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I decided to stop working on Mighty

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Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#321

Post by cercatrova »

swyx wrote: post #211
IceWreck wrote: post #119

Called it here back when it launched. Streaming video of a slightly more powerful browser in a browser (electron) never made sense to me. And the few people who really had that usecase could just use a lightweight container running chromium + guacamole on a nearby server. Okay I'm sure Mighty used cool tech to make it faster than just that (idk how it worked but maybe they were transmitting changed HTML) but at its c…

"you are not better because you see the world in an odious light"

Then we should make the opposite true as well, ie PG calling envy the only reason domain experts could be pessimistic about a future technology. He was too arrogant in those words such that when it failed, he should rightly be denigrated for his hubris.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#323

Post by drcongo »

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 lot of people gaslit into thinking browsers are a janky slow mess because they've been using Chrome for so long.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#324

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 »

michaelt wrote: post #281
ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty much what happens in the regular household with median and around income [1] [2]. Yes, we are currently generating way beyond ridiculous levels of waste, electronic and beyond: we throw away globally 1.4 billion tons of food per year [3] in a world with 822 million people suffering from undernourishment [4]. If we are this bad with something as vital as food, of course we are worse with devices. [1] (2017…

The US market for laptops is 21 billion [1], for desktops 11 billion [2], and tablets 11bn [3]. With 123 million households in the US, the mean spending on laptops, desktops and tablets together is $350/year per household. Smartphone sales were $74 billion [4] or $600/household/year. That's a total of $950/year, per household. The average American household isn't spending $11,000+ every 2 years. [1] https://www.stati…

The lower limit of the example budget above was $8,000 and considering a family of 4 over 2 to 4 years.

"Apple generated $365 billion revenue in 2021, 52% came from iPhone sales" [1] Taking Apple as example, those billions have to come from someone. The greater point was that instead of having the billions try to make every single device the most powerful CPU/GPU of the current Moore's Law peak, because no one wants a slow device, you might just as well have a bare glass able to render pixels computed on a remote powerful machine, but that machine must be owned by the user. And you don't stream an app, a browser, you stream an entire OS, on the spot, on request.

[1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/apple-statistics

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#325

Post by danpalmer »

robenkleene wrote: post #69
danpalmer wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I agree overall, but I don't think it'll be VS Code in the browser, I think VS Code's remote features with the client-server model (client: VS Code's UI running locally, and server: the code executing and file-system running on the server). I've also tried VS Code in the browser, and personally I find it an absolute unusable mess, the key binding space is just way to overloaded for a complex app like VS Code, and the…

Good point, remote dev is probably the more appropriate tech for most orgs.

FWIW, I'm incredibly picky about shortcuts, and as long as you use Chrome to "install" the web app, it basically works fine.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#326

Post by danpalmer »

Kwpolska wrote: post #122
danpalmer wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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?

I use a MacBook Pro. I just connect to the machine. We don't use a VPN (see BeyondCorp) but something like Tailscale would probably work well. The fact the machine is under my desk and not in a data center is due to my laziness in returning it, nothing more.

I'm using VSCode for mostly Java. It's not perfect, but I prefer it to JetBrains products. JetBrains products are more capable for now, but I think their new IDE does remote development, and VSCode gets more IDE-like all the time. I think that's the direction things are going.

I'm using a MacBook Pro because I've been using Macs my whole life and have too much muscle memory to switch to something else.

As for having a beefy laptop, that only goes so far. Right now laptops tend to top-out at 32GB RAM if you still want plenty of choice, you make sacrifices to get more than that. Also many companies have policies or regulation restricting what can be on laptops.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#327

Post by qabqabaca »

funstuff007 wrote: post #268

> I love how friendly Replit and MIghty are to one another. One day they will divide the world between them. https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1357097710734749700?lang=en I dig when billionaires are wrong. They're just like us. :)

The way PG talks about these companies on Twitter makes me feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

Mighty https://twitter.com/search?q=mighty%20(from%3Apaulg)&src=typ...

Mighty so obviously had no idea who its customer was. Can't afford good hardware to run CPU/GPU-intensive browser apps? Why not spend $420 a year on a browser. Is it for enterprise or consumer? Who knows. He spoke of it like a once in a generation company [1] and the fact they spent 3.5 years working a product that never even launched goes against what I thought his philosophy was.

Replit - https://twitter.com/search?q=replit%20(from%3Apaulg)&src=typ...

Replit I feel suffers from the same problem and, possibly not coincidentally, PG talks about it the same way. Is it an IDE? Hosting platform? Education platform? How have they not found PMF after raising $100M over 8 years [2]? I feel like every time I see someone talk about the company on Twitter it's about them launching some brand new feature in a new area. On that, I also only ever see the same few people on Twitter chatting about it and have never encountered Replit in the wild. It's almost always Codepen, Codesandbox, JS Fiddle or Stackblitz.

It makes me seriously question PG's opinions on individual companies as his bias is so clear and it makes him appear so naive.

[1] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1561473124389888000

[2] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/replit/company_finan...

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#328

Post by rightbyte »

glowingly wrote: post #307
rightbyte wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably need some post-rendering to speed things up. And send the data as entity state changes. Like hot and sexy X11 done since I was born. The render, compress, send over IP, decompress pipeline will just always feel laggy and slow.

I agree with the idea, but it may depend on how the X11 application was written. My experience with X11 over a network (across a city, geographically and distance-wise) was very poor. Slow updates, just extreme latency in doing anything. Not impossible to use, but definitely unusable by any reasonable metric. We're talking dozens of seconds for most GUI interactions. I eventually piped it through RDP (mRDP, iirc), wh…

Ye. I don't think X11 servers were designed initially for anything but very local network connections. Maybe your packages were reordered or something which X11 maybe could not handle very well. Otherwise I don't understand how piping would help.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#329

Post by majani »

danso wrote: post #152

Honestly one of the most "But why?" startup ideas I'd ever heard of. I figured pg's hype for it was based in thinking it could someday be targeted for profitable acquisition by Google. But perhaps the current tech industry downturn (plus Stadia's death) made that obviously untenable. At $30/month, this sounded like something that could only be worthwhile for businesses (though I'm at a loss to imagine what size/indus…

pg's absolute faves don't seem to be the best. It's the tier below that where the good leads are

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#330

Post by Juice10 »

gleb-arestov wrote: post #222
IceWreck wrote: post #119

Called it here back when it launched. Streaming video of a slightly more powerful browser in a browser (electron) never made sense to me. And the few people who really had that usecase could just use a lightweight container running chromium + guacamole on a nearby server. Okay I'm sure Mighty used cool tech to make it faster than just that (idk how it worked but maybe they were transmitting changed HTML) but at its c…

I've just looked into Mighty. It has delays for hover css effects & scrolling. Also it has "Debug > Enable H264 encoding" option. So Mighty streams video. I think replicating DOM & sending diffs instead of video should 1) saves resources on encoding for server 2) saves decoding on client 3) send much lower data 4) feels much better since instant scrolling/hover (something like https://www.rrweb.io/ ) I'm indie/solo m…

Core team member of rrweb here: I've seen a number of tools do as you suggest so I think stepping away from video for the dom makes sense.

PS. Linkkraft looks cool

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