Cloud desktops aren't as good as you'd think

Just a heads up for others trying to read this, I think the are backwards.

I've been using this in one form or another for a very long time. Starting when we had Windows desktops with bad Linux support, and back then you couldn't run both OS's on the same machine at the same time.

So I stuck a workstation with Linux on it in a closet. Fired up VNC and I could hit it from home, my cubicle, the road, wherever. It's evolved over the years as things became faster and more secure. It became a co-located server, then a VPS, and now it's a shared setup on a beefy server.

It maintains it's state no matter where I go. I can open up two ore more sessions for two ore more monitors. But it's more useful to just surf the web or open PDF's or whatever on the local machine. Copy and paste is pretty seamless these days. And wherever it's located, has a much better network connection than I do.

You still have a latency problem with large files (CD .iso in the old days, a 10GB package these days). I don't play games so I don't really know how that goes. But for development it works great, as well as just a general workstation.

I have a website with a worker process doing RSS parsing that occasionally fails. It would be quite nice to be able to spend 10 minutes fixing trivial bugs from my phone while I'm out and about. Or from my iPad. I'm not doing feature development but this would be nice to have for things that are so easy I could do them now but instead must wait hours or days until I'm back in front of my dev machine.

And actually I have a desktop and a laptop that I do dev work on. More than once I've started a branch on the desktop one night but don't quite get far enough to push it up and the next day I take my laptop to the coffee shop and realize the code is still at home.

That’s off by about an order of magnitude – highly skilled humans can see and react in less than 120ms. One thing which can complicate discussion on this is that there are different closely related things: how quickly you can see, understand, and react is slower than just seeing which is slower than seeing a change in an ongoing trend (that’s why you notice stutter more than isolated motion), and there are differences based on the type of change (we see motion, contrast, orientation, and color at different latencies due to how signals are processed starting in the cortex and progressing through V1, V2, V3, V4, etc.) how focused you are on the action (e.g. watching to see a bird move is different than seeing the effect of something you’re directly controlling). Audio is generally lower latency than visual, too.

All of this means that the old figures are not useful as a rule of thumb unless your task is exactly what they studied. This paper notes how unhelpful that is with ranges from 2-100ms! They found thresholds around 25ms for some tasks but as low as 6ms for some tasks.

https://www.tactuallabs.com/papers/howMuchFasterIsFastEnough...

Keyboard latency is one of the harder ends of this spectrum: the users are focused, expecting a strong (high contrast, new signal) change in direct response to their action, and everything is highly trained to the point of being reflex.

When I’m typing text, I’m not waiting for the change to hit a key outside of games but rather expecting things like text to appear as expected or a cursor to move. Awhile back I tested this and the latency difference between VSC’s ~15ms key-to-character was noticeably smoother compared to 80+ms (Atom, Sublime) and the Citrix system I tested at 120-150ms (Notepad is like 15ms normally) was enough slower that it forced a different way of thinking about it (for me, that was “like a BBS” because I grew up in the 80s).

n.b. I’m not an expert in this but worked in a neuroscience lab for years supporting researchers who studied the visual system (including this specific issue) so I’m very confident that the overall message is “it’s complicated” even if I’m misremembering some of the details.

There is one more point I would like to add to the "less friction to start." This is the killer feature for education.

No more do students have to set up their own envs. Figure out PYTHONPATH. No more do educators need to debug installation issues on 3 different OSes.

Teachers distribute a pre setup env which they know works for what they are trying to teach. Students go straight into writing code and building things with minimum friction.

Learning to set up your env can be punted to a problem for later.