Random but I love the name. I feel like we've entered into a new fun era of startup names. No more ___ly or ___ist etc. This era is generic word/noun + arbitrary numbers or letters after it.
I think ChatGPT really kicked that off, but maybe it was something else that inspired it?
Less normie/friendly and more technical sounding. So far, I'm a fan!
I've been using Instant for about 6 months and have been very happy. Realtime, relational, and offline were the most important things for us, building out a relatively simple schema (users, files, projects, teams) that also is local first. Tried a few others unsuccessfully and after Instant, haven't looked back.
I think my usage of figma,sheets,etc. is 90% single player, until the moment of sharing my (maybe unfinished) work, where I go through an intense period of collaboration with others for an initial review, then tails off, and becomes async.
I can't see myself using muddy for the single player part, but it sounds interesting for after that initial intense collab process. Especially if the process includes multiple apps, as opposed to a single design review in figma etc. I find the longer running async collab is when I get the most scatterbrained across apps.
Interesting aside: AI models trained on spreadsheets need "good tables" such as column names, headers, etc. to understand context. Like Fortap: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.07323
I'm particularly excited by the idea of gen ai creating entirely new sounds, sort of becoming its own kind of instrument instead of generating or emulating samples previously created / trained on.
Somewhat analogous to how the MPC etc. enabled a generation of musicians to chop and pitch and arrange soul samples into new types of hip hop music. Not super familiar with the history but I don't believe they thought it would be used like that.
I'd imagine a gen AI musical instrument just needs a lot more "knobs" to tweak and eventually someone will find that a particular "hallucination" sound to be interesting. Exciting times!
I don't think you need a pure CRDT either but I think locking and presence is a bit of an oversimplification.
LWW is a good place to start, and updating the smallest piece of information possible is the right idea in general but there is a lot more nuance to handling complex applications like a spreadsheet (I'm working on one) and whiteboard apps.
Things like reparenting or grouping shapes [1], or updating elements that aren't at the lowest scale like deleting a row or column in a spreadsheet make locking challenging to implement. Do you lock the entire row while I'm moving it? Do you lock the entire group of shapes?
With the exception of text editing, the popular libraries like Yjs don't just give you a perfect CRDT out of the box. You still have to construct your data model in a way that enables small scale updates [2], and CRDT libraries and literature are the best source of thinking for these problems that I've found.
If you already have a background in Academia or FAANG doing research, (some) investors will happily fund you, if and only if, you can convince them that the research you're doing will be monetizable. AI has enough precedent that you're seeing this in the news, but most already have a research background.
Wow, Trapeze is cool! Never heard of it until now. And it basically is a spiritual ancestor to what I've been working on. A "block-based" spreadsheet that also preserves row/col style referencing where needed.
And we're still competing with Excel almost 40 years later...
https://neal.fun/infinite-craft/