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I decided to stop working on Mighty

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Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#331

Post by runako »

themoonisachees wrote: post #320
runako wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did see that opinion expressed, but it was just silly given Ax performance in iPad/iPhone pre-M1. In no world does the flagship laptop use a more expensive, less efficient, and slower chip than the mid-range iPhone for more than a couple of product generations.

I don't think it was that silly to expect a transition from a stable, mature architecture, sold (albeit too expensive) by an established chip maker, to a new (to desktop) architecture designed in-house by a company known for its phones, especially when you consider that desktop workloads are very different from "here is an API for our walled garden" workloads. Add to that the fact that a successful transition was ent…

> when you consider that desktop workloads are very different from "here is an API for our walled garden" workloads.

This is a solid point, but iPad workloads were pretty clearly converging with laptop workflows. (And Apple was obviously moving in the direction of converging the SDKs even before the M1 was announced.) Plus, they already had the ability for devs to build apps to run on MacOS & iPad/iPhone. This was a strategic move that was visibly underway for years.

> a successful transition was entirely dependant on how well rosetta works (it turns out it works well, but that wasn't a given at all), evidenced by how people got burned in the powerpc-x86 transition

All the more reason to expect them to make a transition -- they had pulled it off successfully (if with some hiccups) before. I would not be surprised if they had some of the original Rosetta team around to revise for this time around.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#332

Post by doorman2 »

senttoschool wrote: post #317
jacurtis wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was EXACTLY the problem Mighty was encountering. They were targeting customers who didn't have powerful enough computers and offering a way to make their computer effectively faster while browsing the web without needing to upgrade their computer. The problem is the solution costs $35/mo. That's $420 a year. Anyone who can afford an extra $420 a year to improve their computer speed, probably is just going to buy…

You can buy a used M1 Air for $700. Maybe $650. It'd be significantly faster than Mighty's solution because M1's ST is faster than Epyc's ST.

Browsers aren't single threaded, so the ST performance isn't the end-all-be-all metric to use. JavaScript is single threaded, but the browser itself uses multiple threads. E.g. there is the main thread, which handles the user input. There is the rendering thread, which actually takes up a majority of the CPU time on a lot of websites. And then there is stuff like GPU acceleration, which makes a lot of the web performant when it wouldn't be otherwise. Of course, a server does all of these things worse than a decent laptop.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#333

Post by Kwpolska »

danpalmer wrote: post #326
Kwpolska wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you are at home, your box is in the data center, then a BeyondCorp outage makes it impossible to work, right?

I agree that laptops can’t always do everything, but many things can be done comfortably well. At a previous job, I had 32 GB of physical RAM and 20 GB of swap (thanks to 5-10 RAM-hungry JVM apps), and things were quite usable for standard dev workflows.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#334

Post by fragmede »

Kwpolska wrote: post #333
danpalmer wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If you are at home, your box is in the data center, then a BeyondCorp outage makes it impossible to work, right? I agree that laptops can’t always do everything, but many things can be done comfortably well. At a previous job, I had 32 GB of physical RAM and 20 GB of swap (thanks to 5-10 RAM-hungry JVM apps), and things were quite usable for standard dev workflows.

> a BeyondCorp outage makes it impossible to work

Yes. So does a VPN outage if you're using that instead. If your laptop gets chewed up by a lawnmower, it's also impossible to work.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#335

Post by danpalmer »

Kwpolska wrote: post #333
danpalmer wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If you are at home, your box is in the data center, then a BeyondCorp outage makes it impossible to work, right? I agree that laptops can’t always do everything, but many things can be done comfortably well. At a previous job, I had 32 GB of physical RAM and 20 GB of swap (thanks to 5-10 RAM-hungry JVM apps), and things were quite usable for standard dev workflows.

> a BeyondCorp outage makes it impossible to work

Err, sort of. Beyond Corp isn't really one single service that can be running or down, it's more of an approach, a bunch of different pieces, etc. I haven't seen an outage yet, but I don't think it would look like "the VPN is down", probably more like "this web app thinks I'm logged out".

I do recommend reading the BeyondCorp paper, although it's been a long time since I read it.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#336

Post by fuckstick »

mhss wrote: post #273
fuckstick wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Analogies always fall apart somewhere under scrutiny. Yeah but this one falls apart the moment you simply try to figure out what facet is trying to be conveyed. Just say what you fucking mean. The general painkiller > vitamin argument is generally bunk/false dichotomy - therefore you’re not saving any time with the analogy.

I never had heard this analogy before and understood it immediately. If it didn’t click with you that’s fine, that doesn’t mean is not useful.

It’s not that it doesn’t click - it’s just another stupid thing like Myers-Briggs personality types - and it’s just a shit analogy. Go ahead and categorize businesses by vitamins, pain killers and candy if it’s makes you happy. I believe reading anything into these distinctions is open to the free interpretation and is just astrology for the tech bro crowd. And no one actually agrees on the categorizations for anything less trivial than Candy Crush - as evidenced down thread. The software businesses that are cleanly categorized by this are the exception not the rule.

Once you start having a meta discussion about the analogy itself, perhaps that should be a sign.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#337

Post by Kwpolska »

fragmede wrote: post #334
Kwpolska wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are at home, your box is in the data center, then a BeyondCorp outage makes it impossible to work, right? I agree that laptops can’t always do everything, but many things can be done comfortably well. At a previous job, I had 32 GB of physical RAM and 20 GB of swap (thanks to 5-10 RAM-hungry JVM apps), and things were quite usable for standard dev workflows.

> a BeyondCorp outage makes it impossible to work Yes. So does a VPN outage if you're using that instead. If your laptop gets chewed up by a lawnmower, it's also impossible to work.

I can get things done with a VPN, $CloudCodeHosting, or network outage. Sure, not everything would be possible, but I can still write code and run it.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#338

Post by smaudet »

ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #229
smaudet wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"electronic gizmos" is not screens... I can think of quite a few electronics I spent money this year which did not include any screen device. Again, these stats are misleading, maybe dishonest. My "device" budget we'll call it has been less than 1000$ over the past 5 years, and that is with spending a fair amount on non-screen decives, which are electronic in nature but not investments in dedicated computing like you…

"Consumer electronics" consist of "telephones, televisions, and calculators, then audio and video recorders and players, game consoles, mobile phones, personal computers and MP3 players", "GPS, automotive electronics (car stereos), video game consoles, electronic musical instruments (e.g., synthesizer keyboards), karaoke machines, digital cameras, and video players", "smart light fixtures and appliances, digital came…

"Most of them have screens."

Ha, as if.

"one single person's decision tree is rather irrelevant in the long open game of average spending behaviours."

Sure but collectively is what matters, you can't make such precise arguments from such general behaviors, as you put it it's not about a single person's decision tree.

Your own metrics disagree with your original point.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#339

Post by dang »

oops wrote: post #123
fuckstick wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#340

Post by dang »

fuckstick wrote: post #147
oops wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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