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’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 issue, sure. But “high-ping” is a somewhat solved issue, whether in multiplayer gaming, in terminal utilities like Mosh, or even in optimistic GraphQL mutation updates. Where’s the use-case where near-zero latency is vital? The only cases I can think of are games like Rocket League: fast-twitch games where even the latency between my controller and my PC is something I happily spend hours optimizing — where latency prevents the necessary feedback loop for learning (akin to trying to learn how to hit a baseball while drunk).
But beyond near-zero latency use-cases, why would a thick client ever be better than a thin client? At the edge of performance, this question is easily answered: I would never attempt to train a PyTorch model on my admittedly powerful GPU. That’s what the cloud is for. So when it comes to my browser, why am I content to eat up memory and cpu-time with hundreds of tabs open that almost always include one or two that are broken, soaking up my resources, and have to be hunted down and killed off so that IntelliJ can return to its normal lightning-fast speed?
Might goes even further and asks why I would want to run IntelliJ on my machine at all. Wouldn’t I rather run IntelliJ like I used to run Vim over Mosh, where I never have to worry about storage space, about download/upload bandwidth, or about my computer becoming sluggish?
And that’s the killer idea here: that thin-clients almost always beat thick-clients. One could even argue that the entire internet is premised upon this reality.
I’d happily pay Mighty to try it out for a bit. Even if it doesn’t work, I’ve dropped more money of less fascinating ideas. At the very least, I’m rooting for their success, because it would change a lot more than how you consume content over the internet.