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by AnotherGoodName 663 days ago
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?
4 comments
dinobones 663 days ago
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.

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OvbiousError 663 days ago
The performance of browser wasm is also incomparable to the same code compiled into a native binary.
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geysersam 662 days ago
What kind of slowdown would you expect on equivalent hardware?
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bblcla 663 days ago
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.

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AnotherGoodName 663 days ago
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.

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switchbak 663 days ago
Does that run with your GPU in the way this service offers?
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tomjakubowski 663 days ago
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

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ukd1 663 days ago
GPU time
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