Fable 5 Ported the Ladybird Browser to WebAssembly in One Shot and It Cost $552
twitter.comWhat was the human operator cost?
How was the port verified as complete?
A WASM browser is cool for general portability reasons. Right now porting browsers to bespoke targets is a major PITA, even for WebKit.
If this is true, software is essentially worthless.
Stallman warned about this like 35 years ago, now:
> A copy of a program has nearly zero marginal cost (and you can pay this cost by doing the work yourself), so in a free market, it would have nearly zero price.
> What’s more, central production as now practiced is inefficient even as a means of delivering copies of software. This system involves enclosing physical disks or tapes in superfluous packaging, shipping large numbers of them around the world, and storing them for sale. This cost is presented as an expense of doing business; in truth, it is part of the waste caused by having owners.
(essay mirror): https://oitofelix.github.io/gnu-philosophy/standalone/html/w...
He's talking about the marginal cost of distributing a copy of software which has already been created, which is completely different from LLMs reducing the cost of creating new software.
Indeed, but also free compilers, which lowered the cost of creating new software to $0.00 long before AI services did.
Many of the expenses in making a successful software business are a total fiction for both customers and employees from the start. Lines like "careful App Store curation" is the 21st century Shipping & Handling surcharge, in terms of extracting arbitrary profit from your audience. The idea that "software isn't worthless" had to be invented by mankind, and it was apparent that it was a lie when early networks like Usenet were dominated by software piracy. Software has been worthless for so long now.
you mad?
Yes, and there is a finite number of people needed to guide AI agents, yet a large majority keeps thinking it is only going to be a others problem.
nonsense. way too cheap. add a couple/few of zeros and maybe.
we provided the token cost result at the bottom. While an expensive model, 550 for a port of ladybird isn't bad I think