Comment by tylerburnam | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tylerburnam | Hacker News Reader

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You have valid concerns but no need to hope for their failure.

Tech people are the minority. The market IS moving towards cloud. It's happened, it's happening, it will keep happening. Stadia may have failed now, but it IS conceptually the future of gaming. It's like you're arguing for blockbuster in a netflix world. We cannot stop this from happening, no matter how many choirs we preach to. All we can do is find ways to make this happen better.

I think it's more constructive (and technically difficult) to accept that the market is heading to full cloud and we as tech people need to find better ways of making this vibe with good privacy practices.

Personally, I would not use anything like this without knowing a lot more about their security. Even then, maybe we're still a few years out from a security perspective before I would feel comfortable storing my passwords and browsing data with a 3rd party server AND pay for it (wild). But, I could see myself doing this if my privacy was ensured.

I hope these guys really focus on innovating in that aspect, and then I hope they succeed big.

> It's like you're arguing for blockbuster in a netflix world.

No, it's not like that at all. Nobody is arguing for going back to distributing software in boxes with floppies or CD-ROMs in them.

Reason from first principles, not by analogy. Context and details matter.

Here are some major reasons for the push to cloud. None of these reasons are immutable or universal.

(1) Wimpy mobile devices with constrained power, storage, and bandwidth requirements.

(2) Cloud is the only kind of DRM that works. It's a way to lock things up and make piracy virtually impossible. As a bonus you can still build on "open source" and placate the open source zealots who don't understand the current state of things and are still living in the 90s.

(3) Application delivery and installation/uninstallation are terrible. OSes are broken.

Here are some solutions:

(1) Moore's law, huge improvements in battery capacity, 5G, WiFi 6, etc. are eating away at this problem. This issue will die of natural causes.

(2) The hopelessly naive idea that "information wants to be free" and everything has to be "free" (as in beer) needs to die, be cut into a thousand pieces, burned, encased in concrete, and sunk to the bottom of the ocean. Nothing is free. Software takes a vast amount of labor to produce, and that must be funded. If it's not funded directly and honestly it will be funded indirectly and dishonestly (surveillance capitalism, cloud lock-in, etc.). "Everything has to be free" and piracy actually help push us toward a surveillance capitalist panopticon future.

(3) This might be the toughest problem. Windows is by far the worst offender here with its nightmarish installation subsystem. Closed app stores are another huge problem but eventually I think anti-trust action is going to chip away at that.

That's not by any means a complete analysis. This is just a comment on a HN thread. It does hit the major points I think.

Privacy is not the main concern here, although it's huge.

Imagine you buy into this service and they go bust: Suddenly all your history, passwords and cache: poof, gone.

It's exactly what local-first advocates tell us is the current enemy, not closed-source. See Kleppmann's latest blog post about the GPL: https://martin.kleppmann.com/2021/04/14/goodbye-gpl.html

> Tech people are the minority.

That's irrelevant, though. The "tech people" aren't preferring local solutions because they're funny this way - they prefer them because cloud-streamed remote apps objectively sucks. It takes some knowledge about computers to comprehend how and why exactly, but it doesn't change the facts.

(To use an analogy - doctors are a minority too, but you listen to them when they say you should vaccinate.)

> The market IS moving towards cloud. It's happened, it's happening, it will keep happening.

The important question to ask is, why. Why it's happened, why it's happening? The answer has little to do with providing value to customers - it's mostly about creating ability to seek rent. Privacy issues only happen on top of that - they're not the entirety of the problem.

> I think it's more constructive (and technically difficult) to accept that the market is heading to full cloud

Or, we could fight it. Maybe it's a quixotic quest. Maybe not. The market is a dumb greedy optimizer, it flows down the profitability gradients the way water flows downhill. If you want it to flow elsewhere, you have to put obstacles in the way, or cut out a better path.

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