[0] https://www.mightyapp.com/
[1] https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1387101172230672389
[2] https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1387645578067124224
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.
No, they are betting that no matter the processing power of computing devices of the day, developers will always push things to the limit and ship products that can end up being slow on devices used by a large share of the population.
This has always happened, because software product makers always want their products to have as many features/capabilities as possible, and release them to market as quickly/cheaply as possible, which means there are lesser incentives to limit functionality or to invest in performance optimisation.
There's no reason to believe this trend will cease, so Mighty is offering a service that allows people to get much higher performance of their webapps without always needing to have the highest-power computing device in their possession.
Agree, it's an arms race at this point between end consumers and app developers. However, it also means once Mighty becomes popular they have to contend with developers overwhelming their computing resources as well.
Mighty can succeed yes, but it's success would be bad for the ecosystem.
Centralized processing of all computing, would just make current issues like censorship, security issues worse.
No, they can't. Only the right-tail power users will ever pay for this. Unless almost all of a product's users are in that group, the developers still need to offer satisfactory performance to the rest of their users, or be vulnerable to a new competitor.
> Centralized processing of all computing, would just make current issues like censorship, security issues worse.
People keep saying this. I doubt even Mighty believes they or their paradigm will take over "all computing" - just the niche that really needs it. Even a small market share can make them a big/successful company, but without making the whole internet significantly more centralised than it already is. I don't get the panic.
That should easily support twice the peak CPU power for me when I need it.
Another thing is that the Mighty CPUs will (presumably) be upgraded continuously, while my laptop CPU gets no faster after purchase. If that makes me only buy a new laptop every 4 years instead of 2, I've saved a lot of money and hassle.
I'm not saying this means Mighty will conquer the world. But there are reasonable arguments behind the model. Especially if you assume bandwidth will keep improving.
So the idea is you can get your laptop utilization down to 1% by pushing your load to their cloud? Fascinating.
Yeah, but I think it's better to think about it like virtual/remote desktops, where the granularity is a browser tab.
At least, that's the only way it makes sense to me. I might understand that to do 4k high res 3d on my phone - my phone will need help. And once that "help" is available - my TV, and my tablet and my smart watch can make use of it.
But I'm not generally willing to trade latency for cpu time sharing. What is interesting is an always on, always working desktop session. It's why I like screen/tmux and ssh, rdp - and would consider running a Linux terminal server, so my laptop(s) and desktop(s) could be a disk less, stateless thin client.
Make the observation that the browser tab is the new process/application granuality - and it makes sense to host tabs in the cloud.
Personally I'd want to self host it - but the idea doesn't sound quite so inane.
It's not. It's literally spinning up a VM in the cloud to run Chrome and stream a video to you
> At least 80% of the time my computer isn't even used.
Yes, but Mighty isn't running (and will never run) on your computer.
Well, it most likely shares the CPU with other VMs, but that depends on the cloud, and the instance. And since the browser is always open, Mighty will always run that VM, with no sharing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27063554
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.
What if, when you purchase your machine, it includes a host of features including a could suite of things like; VPN, Cloud Browser, An actual amount of decent cloud storage, portable applications, hosted in your cloud bucket, but accessible from any device (If I have Illustrator, I can just run it from any machine - not just my own. I can allow guest access to my paid licenses - like Say i want my brother to be able to draw stuff on my Illustrator license while I am not using it.
Etc.
Imagine if instead of that $7,500 "computer" you bought a $7,500 'stack' and the access terminal you happen to be using most is the physical laptop that youre used to.
I tried to build something similar to this more than a decade ago (2007 or so - but wrote about it in 2004).
My biggest issue is better information/knowledge management.
I have TBs of files and data strewn all over. We should be focusing on "my information" and let me manage and secure that - and access it from any device easily, and securely.
However I think we gonna do have RTX in our mobile devices - AR glasses, whatever modern mobile tech - because of decentralization (security/ethics purpose)
All that said, it's worth noting that the first set of customers seem super impressed. So maybe Mighty are on to something.
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.
How on earth would that work for their product? They need to access the data so they can render it.
Not to mention, it's not like Chrome can run Javascript without looking at the data, and if they're not running Chrome, they'll start getting into compatibility issues.
Sure, it's the ultimate sandbox for the code itself, it probably protects me perfectly from Meltdown attacks against other programs on my main system, but I don't think that's enough to call it 'endpoint security'.
So they need to figure it out otherwise it's only valid for personal use, which is not exactly the money is, imho.
Maybe some self hosted solution for corporate departments? Or waiting for an acquision from Citrix or VMWare...
Or just an IT/security department that is blissfully unaware of the shenanigans that some of its users are up to. Especially if people are accessing this from outside of the corporate network to start with.
My company uses webmarshal which fronts requests and blocks pages deemed not good for productivity/data security. In that type of situation you already have an intermediary so mighty could make sense - make everyone use mighty and give it a custom blocklist. Obviously not a situation that employees would be a fan of, but it’s something that corporate is already doing, and mighty could improve the experience.
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.
Can't you already do that pretty easily on AWS or Azure?
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).
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.
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.
Edit: Although, I'm not sure it supports multiple separate logins.
They didn't reveal their true business model or pricing yet.
The $50 subscription is a way to simply not flood their servers while beta-testing them, and also getting a bit of money from rich/dumb early adopters.
Fake it until you make it is still a thing in Silicon Valley.
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.
I haven't found Chrome slow on my mid-range PC (i5-7500). Or my phone (Pixel 3).
I feel like I must be in some parallel universe to everyone else talking about how slow Chrome is.
Just now, I loaded the first 6 links on Hacker News. 1 didn't load at all due to a server error. The other 5 all loaded in under a second (measured by DOMContentLoaded). I have uBlock Origin enabled (only in Firefox on the phone). Maybe that helps.
I can have 100+ tabs open without slow down if I want to. The bigger problem is I'm less productive with 100 tabs open because... there are 100 tabs open. It's just too cluttered.
I'm willing to admit Mighty might be a good product if people have this problem with slow browsers. I just never found this was an issue. Maybe it's a problem on low-end machines, but how many people have a low-end computer but are willing to pay $50/month for Mighty?
I just set up a new computer and I was wondering why Chrome and Firefox was so slow. Then I remembered I hadn't set up AdBlock yet.
I wonder if Mighty has ad blocking? It's an interesting question of which will be better for their business -- blocking or no blocking. (I won't try it because of the obvious privacy problems, because I use a fast computer, and avoid slow web sites. But it probably has an audience.)
I was curious about Mighty and looking forward to their technology. That’s not the problem.
The judgment came largely when they announced that it cost up to $600/year. It costs so much that it’s actually cheaper to buy a whole new computer if you might need it for a year or more. Once you put a price tag on something and ask people to pay for it, judgment is fair game.
This whole dismissal of people saying that they couldn’t justify the product for the price as some sort of anti-curiosity thing feels disingenuous.
I would say typing is a pretty big one. It is extraordinarily unpleasant when typing lag is anywhere above maybe 50ms,and even worse when it is variable, like it would inevitably be if going over the Internet. It's even worse with mouse movements, where occasional spikes in lag can ruin your day.
Not to mention, the problem is fundamentally simpler in a terminal, with a very limited range of outputs. The problem of optimistically drawing the result of your input on the screen is much harder when that input could affect any portion of the screen in any way, like it can on a JS-powered web page.
PG wants you to think that they're mutually exclusive. They're not, but he has a product to hustle.
The problem (for PG) is that curiosity is not uncritical. Curiosity poses more questions than those in the category "how well does this product work?" Anyone actually curious is going to wonder about the problem space, not just one proposed solution.
Pretty obvious questions include: "how did software get us to the point we're exploring this as a design?" and "could the problem it seeks to solve be addressed in a way that eliminates assumptions about the solution space?", "What are peripheral ramifications of design decisions, and how much do I care?" "Would other approaches solve the same issues, have the same ramifications?" or "Are they synergies to leverage by trying multiple things in concert?"
His arguments are too vague to specifically defend Mighty. You can insert any technology and his arguments are neither valid or invalid.
The biggest gain here is security, you won't ever run code natively. The caveat is you also have to trust the host.
The biggest loss is also security: all of your keystrokes, passwords, traffic, etc. are stored on someone else's hardware.
That assumes any malware cannot bust out out of mightyapp's sandbox to the host's host.
And as you note the need for more power goes beyond a browser, IDEs, gaming, rendering, Bitcoin mining. Why just do it for the browser? You can, and some people do, remote into a more powerful machine for all of their work. This was the norm when terminals were true terminals. We could go back to this, but having your own computer historically had much larger benefits for people.
Edit: Managed to find the right string of words to google: mosh = Mobile Shell
Because thick client distribute the load among many computer. With a thin client all that load is way more centralised.
> I would never attempt to train a PyTorch
No one is asking you to do that. We're talking about Mighty, a thin client that:
- runs a beefy VM in the cloud
- runs a single app, Chrome, in that VM
- streams video to the client
If a million people run Chrome on their laptops and keep it open for the entire day (and your browser is usually open throughout the day), that's... just a million people with their laptops.
If a million people run Chrome through Mighty, Mighty needs a million VMs always open, and a million video streams, also always open.
See how a thick client is better than a thin client?
> "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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
"Essay is french for attempt." There are good and there are bad attempts, of course.
(As we can see here, where a quarter of the comments are debating the business model of Mighty.)
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.
I'm sure there's a niche, though. Like low-paid workers needing to do a lot on their crappy personal machines.
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.
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.,
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.