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Comment by AnotherGoodName | Hacker News Reader

We can literally transpile and run everything client side these days. You can run a recompiled quake 3 inside your browser. Why is a hosted notebook anything other than a static html+js+css site that runs behind a cdn (effectively free to host)?

I suspect that’s a matter of time right?

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I too share the dream of transpiling everything/WebAssembly/everything can run everywhere, but we're pretty far.

For a lot of ML/AI workloads and tasks, Python is just a binding for underlying C/C++.

It's already a nightmare to try to reproduce any ML/AI paper, pip breaks 3 times, incompatible peer deps, some obscure library emits an obscure CLANG error that means I need to brew install some libwhatever, etc...

I don't think the WebAssembly toolchain is quite ready for plug and play "pip install" time yet. I hope it eventually will be though.

The performance of browser wasm is also incomparable to the same code compiled into a native binary.

What kind of slowdown would you expect on equivalent hardware?

A lot of the people we've talked to who get the most value out of remote compute are doing really intensive stuff - they need server-level resources far beyond what you can find on a consumer laptop!

Hopefully someday you'll have 8 H100s on your Macbook, but I think we're still a long way away from that.

In fact a quick google: https://github.com/jtpio/jupyterlite

Yay I really can have serverless notebooks! Not just an easy to manage server environment but literally a static html file that can be passed around and runs the full notebook environment. It’s weird it was ever done any other way.

Does that run with your GPU in the way this service offers?

No, it doesn't. But unlike the marketing buzzword "serverless", it is honest about not requiring a server.

Pyodide GPU support is a ways away, but it is theoretically possible once WebGPU is stable. https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide/issues/1911

GPU time

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