Robin Sloan: Digital software experiments inevitably break compared to durable physical books
Robin Sloan · Microbes, Robots, and Ambition - Robin Sloan on His Novel Sourdough · Y Combinator · Nov 29, 2017 · at 24:40
Author Robin Sloan explains digital ephemerality after his iOS app Fish stopped running on newer iOS versions because he lost the source code.
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“You make these digital things, and unlike a book where once you bind it up and put it on a shelf, even if it gets forgotten, even if it gets damaged, or, you know, whatever, it's like still, It boots somehow. You can, like, compile and run that printed book basically forever. And boy, that is just not the case with digital stuff. Like, the ground shifts under your feet, and suddenly the platform you built it on goes out of business. Or, you know, the OS gets upgraded, and you're like, the APIs are different.”
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