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Crazy New Ideas

paulgraham.com

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Re: Crazy New Ideas

#241

Post by razorfen »

bsedlm wrote: post #192
stephc_int13 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This idea of a dumb client is not new, it has been around basically forever, but we're seeing it again in multiple different incarnations because it could be huge. And I mean that in a bad way. Privacy and users rights are already pretty bad, but we still own our computers. I can see how it would start in the corporate world.

It's like they don't understand that (seemingly) forgotten archiectural principle of the internet which says that the "intelligence" goes in the ends: i.e. the leaves are smart, the nodes are as dumb as pipes. Thus they insist on making the nodes (the servers) smart and the clients (leaves) dumb.

It’s the first I’d heard of this axiom. Can you give an example of that in a real architecture?

I think about a central server with multiple terminals on a network. There the node is the beefy boi and the terminals are just I/O devices. Kind of similar to what MightyApp is doing - except with fewer privacy concerns :)

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#242

Post by lghh »

bestinterest wrote: post #4

Very interesting. This sounds like a response to the Mighty [0] launch which Paul Graham has been defending on twitter recently after an outcry from some of the 'hardcore' developers such as Jonathan Blow [1] and Casey [2]. [0] https://www.mightyapp.com/ [1] https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1387101172230672389 [2] https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1387645578067124224

I don't understand how Jonathan Blow of all people, figurehead behind several great video games that would have been impossible to run on a supercomputer 25 years ago, could possible have this take.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#243

Post by Kye »

yifanl wrote: post #152
stephc_int13 wrote: post #89

In case someone missed the story, Paul Graham is indirectly talking about the feedback received by Mighty App. And in this particular case, I don't think this is a valid defense. First, he clearly has too much skin in the game to be credibly neutral about it. Second, he avoids addressing the main critique about this "new tech". People are not claiming that it is a bad idea because it is infeasible or not valuable, bu…

This domain is frustrating to talk about as a technical person because success isn't based on technical soundness, but rather popularity. So any argument I could realistically make against $sillyAppThatHasVCBacking will not matter if enough Paul Grahams back it and $sillyApp makes itself a moat. WeWork would be the most prominent example of this; even after their 2019/2020 crash, they'll probably come out of the pand…

The Behind the Bastards series on this was great.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#244

Post by HDMI_Cable »

drclau wrote: post #216
arua442 wrote: post #148

I don't like how Paul's writing always gets hundreds of likes just because it's by him. Not everything he writes is amazing. I wish there wasn't such a cult around him.

I think this may be an American thing. People as successful as PG, Musk, Bezos, Gates etc become demigods, for a majority of people. Cults are created around them. They can never be wrong and so on. As a result, the opposition arises too: the people who dislike these demigods for the same reasons their followers like them. I say this is probably an American thing because I don’t see this happening in Europe. I worked…

All of the attention around these guys seems like an extension of celebrity culture. I know Europe (in particular the UK and France) have a somewhat large culture around celebrities and their opinions / comings-and-doings, but the US is on a different level.

These founder-cults seem like the cults around the Kardashians (or whoever), but for guys who couldn't care less about movies but really want to be rich.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#245

Post by easton »

merwanedr wrote: post #225

HN comment section pessimism is a new metric for evaluating your odds of success. "It's too expensive" or "Nobody needs it because we have X" on a project lead by a domain expert is not constructive criticism or conservatism, it's pure envy. PG isn't defending Mighty, Dropbox or Coinbase because he has skin in the game, but because he knows what the teams have achieved and what they could potentially achieve. I don't…

Mighty's problem is different than the others though, in that it is a thin client for a thin client. If web apps are too big to the point people need to stream Chrome in a container to get them to run well, why wouldn't you just stream them a full operating system where developers didn't have to target the web with all of its oddities and instead could just target Windows (or Linux)? The entire point of web applications was that they didn't require an install and were lighter than their desktop counterparts, and now that isn't true, so can't we ditch them?

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#246

Post by vidarh »

bsedlm wrote: post #192
stephc_int13 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This idea of a dumb client is not new, it has been around basically forever, but we're seeing it again in multiple different incarnations because it could be huge. And I mean that in a bad way. Privacy and users rights are already pretty bad, but we still own our computers. I can see how it would start in the corporate world.

It's like they don't understand that (seemingly) forgotten archiectural principle of the internet which says that the "intelligence" goes in the ends: i.e. the leaves are smart, the nodes are as dumb as pipes. Thus they insist on making the nodes (the servers) smart and the clients (leaves) dumb.

There's an ongoing tension here between software getting complex enough to be slow and people wanting to move computation to servers.

The problem with that, of course, is that the clients inevitably gets faster, and cheaper, and software gets pushed to the leaves again.

We're carrying around what used to be super computers.

This is also why I would be very cautious about investing in something that bets on offloading computation from clients: If you time it right, it could be huge for a while, but you're betting against advances in the speed and cost of computation. The same advances you'll rely on to scale and drive down costs.

As such it feels to me like they're playing a game of musical chairs.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#247

Post by PragmaticPulp »

wildermuthn wrote: post #81
bestinterest wrote: post #4

Very interesting. This sounds like a response to the Mighty [0] launch which Paul Graham has been defending on twitter recently after an outcry from some of the 'hardcore' developers such as Jonathan Blow [1] and Casey [2]. [0] https://www.mightyapp.com/ [1] https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1387101172230672389 [2] https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1387645578067124224

It is fascinating to me how quickly people reject the premise of Mighty, even after PG lists all the good reasons for replacing judgment with curiosity. I’ll admit, my initial reaction to Mighty was “I can’t imagine it ever being faster than my behemoth PC.” But then I stopped for a second and got curious. What is Mighty, really? It is a thin-client. That’s it. And are thin-clients a bad thing? Well, if latency is an…

> It is fascinating to me how quickly people reject the premise of Mighty, even after PG lists all the good reasons for replacing judgment with curiosity.

I was curious about Mighty and looking forward to their technology. That’s not the problem.

The judgment came largely when they announced that it cost up to $600/year. It costs so much that it’s actually cheaper to buy a whole new computer if you might need it for a year or more. Once you put a price tag on something and ask people to pay for it, judgment is fair game.

This whole dismissal of people saying that they couldn’t justify the product for the price as some sort of anti-curiosity thing feels disingenuous.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#248

Post by fallingknife »

flunhat wrote: post #104
fallingknife wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You actually add credibility to his writing because you make it obvious that you don't actually have a counter argument.

How can you effectively counter an essay with so many empty generalizations and broad assertions? It would be like debating jello.

Well you could say that instead of going after the author.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#249

Post by stephc_int13 »

elbasti wrote: post #204
bestinterest wrote: post #4

Very interesting. This sounds like a response to the Mighty [0] launch which Paul Graham has been defending on twitter recently after an outcry from some of the 'hardcore' developers such as Jonathan Blow [1] and Casey [2]. [0] https://www.mightyapp.com/ [1] https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1387101172230672389 [2] https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1387645578067124224

I am actually in Mighty's market if it cost ~$10usd per month, not $50. At our startup we have a small org of customer service reps. They basically live in four tools: Notion, Slack, Chrome, and Front. These four tools have one thing in common: they are all Electron apps. They SUCK. On any windows computer slower than a $1.5K lenovo, our reps can't have more than ~10 tabs open before their computer starts to stutter.…

Then you'll simply have to wait a few months.

They didn't reveal their true business model or pricing yet.

The $50 subscription is a way to simply not flood their servers while beta-testing them, and also getting a bit of money from rich/dumb early adopters.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#250

Post by elcapitan »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #89

In case someone missed the story, Paul Graham is indirectly talking about the feedback received by Mighty App. And in this particular case, I don't think this is a valid defense. First, he clearly has too much skin in the game to be credibly neutral about it. Second, he avoids addressing the main critique about this "new tech". People are not claiming that it is a bad idea because it is infeasible or not valuable, bu…

> First, he clearly has too much skin in the game

That sounds like an odd use of "skin in the game". "Skin in the game" would be if that thing failed and then he gets skinned, basically. Being invested in something with potentially lots of upside and worst case a bit of lost investment isn't like that.

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