8 ms·

The Cloud is just someone else's computer. As a self hoster, nothing irks me more that more software that takes control from the user to some random third part

The Cloud is just someone else's computer. As a self hoster, nothing irks me more that more software that takes control from the user to some random third party. And I fail to see why anyone would use this, you need high speed internet capable of streaming 4k for one and if you have access to that, then chances are you also have access to a sufficiently powerful computer capable of running chrome locally. Coming to security, this is a complete disaster. All your traffic including passwords are going to a third party server and you have to trust that server to not do anything shady. This cant be economical either, or will be too expensive. And the testimonial on the website, I find it hard to believe that a CEO of a company cannot afford a powerful computer but can afford a (presumably expensive) subscription service giving them access to a video stream of a browser running on powerful hardware. Like another user said VNC can already do this, and much more without the electron wrapper.

Liron 5y ago
> And I fail to see why anyone would use this, you need high speed internet capable of streaming 4k for one and if you have access to that, then chances are you also have access to a sufficiently powerful computer capable of running chrome locally. Plenty of people who can’t afford a fast computer currently have access to a fast internet connection. The ability to substitute internet bandwidth for CPU and RAM will be very valuable for them.
- mfer 5y ago
  Most people don't need a fast computer. For many a 5 year old average computer is good enough in terms of hardware. What makes this hardware not great is the many developers who have fast machines who are ok using a lot of it with the software they develop. This makes the experience on older systems slow. It's unplanned obsolescence. For chrome stuff and using the web I shouldn't need a killer system. No one should.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  Harder to find a fast connection than a PC. PCs are still cheap
- yunohn 5y ago
  > Plenty of people who can’t afford a fast computer I’m pretty sure this set of people can’t afford 50$ for Mighty either.
  - intergalplan 5y ago
    On the one hand: yes, $50 * 12 months would go a long way toward a machine upgrade, so it doesn't make a ton of sense purely on your-machine's-too-weak grounds. On the other hand, I don't really run Chrome or Firefox on anything that operates on battery, because I don't like seeing the little battery icon deplete twice as fast, and it barely even matters how powerful the machine is (M1 helps, but there's still a noticeable difference). Maybe there are people who really, really want to run Chrome all the time, but also work mostly on portables and like them actually lasting as long on battery as they're supposed to. Maybe that's worth $50/m to them.
    - ufo 5y ago
      I'm curious how much battery the video streaming would use here. Wifi tends to use a fair bit of power.
      - intergalplan 5y ago
        Good point. Decoding's usually pretty efficient, but you're right that use of wifi plus everything else related to this program might erase much of the power-savings.
- halikular 5y ago
  You can get a more than enough powerful computer to run a web browser and more for $400 if you buy used, and you'll get to keep it forever. A subscription of Mighty would only last you a year for the same $400 price tag.
- firebaze 5y ago
  I'm not sure people who cannot afford a fast computer will be able to spend their money on a service like this. I'm quite probably overlooking something and I'd be curious to learn what.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
mxschumacher 5y ago
Just because you have a fast internet connection does not mean that all your client devices have a lot of RAM or a GPU. Even if they do, pushing computation to the cloud could mean improved battery life when you are on the go. Would be interesting to see how far you can take a raspberry pi with mighty. How much lithium battery degradation is due to some mobile tab going rogue?
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  Isnt video streaming more intensive?
  - andiareso 5y ago
    Seriously though. They must be doing some crazy magic to make this claim...
- LegitShady 5y ago
  At their price point buying more ram is a cheaper alternative. Most folks have little use for dedicated gpu.
  - mxschumacher 5y ago
    for the moment, I would consider the concept and not so much the price. What they charge is likely not a lower bound on their internal cost structure. The product came out of beta today, so their pricing seeks to first attract those users with a high need and to test their pricing capacity. Better to try to charge too much and then go lower than to take too little. Given that their engineering expenses are a fixed cost and the majority of their spending, they'll be able to lower prices as they scale.
dheera 5y ago
I imagine VNC can't do this well because it streams pixels with no optimizations other than antiquated compression (it can't even match WebRTC screen sharing), and crappy color depth. The idea is interesting for lightweight computers e.g. chromebooks and ultrabooks, but it would irk me a lot to have my browser and personal information running on some other machine that I don't control. What I would be super-interested in though is a self-hosted version of Mighty, that I could install on a Linux box anywhere of my choosing. For example, the server runs on my powerful desktop at home, and my ultrabook in the bedroom can be a client.
- stephc_int13 5y ago
  Yeah, but this is a VC backed venture, they won't do that. The cloud could be the worst thing that can happen to the Internet. Privacy and Ownership should not be treated as abstract ideas.
  - audience_mem 5y ago
    > The cloud could be the worst thing that can happen to the Internet Is this not the same as saying "The internet could be the worst thing that can happen to the Internet"?
- intergalplan 5y ago
  This project actually made me think that, since the X-Window protocol is practically a dead-end and everything's gotta be made with web tech now (ugh), it'd be really cool to have a version of FF or Chrome that's smart enough to send some kind of render instructions between a server-instance and a client-instance. Process server-side, render client-side, like X-Window but for web junk. (the notion that this is completely fucking absurd since those "render instructions" are called "HTML" and I'm just describing server-side rendering isn't lost on me, but it's not my fault things have gotten so bad that having a server-side browser forward draw commands from bloated "web apps" to a resource-light client might actually be kinda nice)
  - yunyu 5y ago
api 5y ago
It's pretty rare that I root for a company to crash and burn on principle. I'm an entrepreneur myself so it takes a lot for me to go there. I hope every single one of these cloud-streamed remote-app or remote-OS plays fails and fails hard. They're helping lead the Internet and the computing ecosystem in an even more dystopian direction. I've been happy to see Stadia not really take off. So lets say this succeeds. Then Google or Facebook buys it. Now all your browser sessions including passwords, keys, authentication codes, private messages, etc. are globally visible to be data mined. Who's to say they're not doing this already? What if this is hacked? This is worse than that Amazon idea of giving Amazon delivery people keys to your house. In the physical world it's pretty easy to see people when they come in your front door. In the digital world you have no idea what these people are doing with your data. There is zero situational awareness.
- stephc_int13 5y ago
  I am in the same club :) I don't usually care about companies success or failure, this none of my business, after all, but this kind of "innovation" could have extremely unpleasant side effects. I hope they crash quick.
- andiareso 5y ago
  I think you kinda hit it on the nose. Who knows where or how or who has access to these machines. IDC if it's encrypted in transit or what, but there is no way a corporation with strict data privacy rules would be able to stream potentially sensitive information across the wire especially when it will be stored in the cloud in web form for a period of time. IDK good luck, but I'm definitely tin-foil hatting with this guy above me.
  - api 5y ago
    For me it's not so much a trust issue with this company, though for cloud and mobile stuff I have come to a "guilty until proven innocent" rule as regards privacy. It's (1) the trend this supports, and (2) what happens if worse players get access to it either through hacking or acquisition.
mdoms 5y ago
> And I fail to see why anyone would use this, you need high speed internet capable of streaming 4k for one and if you have access to that, then chances are you also have access to a sufficiently powerful computer capable of running chrome locally That's a weird assumption. Where I'm from gigabit (or at the very least 100mbit) fibre is the norm, which means fast 4K-ready internet cuts across virtually every socioeconomic demographic.
sg47 5y ago
I see this being extremely valuable for companies that hire contract workers, especially for UI-intensive tasks. Say you do labeling for self driving cars where you'll have to render a lot of images to the end user. Rather than giving all these users a powerful computer, you could give them chromebooks and reduce your capital cost massively.
- spiderice 5y ago
  And spy on everything they do in their “browser”.
- tboerstad 5y ago
  Agree, good insight!
- dagmx 5y ago
  This is already a thing and has been for years. Many thin client setups like teradici PCoiP are used by tons of film studios in post production. The last few animation Oscar winners have all been done without computers at people's desks. There's already services like Nimble collective (bought by Amazon) that streams 3D apps to your browser like Maya, Blender etc... WebRTC is already seeing tons of companies move to streaming content to thin client end points. Epics MetaHuman creator for example runs in the cloud.

Liron 5y ago

> And I fail to see why anyone would use this, you need high speed internet capable of streaming 4k for one and if you have access to that, then chances are you also have access to a sufficiently powerful computer capable of running chrome locally. Plenty of people who can’t afford a fast computer currently have access to a fast internet connection. The ability to substitute internet bandwidth for CPU and RAM will be very valuable for them.

mfer 5y ago
Most people don't need a fast computer. For many a 5 year old average computer is good enough in terms of hardware. What makes this hardware not great is the many developers who have fast machines who are ok using a lot of it with the software they develop. This makes the experience on older systems slow. It's unplanned obsolescence. For chrome stuff and using the web I shouldn't need a killer system. No one should.
cblconfederate 5y ago
Harder to find a fast connection than a PC. PCs are still cheap
yunohn 5y ago
> Plenty of people who can’t afford a fast computer I’m pretty sure this set of people can’t afford 50$ for Mighty either.
- intergalplan 5y ago
  On the one hand: yes, $50 * 12 months would go a long way toward a machine upgrade, so it doesn't make a ton of sense purely on your-machine's-too-weak grounds. On the other hand, I don't really run Chrome or Firefox on anything that operates on battery, because I don't like seeing the little battery icon deplete twice as fast, and it barely even matters how powerful the machine is (M1 helps, but there's still a noticeable difference). Maybe there are people who really, really want to run Chrome all the time, but also work mostly on portables and like them actually lasting as long on battery as they're supposed to. Maybe that's worth $50/m to them.
  - ufo 5y ago
    I'm curious how much battery the video streaming would use here. Wifi tends to use a fair bit of power.
    - intergalplan 5y ago
      Good point. Decoding's usually pretty efficient, but you're right that use of wifi plus everything else related to this program might erase much of the power-savings.
halikular 5y ago
You can get a more than enough powerful computer to run a web browser and more for $400 if you buy used, and you'll get to keep it forever. A subscription of Mighty would only last you a year for the same $400 price tag.
firebaze 5y ago
I'm not sure people who cannot afford a fast computer will be able to spend their money on a service like this. I'm quite probably overlooking something and I'd be curious to learn what.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

mxschumacher 5y ago

Just because you have a fast internet connection does not mean that all your client devices have a lot of RAM or a GPU. Even if they do, pushing computation to the cloud could mean improved battery life when you are on the go. Would be interesting to see how far you can take a raspberry pi with mighty. How much lithium battery degradation is due to some mobile tab going rogue?

cblconfederate 5y ago
Isnt video streaming more intensive?
- andiareso 5y ago
  Seriously though. They must be doing some crazy magic to make this claim...
LegitShady 5y ago
At their price point buying more ram is a cheaper alternative. Most folks have little use for dedicated gpu.
- mxschumacher 5y ago
  for the moment, I would consider the concept and not so much the price. What they charge is likely not a lower bound on their internal cost structure. The product came out of beta today, so their pricing seeks to first attract those users with a high need and to test their pricing capacity. Better to try to charge too much and then go lower than to take too little. Given that their engineering expenses are a fixed cost and the majority of their spending, they'll be able to lower prices as they scale.

dheera 5y ago

I imagine VNC can't do this well because it streams pixels with no optimizations other than antiquated compression (it can't even match WebRTC screen sharing), and crappy color depth. The idea is interesting for lightweight computers e.g. chromebooks and ultrabooks, but it would irk me a lot to have my browser and personal information running on some other machine that I don't control. What I would be super-interested in though is a self-hosted version of Mighty, that I could install on a Linux box anywhere of my choosing. For example, the server runs on my powerful desktop at home, and my ultrabook in the bedroom can be a client.

stephc_int13 5y ago
Yeah, but this is a VC backed venture, they won't do that. The cloud could be the worst thing that can happen to the Internet. Privacy and Ownership should not be treated as abstract ideas.
- audience_mem 5y ago
  > The cloud could be the worst thing that can happen to the Internet Is this not the same as saying "The internet could be the worst thing that can happen to the Internet"?
intergalplan 5y ago
This project actually made me think that, since the X-Window protocol is practically a dead-end and everything's gotta be made with web tech now (ugh), it'd be really cool to have a version of FF or Chrome that's smart enough to send some kind of render instructions between a server-instance and a client-instance. Process server-side, render client-side, like X-Window but for web junk. (the notion that this is completely fucking absurd since those "render instructions" are called "HTML" and I'm just describing server-side rendering isn't lost on me, but it's not my fault things have gotten so bad that having a server-side browser forward draw commands from bloated "web apps" to a resource-light client might actually be kinda nice)
- yunyu 5y ago

api 5y ago

It's pretty rare that I root for a company to crash and burn on principle. I'm an entrepreneur myself so it takes a lot for me to go there. I hope every single one of these cloud-streamed remote-app or remote-OS plays fails and fails hard. They're helping lead the Internet and the computing ecosystem in an even more dystopian direction. I've been happy to see Stadia not really take off. So lets say this succeeds. Then Google or Facebook buys it. Now all your browser sessions including passwords, keys, authentication codes, private messages, etc. are globally visible to be data mined. Who's to say they're not doing this already? What if this is hacked? This is worse than that Amazon idea of giving Amazon delivery people keys to your house. In the physical world it's pretty easy to see people when they come in your front door. In the digital world you have no idea what these people are doing with your data. There is zero situational awareness.

stephc_int13 5y ago
I am in the same club :) I don't usually care about companies success or failure, this none of my business, after all, but this kind of "innovation" could have extremely unpleasant side effects. I hope they crash quick.
andiareso 5y ago
I think you kinda hit it on the nose. Who knows where or how or who has access to these machines. IDC if it's encrypted in transit or what, but there is no way a corporation with strict data privacy rules would be able to stream potentially sensitive information across the wire especially when it will be stored in the cloud in web form for a period of time. IDK good luck, but I'm definitely tin-foil hatting with this guy above me.
- api 5y ago
  For me it's not so much a trust issue with this company, though for cloud and mobile stuff I have come to a "guilty until proven innocent" rule as regards privacy. It's (1) the trend this supports, and (2) what happens if worse players get access to it either through hacking or acquisition.

mdoms 5y ago

> And I fail to see why anyone would use this, you need high speed internet capable of streaming 4k for one and if you have access to that, then chances are you also have access to a sufficiently powerful computer capable of running chrome locally That's a weird assumption. Where I'm from gigabit (or at the very least 100mbit) fibre is the norm, which means fast 4K-ready internet cuts across virtually every socioeconomic demographic.

sg47 5y ago

I see this being extremely valuable for companies that hire contract workers, especially for UI-intensive tasks. Say you do labeling for self driving cars where you'll have to render a lot of images to the end user. Rather than giving all these users a powerful computer, you could give them chromebooks and reduce your capital cost massively.

spiderice 5y ago
And spy on everything they do in their “browser”.
tboerstad 5y ago
Agree, good insight!
dagmx 5y ago
This is already a thing and has been for years. Many thin client setups like teradici PCoiP are used by tons of film studios in post production. The last few animation Oscar winners have all been done without computers at people's desks. There's already services like Nimble collective (bought by Amazon) that streams 3D apps to your browser like Maya, Blender etc... WebRTC is already seeing tons of companies move to streaming content to thin client end points. Epics MetaHuman creator for example runs in the cloud.