How is this different from Terraform? Generally if something fails during a TF apply it saves the state of all the stuff that worked and just retries the thing that failed when you next run it. And reverting your TF stack and doing apply again should walk changes back.
There are specific things where that's not possible, and there are bugs, but it doesn't seem like what you said unless you meant that you just support a limited subset of resources that are known to be robust to reverts? But that's a fairly different claim.
The main difference is granularity. Terraform runs a plan and applies it as a batch. If something fails, you re-run apply and it retries from the last saved state... but that state is per-resource, not per-API-call.
Alien tracks state at the individual API call level. A single resource creation might involve 5-10 API calls (create IAM role -> attach policy -> create function -> configure triggers -> set up DNS...). If it fails at step 7, it resumes from step 7. Terraform would retry the entire resource.
The other difference is that Alien runs continuously, not as a one-shot apply. It's a long-running control plane that watches the environment, detects drift, and reconciles. Terraform assumes you run it, it converges, and then nothing changes until you run it again.
Speaking of granularity, I noticed that the 2 states of a resource seem to be:
> Frozen: Alien can only monitor it. Created once during setup, then Alien has no permissions to modify or delete it.
> Live: Alien can manage it from your cloud. Push code updates, roll config changes, redeploy — without the customer's involvement.
Is that really all? What about something like "Alien can run these 37 maintenance and debugging commands but cannot touch the firewall or modify routes or change any other access methods to internal resources"?
The whole psyop thing is only an issue if you use "popularity" and mass appeal (people following in instagram, etc) as a signal for finding stuff.
The alternative is to listen to less filtered/signalless stuff (which isn't hard - bandcamp new releases lists (or my bandhiking app) or even their trending charts which seem to be unpopular enough that it's not entirely controlled by marketing (lots of unlistenable stuff makes it onto the chart) and meet/hang out with other people who do the same for a minor filtering pass.
Popularity is the most popular (!) signal because this isn't really about the music - it's to have something to talk about with your friends, whether to bond over shared interest or signal something about yourself to your group. The same is true about any other interest: most people care a lot (arguably, primarily) about their interest being recognized and supported by other people.
Those of us who care about an interest for the sake of that interest, are called nerds.
They also screwed up the API token detection and also blocked a bunch of 1st party tool users for ~24h.
Support consisted of AI bots saying you did something stupid, you did something wrong, you were abusing the system, followed by (only when I asked for it explicitly) claiming to file a ticket with a human who will contact you later (and it either didn't happen or their ticket system is /dev/null).
(By the way this is the 2nd time I've been "please hold" gaslit by support LLMs this exact same way, the other being with Square)
What are x bookmarks? I think I need a concrete example.
Also what are its actual features? What does it export? High resolution media? Author information? Replies?
But also, this feels like a 5 minute vibe coded project you put together on a whim to try to make money. 50% of the description on every page is about paying you. I want a good twitter exporter, but I want something the author is invested in enough that it might conceivably work 5 months later too.
X is Twitter. You bookmark practically anything (post, comment, quote) and can find it later in one place.
I did put it together on a whim because I don't trust that something won't happen to X.com some years in the future with Elon and you legitimately cannot export your bookmarks from X. If that happens, your bookmarks will be lost.
Yes, it is a paid product because I put serious time into it and I designed it to be something I would use myself (even if I make no money off it).
Features are really simple. The annual license is $4.69 because I expect people to export their bookmarks only once every few months.
1. Chrome extension to scrape your bookmark page. You can find plenty of extensions that will do this, but they give you a JSON/CSV file that's not very useful.
2. The viewer is paid. You import the JSON from Step 1 and it loads all your bookmarks.
3. You can tag your bookmarks. You can download the media files embedded into each bookmark. You can delete your bookmarks.
4. You can export your bookmarks as another JSON that you can save or give to a friend (if you trust them with your private data).
5. I may add AI tagging for Claude to suggest tags for your bookmarks.
Why don't they just sell docker containers in the cloud? Why are they wrapping it up as a business-only local development compliance thing? And since they haven't published any pricing, why is it so expensive?
There are specific things where that's not possible, and there are bugs, but it doesn't seem like what you said unless you meant that you just support a limited subset of resources that are known to be robust to reverts? But that's a fairly different claim.
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