charged for API calls but as long as you made less than 500/mo it was free, and the charges were much less for higher tiers than what Twitter is trying to charge now….

Edited February 3, 2023 by CousinsCowgirl84

[tshile]

2 minutes ago, CousinsCowgirl84 said:

Any access of twitters servers cost something. Automated calls to twitters servers will happen more frequently that if a user had to visit the site, so there is an added cost involved with allowing access to Twitter API.

The Twitter API (of any API) is a set of tools that allow you to interact with the site. And it allows you to access info easier. So I think Twitter can possibly charge for that. You don’t. It has nothing to do with knowing about APIs. 

 

 Except you do think Twitter can charge for it; you just disagree with them on cost (which I also agree is too high)

 

Jesus Christ. Of course they *can* charge for it. I just don’t think many will pay for it. I think you’ll see large orgs that can afford it. and that’s it. 
 

and this “any access to twitter servers” stuff is so vapid I don’t even know what to say. 

[CousinsCowgirl84]

2 minutes ago, tshile said:

 

Jesus Christ. Of course they *can* charge for it. I just don’t think many will pay for it. I think you’ll see large orgs that can afford it. and that’s it. 
 

 

cool, then we aren’t necessarily in disagreement then. 

 

[tshile]

7 minutes ago, CousinsCowgirl84 said:

It has nothing to do with knowing about APIs. 

You think understanding how apis work, what they are used for, etc is irrelevant to the discussion of whether you should charge or what you should charge for accessing them. 
 

Well that about sums it up. Having a strong position on a topic with no knowledge of it. 

[Spaceman Spiff]

I'm here because I saw this thread is "hot" and CC84 made the last post.  I'm assuming there's something hilarious brewing.

 

2 minutes ago, Jumbo said:

 

This post has more terms I didn't understand than in my entire first semester in neuroscience. 

 

AWS (Amazon Web Services) is pay as you go.  In other words, if you have not a lot of storage space being taken up in the cloud, your bill will be pretty light.  But if you have a lot of information, you can rack up a pretty high bill.  But the charge goes up and down as you use the service so it should be scalable and predictable.  You can put practically anything you want up there from storing photos and music to having things like servers and email and day to day business needs.

 

A VM is a virtual machine, in other words a virtual server.  In the old days you'd have a closet with a rack and you could count the number of servers in the rack.  Now you can have one physical server running a bunch of "virtual servers" on it.  It's a way to save space and save computing power.  Or in this case with Amazon Web Services, the servers are in the cloud, and aren't taking up any physical space anywhere, they're just using the AWS cloud for the computing power.

 

So in mistertim's story, these developers could "spin up" (industry specific lingo for starting a new server or creating a new server) and put it up into AWS, unaware that the more servers they'd put up in AWS the bigger the bill would be.  These developers had been previously working in a private environment where they could spin up a server on a whim and not have to pay anything extra for it...but since AWS is pay as you go, they ran up a big bill pretty quickly.  Kind of like a drunk college student on spring break in Cancun with a cell phone that's not on an international plan.

 

 

[Jabbyrwock]

39 minutes ago, mistertim said:

 

That reminds me of an old job where we had built a bunch of private openstack cloud instances in our own datacenters. Then the bean counters decided we should forklift everything to AWS (without talking to any of the engineers).

 

So all of these devs were used to spinning up tons of VMs and just letting them sit there, because that's what they were used to doing and there was no penalty for it, since it was our own openstack instances.

 

And of course they just kept doing the same thing in AWS. I remember when the first bill came in and the ELT absolutely blew a gasket because they were estimating the bill to be around $400,000 and it was something like $4,000,000. 

 

I wonder if Twitter might be banking on people making these sort of ****ups, or if they just cut you off after you get to the limit you paid for (which means your entire application probably breaks until you pay for an upgrade).

 

11 minutes ago, Jumbo said:

 

This post has more terms I didn't understand than in my entire first semester in neuroscience. 

 

A "job" is an agreement where you trade life for money.

[CousinsCowgirl84]

6 minutes ago, tshile said:

You think understanding how apis work, what they are used for, etc is irrelevant to the discussion of whether you should charge or what you should charge for accessing them. 
 

Well that about sums it up. Having a strong position on a topic with no knowledge of it. 

I don’t have a strong position. I said I’m not sure whether or not it will work out in the original post you quoted. You must have just skimmed the post. You’ve said yourself some people might pay (and pay a lot) for API access. So the only question is does Twitter gain more that it loses by charger for API access?

Your position is that they will loose more than they gain, mine is that it is hard to say.

Edited February 3, 2023 by CousinsCowgirl84

[tshile]

@Jumbo aws (and gcp (google) and azure (Microsoft)) charge by how much compute power your use. 
 

Theres an entire job field, that pays very very well, writing code to scale your system up/down so it meets demand without running up a huge bill unnecessarily. 
 

Their devs were idiots and didn’t turn their stupid **** off they didn’t need, after moving to a cloud provider (aws), and ran up a huge bill. 

[tshile]

7 minutes ago, CousinsCowgirl84 said:

I don’t have a strong position. I said I’m not sure whether or not it will work out in the original post you quoted. You must have just skimmed the post. You’ve said yourself some people might pay (and pay a lot) for API access. So the only question is does Twitter gain more that it loses by charger for API access?

Your position is that they will loose more than they gain, mine is that it is hard to say.

my position, just to be clear, is that this I stupid because no one does this. Public api’s are done to drive use and improve the product. this is going to make Twitter less useful to people. Especially since you won’t be able to use it for news. 
 

this is going to be twitter blue all over again. 
 

do you sense the pattern yet?
 

 

[CousinsCowgirl84]

8 minutes ago, tshile said:

my position, just to be clear, is that this I stupid because no one does this.

 

 

Plenty of sites charge for access to their API.

 

In fact, there are websites dedicated to pricing your APIs. That’s where Elon needs the help.

 

Again all you are saying is that you feel like it is a bad idea for Twitter to do it. 

Edited February 3, 2023 by CousinsCowgirl84

[China]

59 minutes ago, mistertim said:

 

That reminds me of an old job where we had built a bunch of private openstack cloud instances in our own datacenters. Then the bean counters decided we should forklift everything to AWS (without talking to any of the engineers).

 

So all of these devs were used to spinning up tons of VMs and just letting them sit there, because that's what they were used to doing and there was no penalty for it, since it was our own openstack instances.

 

 

 

31 minutes ago, Jumbo said:

 

This post has more terms I didn't understand than in my entire first semester in neuroscience. 

 

Yeah, it made me think of this:

 

 

 

[ixcuincle]

 I ain't no fancy schmancy web develomepoer but it seems to me Twitter shouldn't be charging for the API. I got called a leech for using my third party app to get tweets to post on ES lol

 

Spare me the poor narrative of Elon trying to rescue and white knight Twitter, the service seemed perfectly fine before he made massive cuts

[spjunkies]

I've stopped following the Twitter garbage, but wasn't that tool voted out of his role? When is he stepping down?

[Llevron]

The people who sold him this **** must wake up everyday laughing their ****ing asses off. 
 

1 minute ago, spjunkies said:

I've stopped following the Twitter garbage, but wasn't that tool voted out of his role? When is he stepping down?

 

He says no one who is capable of running it as well as he is, is willing to take the job. So **** your democratic process. 

[Jabbyrwock]

7 minutes ago, Llevron said:

He says no one who is capable of running it as well as he is, is willing to take the job.

 

I guess there just aren't enough stable geniuses out there.

[Cooked Crack]

 

[Cooked Crack]

Literally watching Rush Hour from a tweet. It's got 3 million views and been up for two weeks. If Elon wants to pivot to being a pirating site, I'm down.

[TradeTheBeal!]

Super.