Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisandchris | Hacker News Reader

That's true and one great advantage. But I don't get how to apply this advantage to personal computing. I have a laptop and I never ever wanted to randomly "log into my cloud workstation" from some other place. I can just open the lid of my laptop and continue working. What advantage does the requirement of a persistent network connection offer me? Seems like working on a train is not doable.

I could see a use case where people don't want / can spend to much money on hardware. But even then, hardware is still required and I can't see where a subscription would help here.

View on HN

I run almost all of my devices as “dumb” terminals for most purposes.

I can work in my office at my workstation. I can walk out to the kitchen and sit down with my laptop and open the lid and be _exactly_ where I just was. I can move across the country and work from my laptop, a friend’s computer, a library, or anything else I run across along the way. My house can burn down and I can go to an electronics store and buy a new laptop and continue typing in the middle of the line where I left off when the smoke detector started beeping and I ran out of the house.

Separating the device I’m using from the work I’m doing makes the friction to move between devices near zero or zero.

I never use my friend's computers, library computers, or anyone else's computers to log into my personal accounts when I can afford to have my own devices. The thought of entering passwords into devices that you don't own and trust horrifies me. Even if someone is trustworthy, their devices could be compromised. Not to mention that it can make your friends uncomfortable if you're borrowing their computers all the time.

It's not like I'm running around living my life on other people's computers. The guy I replied to said he had no idea how to apply this to personal computing to get any advantages. "I spend 90% of my time sitting at my desk, using my desktop, doing normal boring work." isn't really a good demonstration of any advantage.

Most of my work _is_ done from my desktop. The bulk of the remainder is done from my laptop. For that alone I find enough advantage to keep doing it. Zero context lost bouncing around.

But when I _was_ moving across the country, it was certainly nice not having my ability to earn an income any given day tied to a single device. When I was effectively homeless in my month-long move and staying with family at one point I did end up using their computer a couple times. You'll just have to take my word for it that they were okay with it.

The assumption you make is that all these devices you use have a good internet connection. This isn't always true for a lot of people.

I'm not making any assumption. I'm speaking from my personal experience.

Yes, if I'm somewhere without internet I can't get a lot done. But that's true whether I'm running programs locally or remotely.

Based on the number of people that show up on HN every time GitHub/GitLab/etc go down, I don't think I have any unusual dependencies that nobody else does.

One good reason is to prevent data exfiltration, or, at least, make it less convenient.

That does only apply to business environments, but my comment was regarding personal computing.

It's still harder if you can't run arbitrary code on the remote computer or transfer the files there to your local one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com