I decided to stop working on Mighty • Hacker News Board

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#21

Post by roflyear » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 4:18 PM UTC

amadeuspagel wrote: post #7

In May 2021 Paul Graham wrote Crazy New Ideas [1], in which he explained that envy is the only reason people criticize ideas by "reasonable domain experts". This was widely understood at the time to refer to critics of Mighty[2][3]. [1]: http://paulgraham.com/newideas.html [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27062713 [3]: https://www.echevarria.io/blog/the-mighty-pushback-isnt-all-...

I know to exist in the VC world you have to buy into insane shit and convince yourself you believe it is the next best thing, but this just seems so ludicrous to me. I don't understand it at all.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#22

Post by memish » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 4:19 PM UTC

Good pivot and a humbling reminder for us all. Jonathan Blow on the day this was announced, "Very hard to describe how embarrassing this is for everyone involved in the Web and, sort of, software more generally."

https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1387094702139142145

> Wait, Paul Graham supported this?

Jonathan: Very vocally, to the point of insulting world-class programmers who think it’s dumb (he did not know said programmers were world-class).

> Huh, I see. I thought he's all pro elegant and lean solutions, judging by the books and articles at least.

Jonathan: Yeah it doesn't make sense to me either.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#23

Post by _sohan » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 4:20 PM UTC

I was surprised that PG supported this idea so publicly for so long. Best of luck for the team on their next product.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#24

Post by fareesh » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 4:23 PM UTC

I was always quite skeptical of this being a popular use-case that grows over time.

Can the underlying technology be used to create a first class remote desktop experience? From the ones I've tried, I've found that NoMachine is among the best performing remote desktop tools. I never used Mighty but my guess is they must have achieved better performance than this? Was Mighty's technology tailored to Chrome only?

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#25

Post by arriu » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 4:24 PM UTC

Putting market fit aside, Mighty was a technical feat coming from a talented team.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#26

Post by pavlov » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 4:25 PM UTC

Some 5-6 years ago I built a live streaming backend that used a custom C++ encoding front around Chromium on GPU servers on AWS. Mighty probably does something pretty similar. It was the right solution for our users at that moment because our product was a professional tool at a relatively high price tag, and being able to run full HTML+CSS allowed us to deliver customized motion graphics quickly using available designer talent, so there was a distinct advantage there.

It was also quite expensive to run, and the stack was fickle because those Nvidia GPU servers aren’t designed to run client apps — they’re AI/ML solutions primarily. So I’m not surprised that Mighty is shutting down: the infra bills must have been running pretty hot and they seem to believe they can better spend their cash runway on AI, presumably on largely the same infra.

(Btw I’m giving a talk at the Kranky Geek virtual event on Thursday Nov 17 about cloud compositing which will discuss this Chromium adventure and what I believe is a better solution for most apps.)

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#27

Post by rightbyte » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 4:25 PM UTC

stavros wrote: post #19

secondcoming wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still stumped. It seems like a cloud-based browser?

Yeah, it looks like it streams the rendered pages as video from a server?

A X11-server in some crappy video fallback mode?

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#28

Post by bombcar » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 4:26 PM UTC

mbStavola wrote: post #3

I never understood the value proposition here, but I assume they had _some_ traction which motivated them to work on this for almost four years. Curious as to their numbers and what people walked away thinking after trying it.

In a world where phone CPUs weren’t as powerful as laptop CPUs it might have made sense.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#29

Post by nisten » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 4:27 PM UTC

I think it really was the M1 Chip that killed Mighty. The product itself looked like it was working great.

Before the value proposition was good. You can still use your old laptop and still have a very fast browser experience via remotely running it on a AMD server chip, this way you save on battery life and RAM too.

Then M1 speedometer scores started beating AMD Epyc on single core web browsing performance. Not only that, but even providing a much better experience in terms of battery life because of power savings.

Then yeah there was no point paying 20$-30$ a month for a remote browser instance. If you can afford that as a user you're either already set on CPU/GPU/RAM or better off just buying a used m1 air for It's quite sad of a lesson where you do everything right, work consistently hard, be quite innovative, have plenty of financial and talent resources, and still fail.

Tech obsolescence is brutal.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#30

Post by robenkleene » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 4:27 PM UTC

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 significance of Figma. The web has taken over in collaboration-focused software, e.g., things like Google Docs, Slack, etc... What really happened is that design has moved from specialized professional software (hard to use, powerful), to being more like collaboration software (easy to use, light).

I.e., what Figma really signals is that design is now more like new task that became more like using Google Docs app, not that high-powered tasks like video, photo, and audio editing are becoming web apps. This means what really powered Figma's takeover was that flat design took over, which is less technically demanding.