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I decided to stop working on Mighty

• datalopers 4y ago
  He shutdown Mighty to launch an AI image generator. Anytime you’re told someone is smart or clever, remember they aren't.
  • wittycardio 4y ago
    This week should remind you that the silicon valley hype machine is just like any other hype machine
  • htrp 4y ago
    Kinda sad that this is going away, we don't need another lexica
• ivoryloom 4y ago
  I was skeptical about Mighty but seeing gaming platforms moving to streaming, PG endorsing this as the future, I thought I was just not getting it. Maybe I should trust myself more.
  • ohgodplsno 4y ago
    PG endorsing a technology is a sure way to know that it has no future.
    • davidivadavid 4y ago
      Yeah it's almost like people are collectively waking up to the fact that VCs are not actually that smart because their whole business model is predicated on being wrong 90+% of the time (which to be fair they've been explicitly saying forever). Now they're connecting the dots and realizing that the other 10% are just luck (and a well timed bull market).
  • lukevp 4y ago
    Stadia failed too… but was that just google pulling the plug, or the whole concept that doesn’t make sense? Personally I’ve tried stadia and ps now, and they both have noticeable artifacting, lower resolution, and input latency, on a 1 gig symmetrical fiber connection. The only streaming that’s remotely acceptable as a gamer is steam in-home streaming over a hardwired connection.
    • rightbyte 4y ago
      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.
      • glowingly 4y ago
        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), which itself was piped through a VPN. This vastly improved performance and made it so that I didn't have to be physically present at my workstation. Just as well, since it was during the early covid timeframe.
        • rightbyte 4y ago
          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.
    • rstat1 4y ago
      I think Stadia failed because of a combo of reasons. Main 2 being: 1) Google. 2) Their pricing model made no sense. Geforce NOW (NVIDIA's Stadia) works a lot better IMO, and doesn't require you go through them to acquire games. It lets you stream games you already have access to on say Steam or where ever.
  • swyx 4y ago
    broken clock is right twice a day. being skeptical on 100% of startups makes you right 90% of the time but doesnt by itself prove you have good judgment yet. you also need to know how to be nonconsensus and optimistic.
• mbStavola 4y ago
  I never understood the value proposition here, but I assume they had _some_ traction which motivated them to work on this for almost four years. Curious as to their numbers and what people walked away thinking after trying it.
  • bombcar 4y ago
    In a world where phone CPUs weren’t as powerful as laptop CPUs it might have made sense.
• rvz 4y ago
  It made no sense to begin with, had little to no use case and was full of hype by VCs [0] and had absolutely zero path to making any money. Doomed for failure from the start. [0] https://twitter.com/ShaanVP/status/1511477714049388548 https://twitter.com/ShaanVP/status/1511477714049388548
  • GordonS 4y ago
    The most incredible thing about Mighty, for me, was that VCs bought into it. That... is just, wow. I guess it goes to show that the idea is apparently only a small part of their decision making process - how it's sold to them is the bigger piece by far.
    • Cyberdog 4y ago
      I wonder if there's some sort of implicit "you hype my product and I'll hype yours" deal that these people have.
• deleted 4y ago
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• stavros 4y ago
  Can someone explain what Mighty is? There's no context either here or in the linked Twitter thread. After significant searching, I found it: https://www.mightyapp.com https://www.mightyapp.com Basically Stadia for webpages.
  • secondcoming 4y ago
    I'm still stumped. It seems like a cloud-based browser?
    • stavros 4y ago
      Yeah, it looks like it streams the rendered pages as video from a server?
      • rightbyte 4y ago
        A X11-server in some crappy video fallback mode?
  • ayewo 4y ago
    To better understand Mighty and their business model, start with this heavily debated post about them from 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26957215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26957215
• amadeuspagel 4y ago
  In May 2021 Paul Graham wrote Crazy New Ideas[1], in which he explained that envy is the only reason people criticize ideas by "reasonable domain experts". This was widely understood at the time to refer to critics of Mighty[2][3]. [1]: http://paulgraham.com/newideas.html http://paulgraham.com/newideas.html [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27062713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27062713 [3]: https://www.echevarria.io/blog/the-mighty-pushback-isnt-all-about-mighty/index.html https://www.echevarria.io/blog/the-mighty-pushback-isnt-all-...
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • roflyear 4y ago
    I know to exist in the VC world you have to buy into insane shit and convince yourself you believe it is the next best thing, but this just seems so ludicrous to me. I don't understand it at all.
    • ahMath8 4y ago
      People with enough money sit and imagine all day tend to develop delusions of grandeur; see the various flavors of tribal wise men in history. Not so bad in and of itself, it’s when individual’s delusions of self worth infect others and drag us along with. Daily work should focus on tending to human biological needs and telling the delusional to mumble their gibberish in a corner aside from that. I feel zero obligation to validate PG or Musk or the rest. Just people. Each one of billions. Their figurative identities as wealthy members of society is due to conformity to politically correct spoken tradition, not an indication they’re almighty.
    • hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
      "the difficulty with finding truly transformative, great ideas is that they look pretty similar to bad ideas in the early stages" is one of pg's central theses that I couldn't disagree with more strongly, and the only conclusion I can come to is that pg's hubris is blinding him. I don't think it's so much that you can't tell the difference between crazy bad and crazy good ideas in the early stages, it's that you're asking the wrong people. pg loves to quote the mythos that AirBnB was such a "crazy" idea early on that big VCs couldn't see the potential. But even in the early years, I don't think AirBnB was a big leap at all. Couchsurfing was already big, and platforms like HomeAway/VRBO had received huge funding rounds. pg was just asking the wrong VCs - not surprising that a bunch of rich old guys would be put off staying in someone's guestroom. Indeed, my understanding is that the first investor to really see value in AirBnB was very familiar with the vacation rental space. In my opinion, the startups that were wildly successful weren't so much because they had "out there" ideas, but because their execution was unparalleled. Dropbox, Stripe, Figma, AirBnB, etc. just came out with products that were a delight to use when you first tried them in ways their competitors weren't. Trying to be introspective, I think the event that most surprised me and seemed "crazy" was the election of Donald Trump in 2016. But again, I think i was just asking the wrong people. My circle of college-educated urbanites was basically unaware of the depth of some of the discontent with the status quo that Trump tapped into.
• deleted 4y ago
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• tpush 4y ago
  Would be great if PG got more humble as a result, but something tells me that's never gonna happen.
  • stephc_int13 4y ago
    Everyone can make mistakes. He was stubborn and dumb on this one, maybe he is getting old, or maybe he was too emotionally attached for some reason.
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • te_chris 4y ago
    Humility and rich men with twitter accounts shall never mix
• wilde 4y ago
  Props to them for taking risks and making the hard call to pivot. We need people building useful tools.
• searchableguy 4y ago
  Everyone is pivoting to AI creative tools recently. So much interest and explosion.
  • Nathanael_M 4y ago
    In a couple decades people are going to have to radically consider where they find personal value and identity.
    • charbonneau3 4y ago
      There will be apps for that.
• newaccount2021 4y ago
• patentatt 4y ago
  • aero-glide2 4y ago
    Each tweet can have a separate discussion
    • loloquwowndueo 4y ago
      And that’s good why exactly?
      • fragmede 4y ago
        Because each tweet is (possibly) worthy of separate discussion. you have Tweet 1: thesis. t2: supporting evidence A. t3: supporting evidence B. Say you agree with the thesis but think evidence A is weak or otherwise want to discuss it, you don't pollute the discussion on the thesis or supporting evidence B.
        • loloquwowndueo 4y ago
          99% of twitter threaders are incapable of organizing their threads like this.
  • ta988 4y ago
    Don't worry someone is working really hard at making sure it will go away.
  • deleted 4y ago
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• ianbutler 4y ago
  I don’t think Mighty was unreasonable, just tackled from the wrong end. Netlify and Vercel did it from the other end and look where they are right now. Instead of a faster browser they did super easy edge deployments of your JS apps which has a similar end result for users but also solves a giant headache for businesses which is where the money is.
• memish 4y ago
  Good pivot and a humbling reminder for us all. Jonathan Blow on the day this was announced, "Very hard to describe how embarrassing this is for everyone involved in the Web and, sort of, software more generally." https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1387094702139142145 https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1387094702139142145 > Wait, Paul Graham supported this? Jonathan: Very vocally, to the point of insulting world-class programmers who think it’s dumb (he did not know said programmers were world-class). > Huh, I see. I thought he's all pro elegant and lean solutions, judging by the books and articles at least. Jonathan: Yeah it doesn't make sense to me either.
  • Dreako 4y ago
    This happens to literally every startup tho
    • modeless 4y ago
      With different people each time. And some of the people are on the correct side more often than others. It's useful to check afterward and update your priors on who you should be listening to.
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
    Hmm, I'm not quite sure how to interpret Jonathan Blow's tweet. You seem to be saying that he is saying that the Mighty project itself is embarrassing, while I took it to mean the fact that today's beefy computers, with all their CPU and RAM, struggle to render web pages to the point that someone is considering doing a rube-goldberg-esque solution of rendering on a mainframe-equivalent and then streaming you the results is the part that's embarrassing.
    • modeless 4y ago
      Yes, and from that perspective the fact that it didn't work and nobody actually wanted it seems to indicate that it shouldn't have been embarrassing after all.
• _sohan 4y ago
  I was surprised that PG supported this idea so publicly for so long. Best of luck for the team on their next product.
• fareesh 4y ago
  I was always quite skeptical of this being a popular use-case that grows over time. Can the underlying technology be used to create a first class remote desktop experience? From the ones I've tried, I've found that NoMachine is among the best performing remote desktop tools. I never used Mighty but my guess is they must have achieved better performance than this? Was Mighty's technology tailored to Chrome only?
• arriu 4y ago
  Putting market fit aside, Mighty was a technical feat coming from a talented team.
• pavlov 4y ago
  Some 5-6 years ago I built a live streaming backend that used a custom C++ encoding front around Chromium on GPU servers on AWS. Mighty probably does something pretty similar. It was the right solution for our users at that moment because our product was a professional tool at a relatively high price tag, and being able to run full HTML+CSS allowed us to deliver customized motion graphics quickly using available designer talent, so there was a distinct advantage there. It was also quite expensive to run, and the stack was fickle because those Nvidia GPU servers aren’t designed to run client apps — they’re AI/ML solutions primarily. So I’m not surprised that Mighty is shutting down: the infra bills must have been running pretty hot and they seem to believe they can better spend their cash runway on AI, presumably on largely the same infra. (Btw I’m giving a talk at the Kranky Geek virtual event on Thursday Nov 17 about cloud compositing which will discuss this Chromium adventure and what I believe is a better solution for most apps.)
• nisten 4y ago
  I think it really was the M1 Chip that killed Mighty. The product itself looked like it was working great. Before the value proposition was good. You can still use your old laptop and still have a very fast browser experience via remotely running it on a AMD server chip, this way you save on battery life and RAM too. Then M1 speedometer scores started beating AMD Epyc on single core web browsing performance. Not only that, but even providing a much better experience in terms of battery life because of power savings. Then yeah there was no point paying 20$-30$ a month for a remote browser instance. If you can afford that as a user you're either already set on CPU/GPU/RAM or better off just buying a used m1 air for <900$. It's quite sad of a lesson where you do everything right, work consistently hard, be quite innovative, have plenty of financial and talent resources, and still fail. Tech obsolescence is brutal.
  • Kwpolska 4y ago
    > use your old laptop > M1 To have a M1 chip, you need a new laptop. A new Intel/AMD laptop would bring you plenty performance not to require remote desktop as a service.
    • MomoXenosaga 4y ago
      I looked into remote desktop services but in the long run you're cheaper off just buying a computer
      • pclmulqdq 4y ago
        Even for gaming and workstation use, this seems to be true. Last year, the value proposition of remote desktops looked great, but it turns out price/performance of all computing parts was at an all-time high.
      • jbjbjbjb 4y ago
        I looked into this and found, annoyingly, that even if used the Remote Desktop rarely and I could deallocate the machine to not get charged, it was actually the price for storage that made it too expensive.
• robenkleene 4y ago
  The trick of Figma claims another. I see Mighty as part of the broader trend of folks thinking Figma it the leading edge of a wider transition to web apps across all creative work. 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. I think what really happened is folks misinterpreted the significance of Figma. The web has taken over in collaboration-focused software, e.g., things like Google Docs, Slack, etc... What really happened is that design has moved from specialized professional software (hard to use, powerful), to being more like collaboration software (easy to use, light). I.e., what Figma really signals is that design is now more like new task that became more like using Google Docs app, not that high-powered tasks like video, photo, and audio editing are becoming web apps. This means what really powered Figma's takeover was that flat design took over, which is less technically demanding.
  • Kiro 4y ago
    You say "what really happened" four times with four, to me, unrelated conclusions.
    • robenkleene 4y ago
      Trying again, there's one point: What really made Figma successful is design moving from being made in "professional software" (like say Photoshop, Premiere, Visual Studio, Maya) to "collaboration software" (like Slack, Google Sheets), and that this was made possible because "flat design" is less technically demanding than the "skeumorphic" design it replaced. (Sorry I wasn't clearer, I struggle on how to make points like this succinctly without is sounding a bit disjointed.)
      • hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
        I agree with one of your points (that where Figma really succeeded is that it understood better than anyone else the collaborative nature of web design), but I disagree that flat design vs. skeuomorphic makes much of a difference. I've seen more "realistic" designs where the actual iconography/images are created in something like Photoshop and then just imported to Figma, and Figma handles it fine. Point being that I think that even if all apps still had the design aesthetic of 2008 iPhone apps that Figma still would have succeeded.
• OmarIsmail 4y ago
  Mighty as an idea was cool and interesting and I hope the tech survives and continues to be developed. Fat clients have their place in the world but a solution like Mighty allows for a lot of the benefits of a fat client without a lot of the downsides. I think this is a really interesting decision from Suhail and one not taken lightly. I think this decision is another data point that AI-infused applications are a potential new “tech platform” and we’re at the beginning of a new “mega cycle”. I.e. web2 2002-2010, mobile 2010-2020. Folks shouldn’t be spending much energy on thinking about how Mighty may have gone wrong (and seriously the negative analysis is so boring and lame), and instead think about the new AI opportunity.
• dhirenb 4y ago
  This idea sounded bad like a lot of ideas initially sound (insert ipod nomad lame meme). There was a case to be made that consumer laptop processing speeds had completely stagnated, chrome wasn't getting any lighter, and fast internet was more readily available. But, Apple stepped in with the M1/M2 and totally obviated the need for any product like this.
• talhof8 4y ago
  I don't think it's M1 that killed it. Probably high server costs and being a vitamin and not a painkiller killed it. Also, people are not too happy about giving away their browser history data to server-side powered browsers. That being said, it's still sad to see startups fail. Hopefully they'll have better luck with their new direction. Fingers crossed!
  • peter422 4y ago
    Well I think M1 probably put the nail in the coffin but I agree, probably still fails anyways. Mighty is cool and useful, but is it cool and useful enough for the non-trivial server costs? $20-30/month is a lot for a service.
    • talhof8 4y ago
      Yup, I agree.
  • baxtr 4y ago
    I love the vitamin vs painkiller discussion. The basic premise is: don’t build a vitamin, build a painkiller because it’s solves a real problem and people will be willing to pay for it. First of all the analogy fails in the real world. The vitamin market is huge. People pay lots of money to buy vitamins. Second, the transition is not clear. It’s hard to draw a line line and say now this vitamin turned into a painkiller. Third, I believe almost no product is a real painkiller. We in the West at least live in sheer abundance. Almost none of our problems is really painful. For example: was Facebook a painkiller? Hardly. Was the iPhone a painkiller? Not until you considered using it. I’m not saying the analogy is useless. But I don’t think that vitamins can’t be super successful.
    • talhof8 4y ago
      Vitamins can def be super successful, as you mentioned. Agreed. I think that with Mighty it's just the combination of being an expensive product (mainly to operate, but to some extent for the end customer as well) + privacy concerns + most people don't suffer that much from slow browsers and instead willing to pay $20/30 a month to solve it. Pretty niche market, I think. But might be mistaken...
• modeless 4y ago
  Looking at tweets like [1] it seems like their original bet was that server single core performance would dramatically outpace client single core performance. Honestly even if that had happened I still don't think their product would have made sense. The hosting cost and bandwidth/latency requirements would still have killed it. The death of this product is a good sign for computing overall. The more of computing that happens on the client the better. Clients are (at least sometimes) under user control. When stuff moves to the cloud users give up control and that's a bad thing. Long live fat clients! [1] https://twitter.com/Suhail/status/1588906086459150337?s=20&t=3QU-o-xTD4nS9k2eog9U9A https://twitter.com/Suhail/status/1588906086459150337?s=20&t...
  • aslilac 4y ago
    yes! this is the same reason I’m glad Stadia died. “cool demo” does not equal “practical business”, and local compute will always be superior to cloud compute.
    • liuliu 4y ago
      "always" is not given. But yes, glad more computing on clients. More power to the people.
    • andrewvc 4y ago
      What? Stadia worked great (I say this as a user). What didn’t work was the business model, the lack of games, and the lack of trust in google to invest to fix those other things. It worked flawlessly for me for years over Wi-Fi. GeForce now which I currently use is rockier due to being more bandwidth sensitive and not as controller friendly since you’re really using a PC, not a console as stadia was.
    • Kiro 4y ago
      Stadia was amazing and worked great even for games that required semi-high latency. The problem was the business model.
      • bloody-crow 4y ago
• landonxjames 4y ago
  According to the final tweet in that thread [0] it seems like they are pivoting to a sort of AI generated art based social media platform. I’m curious why they think this has the potential to be a “mass market changing” business since the social media world seems pretty over saturated already [0] https://twitter.com/suhail/status/1591831193598963713 https://twitter.com/suhail/status/1591831193598963713
  • bombcar 4y ago
    A cynical take would be something doused in enough buzzwords to prevent the VCs asking for the half of the money that remains back.
  • morelisp 4y ago
    The last thing he already knew how to build didn't work, so he's going to try something else he already knows how to build. PMF? What's that?
    • minimaxir 4y ago
      There's definitely PMF for AI image tools... ...but that particular industry is moving so fast it's already homogenized (with the best and cheapest tools being made by the core AI developers themselves), so without extreme differentiation a new player can't compete. The beta app in the Twitter thread has less features than current open-source AI Image tooling.
  • Dreako 4y ago
    it's not ai generated "social media" The social aspect was just added as an extra feature It's more like a Photoshop + canva type project
  • rikroots 4y ago
    He says in his 4th tweet in the thread "I think there’s a large opportunity to make an experience using many advances in AI (not just diffusion) to make a new kind of Creative Suite. A different set of products with a brand new UX." He links to the prototype at the end of the thread - https://playgroundai.com/ https://playgroundai.com/ The current site doesn't look very inspiring. Like you say, just another "AI generated art based social media platform". But if his plans are to develop it into some sort of After Effects competitor then ... maybe that's a market opportunity worth cracking?
• langitbiru 4y ago
  His new venture: https://playgroundai.com/ https://playgroundai.com/ Src: https://twitter.com/Suhail/status/1591831193598963713 https://twitter.com/Suhail/status/1591831193598963713
  • aslilac 4y ago
    oh lovely, a big titty generator. how useful.
    • Dreako 4y ago
      have you even used it? Why are people here acting more and more like reddit users Insufferable
• raverbashing 4y ago
  This is one startup I never "bought". Sure, they have an interesting product, but it is not something I would pay for As other comment said, it's a vitamin, not a painkiller. And you can always buy a new computer or upgrade it. Would it really make me much difference to run a browser in a much more powerful computer than the one I'm at? Only in extremely limited situations
• obblekk 4y ago
  Props to Suhail for building in the open (takes a lot of rejection tolerance) and being so honest about the path. That said, I work with lawyers as customers and I suspect there was an adjacent market in data privacy that a hosted browser would have had PM fit for. A lot of industries have strict legal requirements on controlling employee access to data (think healthcare, legal, compliance). In these cases, SaaS becomes risky if it can be accessed by anyone off their work computer. The standard solution is to limit the webapp to be accessible on VPN, and limit VPN to be accessible on MDM controlled devices, and limit MDM to be accessible on company owned devices. It would be a lot easier to just control the browser viewport and prevent data harvesting (essentially what Mighty was doing, focused on performance). Sounds like a small change, but it makes a world of difference when it's not feasible to send a physical machine to someone (3rd party contractors, overseas employees, low wage employees, etc)... something I discovered when talking to lawyers about using contractors overseas for routine data entry tasks. But that's definitely not the same kind of user, or tech expertise and would have been a big pivot in itself. Hopefully someone buys the IP and builds something cool.
  • MarkSweep 4y ago
    As evidence of a market for this, see the company Citrix. Also I think Facebook's content moderation website is only accessible from some sort of remote desktop system.
    • csande17 4y ago
      Funnily enough, the few times I've seen Citrix remote-desktop browsers used it's been for the opposite use case: isolating potentially malicious websites in a virtual machine so they can't compromise employees' computers.
  • hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
    > The standard solution is to limit the webapp to be accessible on VPN, and limit VPN to be accessible on MDM controlled devices, and limit MDM to be accessible on company owned devices. Didn't the "BeyondCorp" zero trust model pretty much kill that, or at least show there was a better way to restricting access to secure apps than a VPN?
• skc 4y ago
  He bravely and openly battled through alot of skepticism. Unfortunately (or fortunately I suppose), it turns out the skeptics were right. Always seemed like a very, very niche product .
• miketery 4y ago
  I’d love to see a mighty type app but for a phone emulator. I’m tired of all these apps constantly doing stuff in the background and tracking my location anytime I use them. If I had a “mighty” phone app, and could stream an emulated device with the apps on that server I’d happily pay $5~$10/ month.
• abetusk 4y ago
  In my opinion, on the face of it, remote experiences like this, be it gaming or whatever, are not out of the realm of reason. In practice, they tend to not work (again, in my opinion) because the rate at which computers get faster and cheaper far outpaces the infrastructure necessary to make a these "fly by wire" solutions work or have them be adopted. If Moore's law (or it's equivalent in compute/dollar) really ever does level out, then this will become more attractive. With the cost of compute dropping exponentially, it doesn't seem like this can ever really get a foothold.
• dietsprite 4y ago
  Couldn’t of happened to a nicer guy
• rognjen 4y ago
  I think they're yet another example of a company that had a good idea but then wildly over-promised. Just like Occulus.
• hmate9 4y ago
  Suhail’s Twitter is definitely worth a follow as he is regularly tweeting about the everyday problems and challenges of running a startup. If you’re interested in the space it’s a good mix of technical and startup challenges and is one of the few Twitter accounts that provides great content all the time (in my opinion)
  • rideontime 4y ago
    Eh, I couldn't stand all the cringe AI art tweets.
  • userabchn 4y ago
    Although I follow him, I get such a feeling of arrogance from his tweets (similar to the Repl.it guy) that, although the failure of a startup is sad, I can't help feeling some satisfaction from this development (also partly from the vindication as I was certain that this wouldn't work as soon as it was announced).
    • wittycardio 4y ago
      Similarly annoying vibes but the repl it guy is waaaay worse
  • renewiltord 4y ago
    I actually had him muted for what seemed to me him constantly trying to self aggrandize.
  • philshem 4y ago
    On the other hand,… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21067820 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21067820
• anhncommenter25 4y ago
  Mighty was like compute arbitrage. The bet was that you could buy compute at cloud prices, resell it to end users, and since this is cheaper than buying consumer compute in the form of workstations, laptops, & tablets, you can pocket the difference. I can't think of a bigger slice of consumer compute than browser workload; so if the scheme doesn't work there, it won't work for anything. My conclusion is that compute arbitrage isn't viable for B2C. You will have to actually provide a service on top of the resale. For example Github Codespaces is reselling cloud compute while simultaneously solving infra-as-code pain points in the CI/CD pipeline.
  • fragmede 4y ago
    I don't think it means services+arbitrage doesn't work. They were paying (I assume) cloud VM prices, and had to charge 20-30/month. If they had lower costs and were able to charge $5/month and still make money, we might not be having this conversation right now.
    • jacurtis 4y ago
      Services+Arbitrage definitely works. But Mighty didn't solve a painful-enough pain point. The arbitrage was how Mighty made money (buy a cloud VM for $10/mo and sell it for $20 with a software wrapper). But customers need a reason to pay for it. The advantages that Mighty offered weren't significant enough to impact most people. If they did, the advantages gained were questionable IMHO. Forcing people into a whole new workflow to slightly improve client-side JS performance is probably a worse trade-off for the vast majority of people even if you ignore cost entirely. Only a small group of people are encountering this pain point enough to actually seek out a solution for it. Once that small group of people find your solution, then you have to convince them to pay $20-30 a month to remove it. People are already canceling $12/mo Netflix subscriptions. To pay double-that for better JS rendering is a tough sale.
  • wmf 4y ago
    Hasn't cloud compute always been far more expensive than local hardware? I don't see any arbitrage opportunity here. Twenty years ago VDI wanted to replace desktop PCs with VMware ($$$) running on quad-socket servers ($$$) with fibre channel SAN storage ($$$). I didn't understand the economics then and I don't today.
• ec109685 4y ago
  Mighty was conceived at a really dark time in Mac laptop performance. The combination of Intel Mac Laptops that had horrible thermal characteristics, browsers that didn’t do anything to throttle background tabs, bloated websites and limited memory created a perfect storm of awful performance that Mighty could address. Almost all of that isn’t true anymore (besides the bloated websites which browsers manage better), which decimated the potential Mighty market (people willing to spend hundreds a year on a fast browser).
  • guruz 4y ago
    I love the "Auto Tab Discard" Firefox extension. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...
• doorman2 4y ago
  Mighty had no hope of succeeding. I’ve built something very similar to Mighty, and the fact is that browsers are hogs, and then adding on video transcoding on top of that makes the situation completely untenable. If someone can’t afford a computer good enough to browse the web, they sure as hell can’t afford a computer that can transcode HD video at all times, which is essentially what they’d need to pay for.
  • jacurtis 4y ago
    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 a better computer with that money.
    • senttoschool 4y ago
      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.
      • doorman2 4y ago
        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.
        • senttoschool 4y ago
          It is the end all, be all metric. The reason is because once a certain threshold of MT performance is reached, which the M1 most certainly reaches, then the ST is what matters for how fast your website loads, even with multiple tabs opened.
• xwowsersx 4y ago
  What is Mighty?
  • Cyberdog 4y ago
    I think the product in question is this: https://www.mightyapp.com/ https://www.mightyapp.com/ It's basically Google Stadia for web browsers; do the computation and renderning in a far-away data center and stream the result as a video feed to a local thin client program. I suppose this is an idea that could work better for web browsers than video games, but modern web browsers and sites/"applications" require fewer resources than modern AAA video games by at least a tiny margin and the pricing just wasn't competitive.
    • xwowsersx 4y ago
      Oh thank you. Given the discussion here, that has to be it. Thanks!
• IceWreck 4y ago
  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 core the idea was not something normal people and 99% engineers would ever consider. Anyone rich enough to pay for it would just pay for a more powerful machine. Anyways, they said they have 50% of VC money left and will be using it to create an online stable diffusion thingy which atleast fifteen startups are doing already including stability AI themselves. How can they differentiate ? Can they just use leftover VC money to make a completely different thing ?
  • swyx 4y ago
    "you are not better because you see the world in an odious light"
    • cercatrova 4y ago
      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.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • gleb-arestov 4y ago
    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/ https://www.rrweb.io/) I'm indie/solo making Linkkraft browser (to make a living from it). Browser to be effective researcher & collector. It visualizes your steps as tree and makes html snapshot for your each step (even steps in SPAs like twitter). https://arestov.github.io/linkkraft-notes/comparing/linkkraft-vs-chrome.mp4 https://arestov.github.io/linkkraft-notes/comparing/linkkraf... https://arestov.github.io/linkkraft-notes/trails-tree-plus-offline-for-tool-for-thoughts/linkkraft-fresh-offline-spa.mp4 https://arestov.github.io/linkkraft-notes/trails-tree-plus-o... As side effect of snapshots you can confidently unload documents & save CPU/memory. Looking forward to grow that snapshotting part into DOM streaming. So you can run "browser server" on your own PC, while having laptop fast & cool. With almost 0 delays and without worrying about privacy.
• theGnuMe 4y ago
  What does Mighty offer beyond app streaming?
• andybak 4y ago
  For the benefit of others who don't have a clue what mighty is: https://www.mightyapp.com/ https://www.mightyapp.com/
  • jbverschoor 4y ago
    Thank you
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• bagels 4y ago
  For those, like me who don't know what Mighty is: apparently a web browser that is faster. If that is the selling point, I can see why he quit working on it.
  • shp0ngle 4y ago
    It’s a browser that runs remotely and renders the page remotely, and the user connects to it via Electron app. That was the selling point.
    • bagels 4y ago
      I don't think most people using browsers care how they work, so if that was the pitch, even worse. This is from the home page, it just focuses on faster and more capable: A new browser to work faster. Mighty is a new browser that loads pages faster, finds docs quickly, and remains snappy with hundreds of tabs to save you time and make you more productive at work.
• guynamedloren 4y ago
  Launched April 2021, discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26957215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26957215
• danso 4y ago
  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/industry of company would want this). Did Might have any corporate clients, and if so, how did they navigate the security/privacy compliance issues?
  • ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
    I think pg likes slightly naughty ideas. Didn't he famously want to program a server using instructions send over email? And this Mighty idea was quite naughty. Stream like Netflix but it is your whole browser. And also pg really hypes YC companies which, bless his heart, is what we all expect and why YC is such a beast.
    • crubier 4y ago
      PG hypes a very infinitesimal subset of YC companies.
  • dmix 4y ago
    There's no indication that cloud gaming is declining. Xbox Cloud, Playstation, Nvidia Geforce, Shadow (even has streaming VR), Amazon Luna, Paperspace, Boosteroid, etc etc. There's no shortage of options. Google shutting down a business isn't a good indicator of a market's validity. The "Buy why?" was simple: it made the internet very fast and improved battery life of laptops.
    • cowtools 4y ago
      latency
      • dmix 4y ago
        I've played a 50hrs of Xbox cloud games in the last 2yrs and never had latency issues The people saying this either haven't used it recently or need a modern ISP
• stephc_int13 4y ago
  Suhail blocked me on Twitter some time ago as I was a bit vocal in my opposition to the core idea behind this app. I think it was already dead at the time and the criticism got under his skin. I wish there was a way to make money by shorting bad ideas. I think I could easily fund a few companies by doing that on weekends.
  • GordonS 4y ago
    > I wish there was a way to make money by shorting bad ideas That's a great idea for a startup, VCs would be falling over themselves for a piece!
    • benjaminwootton 4y ago
      I wish there was a way to short this short startup startup…
      • BonoboIO 4y ago
        A wild SoftBank appears
  • polio 4y ago
    This is why general prediction markets need to continue to flourish. They're an antidote to bullshit. Also, ban the bettors that things wrong because they're probably just gambling addicts.
  • ALittleLight 4y ago
    I think you'd need a startup prediction market to do this. Founder describes startup and success, people bet on yes or no.
  • phphphphp 4y ago
    Predicting failure is easy, though, because most things fail: you can predict everything will fail and be right 90%+ of the time. The venture capital model operates on that understanding: most things will fail, but in taking a chance on lots of things that will probably fail, you're exposed to the very small number of things that will succeed in a meaningful way. Success is the aberration, and being able to identify the things that will succeed is where the challenge is. If you think you have talent in identifying things that will succeed, then invest in things, and if you're right, you'll make lots of money. Unfortunately, as you'll discover, predicting failure is easy because there's a million ways to fail and very few ways to succeed. Mighty investors would have had 90%+ confidence it would fail, but that's fine, because it's the tiny chance it might succeed that mattered.
• lmeyerov 4y ago
  Good to see the pivot before cash ran out, but sad news :( Good luck to the team! IMO Mighty is too early bc they didn't tackle the SW side, 'just' the remote nature, so couldn't get their 10X. The 10-100X shift today comes from apps running differently on cloud resources, not just lift-and-shift. That already exists as the VDI market. Ex: We do client GPU <> cloud multi-GPU for cyber/fraud/etc analysts wanting to visually investigate how their many events stitch together, and Otoy does same for movie effects. In the consumer market, seeing same rewrites in say gaming. In a sense, Mighty's pivot to generative AI is the same -- faster to use remote multi-GPU services.. but custom built accelerated visual app for 100Xs, not lift-and-shift. Without tackling the SW rewrite problem, hard for Mighty to get these wins via a lift-and-shift :( I do think federating cloud resources so users can bring their own and devs can reliably tap them would be amazing, but we seem still in the dev-controlled-server era. As someone trying to build predictable 100X experiences, that feels likely for awhile. Such a shift could have been webgl2 etc standards enabling modern multigpu apps in the browser... but Google and Apple web GPU browser/standards leadership have long strangled that path. In a related note, we are starting to launch our global GPU edge network, and looking for a backend/infra eng on that + related AI services build out -- Nodejs/python/k8s. We are profitably growing: I agreed with Mighty's pattern before it even existed (my PhD at Berkeley explored it!), just easier ROI right now by sticking at the app layer.
• abol3z 4y ago
  Seems like the privilege of raising a lot of money without having a product, revenue, or market fit can be a curse as well. They could have figured it sooner with less money in hand.
• smaudet 4y ago
  It's decent tech, I don't think the market was there for it, though. The problem with too many tabs wasn't primarily performance, although that was a part of it (disabling background tabs is a better optimization), it was that there were too many tabs. So, cool tech but I don't think most people needed it.
• thih9 4y ago
  Initially announced in 2021: > We're excited to finally unveil Mighty, a faster browser that is entirely streamed from a powerful computer in the cloud. Source: https://blog.mightyapp.com/mightys-secret-plan-to-invent-the-future-of-computing/ https://blog.mightyapp.com/mightys-secret-plan-to-invent-the...
• dandongus 4y ago
  It was very surprising to see how many people were buying into this (frankly awful) idea when it was posted here a year or two ago. Any one person criticizing it was immediately dogpiled on by 10 people telling them how wrong they were. Refreshing to see everything come full circle in the end.
• iworshipfaangs2 4y ago
  I actually thought about this company recently, because slack, zoom, Google suite, and all the other work apps perform so badly on my linux machine. Even with an i9 I get occasional full utilization. I thought I might just embrace the meme and outsource my browser. I only use chrome for work anyway. Too bad, Mighty, it is possible a similar business might work some day to centralize corporate work environments.
• yubiox 4y ago
  Is there anything like this that I can run myself? My phone does not load some pages well and I would like to browser stream from my own server.
  • ceres 4y ago
    I think kasmweb (kasmweb.com) has this. They claim it’s open source but I think it’s more “source available”
• SergeAx 4y ago
  I am very skeptical by my nature, and see it more as a negative trait. But there are moments when I want to shout from the top of my lungs: "Who in their right mind gonna use it, not talking about buying it?!". I remember two such cases: that voice rooms app, where people gathered and talked about themselves and of course crypto tokens, and this remotely running browser for $30/month. I beleive, by the way, that the idea of a fast browser for cheap devices came to founder after reading story about Browserling, QA multibrowser suite, going viral in India, where people with $20 phones were able to use WhatsApp webapp via Browserling free plan (HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16103235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16103235). Coincidentially, I heard that voice room app (I am not being sarcastic here, I really forgot it's name and don't think it's worth googling) also became succesfull in India.
  • arvindamirtaa 4y ago
    Voice rooms app - Clubhouse
• kilroy123 4y ago
  I was a paid user, so I guess I'll chime in from that point of view. Why did I pay for this? On my work computer, I keep everything separate. Chrome is work stuff. Mighty was my personal stuff, with little to no files stored locally. When I run all the docker containers to stand up the local server. My computer is very taxed for resources. Mighty was amazing and not bogging down my computer with a second browser open. However, on my big beefy personal M1 Max MacBook Pro with 64 GB of ram. It actually felt slow. I found myself reaching for regular Chrome more and more. Very niche use case. IMO they needed to pivot to B2B and not some niche B2C play, like what they were pursuing. Overall, it worked impressively so. Kudos to the team for shipping something so stable that worked.
• funstuff007 4y ago
  > 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 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1357097710734749700?lang=en I dig when billionaires are wrong. They're just like us. :)
  • qabqabaca 4y ago
    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=typed_query&f=top 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=typed_query&f=top 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 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1561473124389888000 [2] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/replit/company_financials https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/replit/company_finan...
• ykl 4y ago
  I think this piece from a few years ago about how difficult it is to build a startup around GPT-3 [1] is relevant to the AI art product they’re pivoting to. Best of luck to them, but the “build a product on top of open source AI models” space overwhelming favors the incumbents that actually are doing the cutting edge work in driving those models. [1] https://www.allencheng.com/starting-a-business-around-gpt-3-is-a-bad-idea/ https://www.allencheng.com/starting-a-business-around-gpt-3-...
• crubier 4y ago
  I’m actually happy that Mighty did not succeed. A more centralized web with dumb terminals is not what we need. I was always a bit disappointed to see Paul Graham hyping it up. Suhail is super smart though so I’m sure their next chapter is going to be awesome!
• QuadrupleA 4y ago
  I agree with Casey Muratori's take on this one: Running a browser to connect to the cloud to run a browser to connect to the cloud to retrieve the contents of a single 2D page to recompress and send back to the original browser is now "the future of computing".
• fulafel 4y ago
  > Much of the web is bound by single core performance of JS. I feel my web experience is mostly bound by other browser things than JS. I wonder what would be the best way to profile this.