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I decided to stop working on Mighty

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Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#121

Post by userabchn »

hmate9 wrote: post #92

Suhail’s Twitter is definitely worth a follow as he is regularly tweeting about the everyday problems and challenges of running a startup. If you’re interested in the space it’s a good mix of technical and startup challenges and is one of the few Twitter accounts that provides great content all the time (in my opinion)

Although I follow him, I get such a feeling of arrogance from his tweets (similar to the Repl.it guy) that, although the failure of a startup is sad, I can't help feeling some satisfaction from this development (also partly from the vindication as I was certain that this wouldn't work as soon as it was announced).

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#122

Post by Kwpolska »

danpalmer wrote: post #58
robenkleene wrote: post #30

The trick of Figma claims another. I see Mighty as part of the broader trend of folks thinking Figma it the leading edge of a wider transition to web apps across all creative work. But all forms of coding and media editing (the main tasks that are truly CPU/GPU-bound, the area where something like Mighty would help) have remained as local desktop app affairs. I think what really happened is folks misinterpreted the s…

> But all forms of coding and media editing (the main tasks that are truly CPU/GPU-bound, the area where something like Mighty would help) have remained as local desktop app affairs. Media creation maybe, but I feel like professional software engineering might move soon. At the beginning of the year I moved from a company where I worked entirely locally, running a local stack, developing in a local editor, etc, to a…

What hardware do you use to talk to the box under your desk? How do you work remotely with this setup, and what if the network VPN goes down?

Working in this way depends a lot on the stack you’re working with. For languages like Java or C#, where you can’t really work productively without an IDE, browser-based VSCode won’t cut it for most people. (I’d prefer a JetBrains IDE over VSCode too.) If your language doesn’t have a good remote debugging story, a remote-first stack won’t cut it.

This setup with a box under your desk doesn’t sound reasonable to me from a financial side either. According to your profile, you’re at Google, so I assume the hardware you use to access the box is a Chromebook. Sure, those are dirt cheap, but is a desktop + Chromebook combo really cheaper than one reasonably priced PC laptop with specs similar to the desktop?

I think I’m still happy with my beefy (spec-wise and kilogram-wise) laptop, having the ability to do everything directly on the machine (with no network round-trip for every operation), and still being able to do things if the VPN or the network goes down (with limitations, of course).

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#123

Post by oops »

fuckstick wrote: post #111
oops wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the analogy. I never heard it before now, but I instantly understood what I think it meant: build something that is harder to live without. I have nothing to back this up but I’d think most people think of a vitamin as easier to live without than a painkiller. > For example: was Facebook a painkiller? Hardly. I don’t know. People without pain do take painkillers. And they can have a really hard time stopping.…

> I don’t know. People without pain do take painkillers. And they can have a really hard time stopping. In that sense, I would argue that Facebook is a lot like a painkiller for a lot of people! Nice, you’ve explained by demonstration better than I could why this is a trash analogy and only confuses issues, does not clarify them. Consider stopping using it.

No post body was provided.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#125

Post by wmf »

anhncommenter25 wrote: post #95

Mighty was like compute arbitrage. The bet was that you could buy compute at cloud prices, resell it to end users, and since this is cheaper than buying consumer compute in the form of workstations, laptops, & tablets, you can pocket the difference. I can't think of a bigger slice of consumer compute than browser workload; so if the scheme doesn't work there, it won't work for anything. My conclusion is that compute…

Hasn't cloud compute always been far more expensive than local hardware? I don't see any arbitrage opportunity here.

Twenty years ago VDI wanted to replace desktop PCs with VMware ($$$) running on quad-socket servers ($$$) with fibre channel SAN storage ($$$). I didn't understand the economics then and I don't today.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#126

Post by [deleted] »

talhof8 wrote: post #39

I don't think it's M1 that killed it. Probably high server costs and being a vitamin and not a painkiller killed it. Also, people are not too happy about giving away their browser history data to server-side powered browsers. That being said, it's still sad to see startups fail. Hopefully they'll have better luck with their new direction. Fingers crossed!

[deleted]

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#127

Post by charbonneau3 »

Nathanael_M wrote: post #45
searchableguy wrote: post #13

Everyone is pivoting to AI creative tools recently. So much interest and explosion.

In a couple decades people are going to have to radically consider where they find personal value and identity.

There will be apps for that.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#128

Post by dmarcos »

beebeepka wrote: post #106
iopq wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait until adblockers stop working, and see many people start seeing YouTube ads again. Will they agree to stay on Chrome?

My only use for chromium is youtube. I only watch a handful of channels but things are getting ridiculous. Sometimes I get ads every minute. Every minute! Just the other day I got served 5 ads in a row after a simple fast forward. I gave up TV more than 20 years ago and this crap is way worse. What can I do without letting them in my actual browser? These people are crazy.

I highly recommend Youtube Premium. Also heard from creators that they get paid more from Premium views than from free accounts.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#129

Post by csande17 »

aniforprez wrote: post #80
paulgb wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve talked to a couple of very loyal Mighty users. If you think about the number of hours a knowledge worker spends in the browser every month, it works out to a pretty small price per hour. It’s similar to people in jobs that require them to live out of their inbox paying (a comparable amount) for Superhuman.

I'm really REALLY not sure how it makes sense to pay that much for a remote browser unless there's something I'm missing which I have to think is the case. What was the actual hook here? Surely a remote browser cannot have been worth it for 240-360 dollars a year? Wouldn't it have been more worth it to simply buy an M1 Mac or a Surface? How are people suffering from slow browsers that much?

There's a reasonably sized market segment of people who, themselves, work at startups with dubious value propositions. They try to prop up the whole ecosystem by spending a lot of money on each other. (Source: worked at a late-stage startup, spent weeks integrating APIs that did nothing but were owned by a friend of the CEO.)

There's another segment of people who can be sold snake oil. They aren't actually very sensitive to UI responsiveness, so they won't notice the extra latency added by the streaming service, but they will believe claims that it is "faster" than what they're currently using in some nebulous way. (These are the same kind of people who rewrite their app in React because they believe React makes apps faster.)

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