I'm struck by the profundity of this loss. It's almost as bad as if something like archive.org were to just disappear. SaaS is so ephemeral. One day, you have access to a version of Google that works absurdly well. The next, it's gone forever.

I used to use Google so much that it felt like a border collie in those dog competitions. I knew how it behaved, I had a bank of commands/searches that I had half-memorized and which I could use to restore knowledge that had been evicted from my cache. It repeatedly surprised and delighted me with how smart and loyal it was. Like a good dog.

And then that dog got brain cancer. It doesn't know any commands anymore. All it can do is vomit up clickbait-y news stories from the last 4 years. And I'll never get to interact with the old one ever again. You can't archive.org a SaaS application.