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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

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/ https://www.mightyapp.com/ [1] https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1387101172230672389 https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1387101172230672389 [2] https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1387645578067124224 https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1387645578067124224

anotha1 5y ago
Mighty is a good idea, marketed to the wrong people. I mean, who wouldn't just upgrade their computer? New software is a cost, even if it's "free." I'm sure there's a niche, though. Like low-paid workers needing to do a lot on their crappy personal machines.
- blocked_again 5y ago
  Do you think low paid workers are going buy a cheap laptop for 500$ and pay 30$ or 50$ per month for Mighty instead of just getting a more powerful Window laptop for like 1000$ or 1500$?
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    M1 macs can be had for $999, and they can even be bought with cheap financing options to convert it to a monthly payment. Maybe there’s a market for people stuck on old computers but whose companies still spring for super fast internet and $50/month SaaS bills per user instead of just spending that same money (or less) financing the laptops they actually need, but it would be a small market.
  - criddell 5y ago
    Is it just the price that's the problem? What if Might were $30 to $50 per year?
- bhouston 5y ago
  I think that corporations may want to force all their users to use Mighty so that they can control exactly what goes on in the browser -- it is easier to pay Mighty to "virtualize" the browser, than it is to keep all computers up to date and without malicious extensions. Maybe even prevent browsers from downloading files onto the local computer. A full recording of each user's sessions. Integrated password manager that uses the Mighty login to tie them all together. So I view it as valuable to corporations and thus mighty falls into the B2B category of company which makes software end users hate, but corporations love. Probably a fair bit of money in that.
  - dd36 5y ago
    Don’t they already do this with VMs for less cost?
  - vishnugupta 5y ago
    > easier to pay Mighty to "virtualize" the browser, than it is to keep all computers up to date and without malicious extensions. Not denying your other points but Amazon Workspaces[1] is a product that perfectly fits their needs. From a top-level exec's stand point I would imagine they would be more willing to buy something like Amazon Workspaces which gives them 100% control and peace of mind Vs piecemeal approach such as browser, conference call client etc., [1] https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces
  - calvin_ 5y ago
    Except VDI products for enterprise already exist and are much cheaper than Mighty. AWS, Citrix, VMware, and probably others play in this space.
blocked_again 5y ago
Yeah. Also, Suhail Doshi, the founder of Mighty, is mentioned as one of the people who draft read this essay.
- gustavo-fring 5y ago
  Graham does this often. Instead of directly saying what he wants to say, he beats around the bush. When Allred was getting criticized for shady business practices, Graham wrote haters and thanked him and Musk and a bunch of other people. Not sure why he does it, it is very underhanded, as though he's afraid of actually getting in a legit argument with the person. Easier to pontificate form his essays, have them posted to his website, then have the mods defend him. "Essay is french for attempt." There are good and there are bad attempts, of course.
  - domnomnom 5y ago
    Probably terrified of outrage mobs.
  - herendin2 5y ago
    I think he genuinely believes these issues are much broader than a single company. So he wants to encourage discussion about the general issue, instead of sparking even more unproductive, repetitive argument about a single company which would overshadow the broader and more interesting issue he sees. (As we can see here, where a quarter of the comments are debating the business model of Mighty.)
thundergolfer 5y ago
If a “Crazy New Idea” (CNI) is getting VC funding from establishment tech capital to deliver a twist in an existing product, it doesn’t seem like it could be so crazy. Reading this I thought of CNIs like the Internet of the 1980s, women’s suffrage in the 19th century, Project Mercury, The Eiffel Tower. The CNIs gaining ground today in tech seem to be crypto, brain-computer-interfaces, quantum computing, and CRISPR gene editing.
busymom0 5y ago
If there was a similar offering as mighty for certain development tools including Xcode and android studio together, that would be awesome and something I would look into. Basically something which would reduce the build times.
AussieWog93 5y ago
From what I understand of both the recent tweets and both of their fairly radical/extreme (and mostly correct) views about abstraction being a net negative, the criticism is less "Mighty doesn't work" and more "We shouldn't need to use an app like Mighty to get good performance on a basic website".
- paulgb 5y ago
  Sure, but the disconnect seems to be that Mighty is advertised for people who essentially use their browser as an OS (I see Figma mentioned a lot), rather than people who just want to do basic browsing. I think Mighty has unfairly taken the brunt of a lot of growing discontent with bloat on the web. I'm not ready to fork over $30+ for faster browsing, but I'm glad someone is working in this space, because I genuinely would like to rent a fast virtual computer for the occasional video editing task and think Mighty is a step in that direction.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    > I genuinely would like to rent a fast virtual computer for the occasional video editing task and think Mighty is a step in that direction. Can't you already do that pretty easily on AWS or Azure?
    - paulgb 5y ago
      At minimum it seems like I’d have to choose an instance size, an OS that was compatible with my software, install the editing software, mount a common storage location with my footage, etc. What I’d like to see is a service that let me add my credit card, click a button, and launch a video editor on a high-RAM machine that I pay for the hour (including the software license fee).
  - ta_ca 5y ago
    unfairly? privacy concerns aside they just added another huge abstraction on top of an already huge pile of shit we call modern web.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
My hang up with Mighty isn’t about their idea or their technology or their execution. It’s impressive to see what they’ve done. My issue is that it’s not a product I could feel good recommending to anyone, at least at the high pricing that was proposed in the last discussion. In an era of $999 M1 Macs (and even cheaper AMD laptops) and readily available financing options, it doesn’t make sense for anyone to throw their money away at a SaaS service that simply cannot perform as well as local Chrome on a modern machine. I could see the narrow use case for limited situations where someone has 1. Weird IT department restrictions that require them to use old, slow computers but also 2. Budget rules that allow them to spend monthly money on a SaaS but not on financing the hardware they need to get their job done and 3. Guaranteed high speed internet all of the time and 4. An IT/corporate security department that is okay with them sending all of their keystrokes, login info, and browser data to a 3rd party service Surely this situation exists, but it still feels like Mighty is targeting a broader audience by providing untrue claims about remote thin client technology somehow being faster than a halfway decent local machine. I’d feel equally uncomfortable if Stadia was charging $50/month while claiming to be lower latency than local gaming. The counter arguments about disrespecting hard working startup founders or doubting visionaries feel like a strawman response to legitimate questions about the value of their service. The technology and execution look to be good, AFAICT. It’s the product, pricing, messaging, and value that I can’t recommend.
- pantulis 5y ago
  I was going to try Mighty but even in my somewhat relaxed work environment item 4 is not really solved by Mighty apart from "we will not access your data". Obviously they are very smart and will surely be working on E2E encryption but they do not seem to have it.
  - IAmLiterallyAB 5y ago
    > E2E encryption How on earth would that work for their product? They need to access the data so they can render it.
    - 5y ago
vishnugupta 5y ago
There was this product[1] to browse internet offline by downloading something called “Web Packs”. This was back in 2005 just when I was graduating when I spoke to the founding team. They were naturally quite confident about the product taking off. Something seemed off to me I couldn’t point out what so I didn’t take the job offer. After all these years I realized the source my discomfort. They were actually betting against the speed of internet getting better. While most of the businesses like Amazon, Google were betting for the internet tech to improve this product did exactly the opposite. To me Mighty sounds like a similar category of product. They are betting that PC/Laptop/Mobile hardware will stagnate from this point on. Exactly when Apple has launched M1, which blows the previous version out of the water, at a non crazy price. From this point it’s a matter of time other hardware also catches up in terms of performance and price. Besides, yet another company to handover my entire browsing history and data for purported improvement in latency? I don’t know. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webaroo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webaroo
- weasel_words 5y ago
  "They are betting that PC/Laptop/Mobile hardware will stagnate from this point on." Me playing the devils advocate... Perhaps not //forever//, but perhaps for the next few years (enough for them to make some good money). Why? Chip shortage, GPU shortage. Anecdotally, I just bought a computer for $7500, that, two years ago would have cost about $2500 (granted, it is the new tech, but even so, new tech of this tier two years ago would have been approx. $2500). On top of that, have to wait two months for it to be assembled. (ouch) I agree with you that speed will probably not stop increasing, but if prices continue to go up, or even just level off, few people will be able to afford the new tech. That being said, would I invest in Mighty? No since I agree with you in general....and agree with you about the zero privacy issue...very regressive position for someone like PG imo.
  - easton 5y ago
    That assumes that AWS/Azure/GCP won't have the same issues getting chips to run Mighty on that PC manufacturers have getting chips to sell to consumers though. If the shortage keeps up, that is not necessarily true.
zitterbewegung 5y ago
We have game streaming services from NVIDIA and amazon has had Amazon workspaces. With the global chip shortage which will affect a large amount of people I think that this would be the best time to prove your product to have a good effect. Not only that but a great amount of people here live in a literal tech bubble and we believe that everyone has a reasonably fast laptop or can setup a large workstation.
- hoppyhoppy2 5y ago
  We have a game streaming service from Google, too (Stadia)... which is apparently struggling.
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  > Not only that but a great amount of people here live in a literal tech bubble and we believe that everyone has a reasonably fast laptop or can setup a large workstation. By that same token the average persons browsing habits are also not the same. Optimising for Chrome power users who have eleventy billion tabs open and run hefty web apps isn’t the normal usecase. My families browsing is mostly taken care of on a 2012 MBP and a couple of ancient iPads. Mighty would be functionally useless for us. Heck my entire day is spent in Chrome working in Drive and writing code in our own development environment in our web app. I am a browser power user in that sense on a three year old gaming laptop and I don’t understand the Mighty usecase. It’s a niche within a niche at the moment although I understand the appeal of the business model.
  - nbzso 5y ago
    The business model is obvious. Data. The new petrol. The use case is the question. The general trend against personal computing. The naïveté of todays startups and VC in general. But this is nothing new. It will pass, some people will get rich, some will lose money. Do I like it? No. Do I care? No. Why? Because I have learned my life lessons well. If something survives as tech standard, it will be used. So I focus my attention on not being early adopter on any kind of tech.
  - sjg007 5y ago
wildermuthn 5y ago
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 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.
- gargs 5y ago
  You just described a Netbook
- Secretmapper 5y ago
  What's mosh? Edit: Managed to find the right string of words to google: mosh = Mobile Shell
moultano 5y ago
I did not take Jonathan Blow's tweet to be saying it's a bad idea, or won't work, but rather that it's an indictment of the whole web stack that it's necessary.
- cableshaft 5y ago
  Watch any of his talks and you'll know for him it's definitely the latter. He's complained about bloat and the web stack in particular plenty of times. Here's a really good talk by him that dives into it, titled dramatically "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko Also note he's currently developing a programming language called JAI that's trying (and seems like it might ultimately succeed) in being a faster and smoother alternative to C++ for developing games.
runako 5y ago
I have no dog in the fight either way, but I think it's weird that their demo product shots are on a Mac when part of their pitch is > "50+ tabs without your computer coming to a crawl" On Macs, people can just switch to Safari for free and solve that problem. Yes, Chrome is a memory hog. Stop using Chrome, don't send all your browsing data to a third party. Perhaps Windows would be a better choice for Mighty demo shots, since there may not have a better option than Chrome for Windows.
- mstipetic 5y ago
  I just bought an used Lenovo desktop that’s a few years old, but has an i7 and 32gb of ram. It handles a hundred tabs without blinking. I think the bigger problem is the artificial constraint we’ve put on ram, why are we still selling computers with 8gb of ram?
elbasti 5y ago
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. One answer would be to buy everyone an M1 mac. However, most of these reps are not familiar with apple (they use PCs at home) + they are still a bit too expensive (we're in Mexico where they cost 1.5 - 2x). I would love to be able to buy our customer service reps a setup (monitor + mouse + computer) for ~$500 USD and have them use Mighty to run our customer service suite for $10-$15 bucks a month. That would scale to a customer service org of hundreds. At $50 bucks a month I should just buy them a mac. IMHO Suhail's pitch about "running figma" is wrong. I'm happy to buy a designer any computer they want. But outfitting a CSR team of 50+ people? Mighty + a thin client would be amazing.
- notsureaboutpg 5y ago
  >At $50 bucks a month I should just buy them a mac. Yeah, agreed. I kind of thought the savvy business plan would be to charge at a loss, make up the loss with VC money, gather a lot of market share (customers like you), then raise the price once the pain of moving off is too high
- chrisco255 5y ago
  How long before the $500 Lenovos and Dells have same ballpark performance to the 2021 M1 Macs? AMD or NVidia will inevitably release an ARM chip that competes with M1, and it will just be 12-24 months before this is commonplace. I don't buy the argument that performance will always get tapped out by developers. There is an upper limit to what even a horribly architected 2D web app needs to consume.
  - elbasti 5y ago
    Maybe! Hopefully! But it begs the question: why is the situation so bad now? What will change? It's not like the apps I mentioned are inherently complicated.
lghh 5y ago
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.
- detaro 5y ago
  He is very much in the church of hand-optimized low-level programming and anything that abstracts over that being where computing is going wrong.
- ta_ca 5y ago
  you can't just compare a game and a web page. vastly different requirements.
Pxtl 5y ago
I'm not upset about Mighty itself - I'm sure it's a fine product made by some decent people. No, I'm upset that Mighty is necessary. That we, as an industry, have failed so hard that multi-gigahertz mult-core machines with gigabytes of ram can no longer consistently and quickly render documents without offloading it to a central server.
d_burfoot 5y ago
I follow Blow's work and opinions quite closely. I am quite confident he was NOT criticizing Mighty specifically. Instead he was deploring the state of software engineering in general and web programming in particular. He is saying something like "I can't believe web engineering sucks so bad that a tool like Mighty actually makes sense". See his talk about preventing the end of civilization (!!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk
- lapnitnelav 5y ago
  Fascinating video as always from Jonathan. Definitely highlights something I've always felt, which is that we're really making life complicated with all those tools and processes that are less than ideal. I get the feeling business and the need to "ship" stuff is the thing really bringing technology down, even though it looks like it's moving it forward.
peterthehacker 5y ago
This is the first time I’m hearing of Mighty App and, at least at first glance, I wouldn’t categorize it as a “crazy idea,” in fact it seems pretty non-crazy to me - chrome but more efficient. It’s literally a faster horse. I guess the implementation is the crazy part...?
peterthehacker 5y ago
Has mighty app announced what pricing will look like? I’m assuming that you couldn’t offer something like this for free.
- saklani 5y ago
  yeah, they mentioned 30-50$ monthly on their site.

anotha1 5y ago

Mighty is a good idea, marketed to the wrong people. I mean, who wouldn't just upgrade their computer? New software is a cost, even if it's "free." I'm sure there's a niche, though. Like low-paid workers needing to do a lot on their crappy personal machines.

blocked_again 5y ago
Do you think low paid workers are going buy a cheap laptop for 500$ and pay 30$ or 50$ per month for Mighty instead of just getting a more powerful Window laptop for like 1000$ or 1500$?
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  M1 macs can be had for $999, and they can even be bought with cheap financing options to convert it to a monthly payment. Maybe there’s a market for people stuck on old computers but whose companies still spring for super fast internet and $50/month SaaS bills per user instead of just spending that same money (or less) financing the laptops they actually need, but it would be a small market.
- criddell 5y ago
  Is it just the price that's the problem? What if Might were $30 to $50 per year?
bhouston 5y ago
I think that corporations may want to force all their users to use Mighty so that they can control exactly what goes on in the browser -- it is easier to pay Mighty to "virtualize" the browser, than it is to keep all computers up to date and without malicious extensions. Maybe even prevent browsers from downloading files onto the local computer. A full recording of each user's sessions. Integrated password manager that uses the Mighty login to tie them all together. So I view it as valuable to corporations and thus mighty falls into the B2B category of company which makes software end users hate, but corporations love. Probably a fair bit of money in that.
- dd36 5y ago
  Don’t they already do this with VMs for less cost?
- vishnugupta 5y ago
  > easier to pay Mighty to "virtualize" the browser, than it is to keep all computers up to date and without malicious extensions. Not denying your other points but Amazon Workspaces[1] is a product that perfectly fits their needs. From a top-level exec's stand point I would imagine they would be more willing to buy something like Amazon Workspaces which gives them 100% control and peace of mind Vs piecemeal approach such as browser, conference call client etc., [1] https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces
- calvin_ 5y ago
  Except VDI products for enterprise already exist and are much cheaper than Mighty. AWS, Citrix, VMware, and probably others play in this space.

blocked_again 5y ago

Yeah. Also, Suhail Doshi, the founder of Mighty, is mentioned as one of the people who draft read this essay.

gustavo-fring 5y ago
Graham does this often. Instead of directly saying what he wants to say, he beats around the bush. When Allred was getting criticized for shady business practices, Graham wrote haters and thanked him and Musk and a bunch of other people. Not sure why he does it, it is very underhanded, as though he's afraid of actually getting in a legit argument with the person. Easier to pontificate form his essays, have them posted to his website, then have the mods defend him. "Essay is french for attempt." There are good and there are bad attempts, of course.
- domnomnom 5y ago
  Probably terrified of outrage mobs.
- herendin2 5y ago
  I think he genuinely believes these issues are much broader than a single company. So he wants to encourage discussion about the general issue, instead of sparking even more unproductive, repetitive argument about a single company which would overshadow the broader and more interesting issue he sees. (As we can see here, where a quarter of the comments are debating the business model of Mighty.)

thundergolfer 5y ago

If a “Crazy New Idea” (CNI) is getting VC funding from establishment tech capital to deliver a twist in an existing product, it doesn’t seem like it could be so crazy. Reading this I thought of CNIs like the Internet of the 1980s, women’s suffrage in the 19th century, Project Mercury, The Eiffel Tower. The CNIs gaining ground today in tech seem to be crypto, brain-computer-interfaces, quantum computing, and CRISPR gene editing.

busymom0 5y ago

If there was a similar offering as mighty for certain development tools including Xcode and android studio together, that would be awesome and something I would look into. Basically something which would reduce the build times.

AussieWog93 5y ago

From what I understand of both the recent tweets and both of their fairly radical/extreme (and mostly correct) views about abstraction being a net negative, the criticism is less "Mighty doesn't work" and more "We shouldn't need to use an app like Mighty to get good performance on a basic website".

paulgb 5y ago
Sure, but the disconnect seems to be that Mighty is advertised for people who essentially use their browser as an OS (I see Figma mentioned a lot), rather than people who just want to do basic browsing. I think Mighty has unfairly taken the brunt of a lot of growing discontent with bloat on the web. I'm not ready to fork over $30+ for faster browsing, but I'm glad someone is working in this space, because I genuinely would like to rent a fast virtual computer for the occasional video editing task and think Mighty is a step in that direction.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  > I genuinely would like to rent a fast virtual computer for the occasional video editing task and think Mighty is a step in that direction. Can't you already do that pretty easily on AWS or Azure?
  - paulgb 5y ago
    At minimum it seems like I’d have to choose an instance size, an OS that was compatible with my software, install the editing software, mount a common storage location with my footage, etc. What I’d like to see is a service that let me add my credit card, click a button, and launch a video editor on a high-RAM machine that I pay for the hour (including the software license fee).
- ta_ca 5y ago
  unfairly? privacy concerns aside they just added another huge abstraction on top of an already huge pile of shit we call modern web.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

My hang up with Mighty isn’t about their idea or their technology or their execution. It’s impressive to see what they’ve done. My issue is that it’s not a product I could feel good recommending to anyone, at least at the high pricing that was proposed in the last discussion. In an era of $999 M1 Macs (and even cheaper AMD laptops) and readily available financing options, it doesn’t make sense for anyone to throw their money away at a SaaS service that simply cannot perform as well as local Chrome on a modern machine. I could see the narrow use case for limited situations where someone has 1. Weird IT department restrictions that require them to use old, slow computers but also 2. Budget rules that allow them to spend monthly money on a SaaS but not on financing the hardware they need to get their job done and 3. Guaranteed high speed internet all of the time and 4. An IT/corporate security department that is okay with them sending all of their keystrokes, login info, and browser data to a 3rd party service Surely this situation exists, but it still feels like Mighty is targeting a broader audience by providing untrue claims about remote thin client technology somehow being faster than a halfway decent local machine. I’d feel equally uncomfortable if Stadia was charging $50/month while claiming to be lower latency than local gaming. The counter arguments about disrespecting hard working startup founders or doubting visionaries feel like a strawman response to legitimate questions about the value of their service. The technology and execution look to be good, AFAICT. It’s the product, pricing, messaging, and value that I can’t recommend.

pantulis 5y ago
I was going to try Mighty but even in my somewhat relaxed work environment item 4 is not really solved by Mighty apart from "we will not access your data". Obviously they are very smart and will surely be working on E2E encryption but they do not seem to have it.
- IAmLiterallyAB 5y ago
  > E2E encryption How on earth would that work for their product? They need to access the data so they can render it.
  - 5y ago

vishnugupta 5y ago

There was this product[1] to browse internet offline by downloading something called “Web Packs”. This was back in 2005 just when I was graduating when I spoke to the founding team. They were naturally quite confident about the product taking off. Something seemed off to me I couldn’t point out what so I didn’t take the job offer. After all these years I realized the source my discomfort. They were actually betting against the speed of internet getting better. While most of the businesses like Amazon, Google were betting for the internet tech to improve this product did exactly the opposite. To me Mighty sounds like a similar category of product. They are betting that PC/Laptop/Mobile hardware will stagnate from this point on. Exactly when Apple has launched M1, which blows the previous version out of the water, at a non crazy price. From this point it’s a matter of time other hardware also catches up in terms of performance and price. Besides, yet another company to handover my entire browsing history and data for purported improvement in latency? I don’t know. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webaroo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webaroo

weasel_words 5y ago
"They are betting that PC/Laptop/Mobile hardware will stagnate from this point on." Me playing the devils advocate... Perhaps not //forever//, but perhaps for the next few years (enough for them to make some good money). Why? Chip shortage, GPU shortage. Anecdotally, I just bought a computer for $7500, that, two years ago would have cost about $2500 (granted, it is the new tech, but even so, new tech of this tier two years ago would have been approx. $2500). On top of that, have to wait two months for it to be assembled. (ouch) I agree with you that speed will probably not stop increasing, but if prices continue to go up, or even just level off, few people will be able to afford the new tech. That being said, would I invest in Mighty? No since I agree with you in general....and agree with you about the zero privacy issue...very regressive position for someone like PG imo.
- easton 5y ago
  That assumes that AWS/Azure/GCP won't have the same issues getting chips to run Mighty on that PC manufacturers have getting chips to sell to consumers though. If the shortage keeps up, that is not necessarily true.

zitterbewegung 5y ago

We have game streaming services from NVIDIA and amazon has had Amazon workspaces. With the global chip shortage which will affect a large amount of people I think that this would be the best time to prove your product to have a good effect. Not only that but a great amount of people here live in a literal tech bubble and we believe that everyone has a reasonably fast laptop or can setup a large workstation.

hoppyhoppy2 5y ago
We have a game streaming service from Google, too (Stadia)... which is apparently struggling.
meheleventyone 5y ago
> Not only that but a great amount of people here live in a literal tech bubble and we believe that everyone has a reasonably fast laptop or can setup a large workstation. By that same token the average persons browsing habits are also not the same. Optimising for Chrome power users who have eleventy billion tabs open and run hefty web apps isn’t the normal usecase. My families browsing is mostly taken care of on a 2012 MBP and a couple of ancient iPads. Mighty would be functionally useless for us. Heck my entire day is spent in Chrome working in Drive and writing code in our own development environment in our web app. I am a browser power user in that sense on a three year old gaming laptop and I don’t understand the Mighty usecase. It’s a niche within a niche at the moment although I understand the appeal of the business model.
- nbzso 5y ago
  The business model is obvious. Data. The new petrol. The use case is the question. The general trend against personal computing. The naïveté of todays startups and VC in general. But this is nothing new. It will pass, some people will get rich, some will lose money. Do I like it? No. Do I care? No. Why? Because I have learned my life lessons well. If something survives as tech standard, it will be used. So I focus my attention on not being early adopter on any kind of tech.
- sjg007 5y ago

wildermuthn 5y ago

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 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.

gargs 5y ago
You just described a Netbook
Secretmapper 5y ago
What's mosh? Edit: Managed to find the right string of words to google: mosh = Mobile Shell

moultano 5y ago

I did not take Jonathan Blow's tweet to be saying it's a bad idea, or won't work, but rather that it's an indictment of the whole web stack that it's necessary.

cableshaft 5y ago
Watch any of his talks and you'll know for him it's definitely the latter. He's complained about bloat and the web stack in particular plenty of times. Here's a really good talk by him that dives into it, titled dramatically "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko Also note he's currently developing a programming language called JAI that's trying (and seems like it might ultimately succeed) in being a faster and smoother alternative to C++ for developing games.

runako 5y ago

I have no dog in the fight either way, but I think it's weird that their demo product shots are on a Mac when part of their pitch is > "50+ tabs without your computer coming to a crawl" On Macs, people can just switch to Safari for free and solve that problem. Yes, Chrome is a memory hog. Stop using Chrome, don't send all your browsing data to a third party. Perhaps Windows would be a better choice for Mighty demo shots, since there may not have a better option than Chrome for Windows.

mstipetic 5y ago
I just bought an used Lenovo desktop that’s a few years old, but has an i7 and 32gb of ram. It handles a hundred tabs without blinking. I think the bigger problem is the artificial constraint we’ve put on ram, why are we still selling computers with 8gb of ram?

elbasti 5y ago

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. One answer would be to buy everyone an M1 mac. However, most of these reps are not familiar with apple (they use PCs at home) + they are still a bit too expensive (we're in Mexico where they cost 1.5 - 2x). I would love to be able to buy our customer service reps a setup (monitor + mouse + computer) for ~$500 USD and have them use Mighty to run our customer service suite for $10-$15 bucks a month. That would scale to a customer service org of hundreds. At $50 bucks a month I should just buy them a mac. IMHO Suhail's pitch about "running figma" is wrong. I'm happy to buy a designer any computer they want. But outfitting a CSR team of 50+ people? Mighty + a thin client would be amazing.

notsureaboutpg 5y ago
>At $50 bucks a month I should just buy them a mac. Yeah, agreed. I kind of thought the savvy business plan would be to charge at a loss, make up the loss with VC money, gather a lot of market share (customers like you), then raise the price once the pain of moving off is too high
chrisco255 5y ago
How long before the $500 Lenovos and Dells have same ballpark performance to the 2021 M1 Macs? AMD or NVidia will inevitably release an ARM chip that competes with M1, and it will just be 12-24 months before this is commonplace. I don't buy the argument that performance will always get tapped out by developers. There is an upper limit to what even a horribly architected 2D web app needs to consume.
- elbasti 5y ago
  Maybe! Hopefully! But it begs the question: why is the situation so bad now? What will change? It's not like the apps I mentioned are inherently complicated.

lghh 5y ago

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.

detaro 5y ago
He is very much in the church of hand-optimized low-level programming and anything that abstracts over that being where computing is going wrong.
ta_ca 5y ago
you can't just compare a game and a web page. vastly different requirements.

Pxtl 5y ago

I'm not upset about Mighty itself - I'm sure it's a fine product made by some decent people. No, I'm upset that Mighty is necessary. That we, as an industry, have failed so hard that multi-gigahertz mult-core machines with gigabytes of ram can no longer consistently and quickly render documents without offloading it to a central server.

d_burfoot 5y ago

I follow Blow's work and opinions quite closely. I am quite confident he was NOT criticizing Mighty specifically. Instead he was deploring the state of software engineering in general and web programming in particular. He is saying something like "I can't believe web engineering sucks so bad that a tool like Mighty actually makes sense". See his talk about preventing the end of civilization (!!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk

lapnitnelav 5y ago
Fascinating video as always from Jonathan. Definitely highlights something I've always felt, which is that we're really making life complicated with all those tools and processes that are less than ideal. I get the feeling business and the need to "ship" stuff is the thing really bringing technology down, even though it looks like it's moving it forward.

peterthehacker 5y ago

This is the first time I’m hearing of Mighty App and, at least at first glance, I wouldn’t categorize it as a “crazy idea,” in fact it seems pretty non-crazy to me - chrome but more efficient. It’s literally a faster horse. I guess the implementation is the crazy part...?

peterthehacker 5y ago

Has mighty app announced what pricing will look like? I’m assuming that you couldn’t offer something like this for free.

saklani 5y ago
yeah, they mentioned 30-50$ monthly on their site.