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Show HN: FablePool – pool money behind a prompt, and Fable builds it in public (fablepool.com)
195 points by matthewbarras 3 hours ago
35 comments

Seems similar to open source bounties, which have been tried in the past and never succeeded.

We've seen something like 20+ years of different attempts of voluntary donations to fund open source, and it never worked. Companies barely fund anything voluntarily.

I'm taking the opposite approach with Supported Source (https://supso.org/) which is this: actually force companies to pay to use the project. Sell commercial licenses. Make it mandatory to using your software commercially. This approach works much, much better than voluntary donations.

I think there's a categorical difference between paying for long term maintenance voluntarily vs paying for something to exist. The latter works much better as the value prop is clear and you can scratch an itch. Kickstarter is similar.
This idea reads like a joke, but there's something to it.

One feature request: In addition to high-level milestones, it would be cool if a partially-funded project would generate a public, highly detailed implementation plan.

Also, IANAL but MIT is still a license with a copyright holder. I don't think saying "it's MIT, we all own it" is defensible. The courts might view all this code as public domain.

if fable is writing it, courts my declare that its not even public domain? not a copywrightable work
[delayed]
The problem with running open source code is the security aspect, but with Mythos running point, how would you distribute revenue is the real question.

Which market is even left after since the sasspocaloypse?

yeah it should really be CC0
Should it? If it was real world infrastructure, like a bridge it'd be easier to say that it belongs to those who lead the project and those who put down the money
I love how even the "demo build" doesn't work. https://fablepool.com/projects/7

Rather, it did work at milestone 14, but then regressed at milestone 15, where it changed the link from a wikimedia image to a nonexistent file in /assets (despite still having the "Photo via Wikimedia Commons" caption).

edit: they removed it :^)

If you check "DEPLOYMENT.md," there is a lengthy list of deployment instructions for the app, and it includes creating an assets folder and putting an image of Claude Shannon in it. There are also other instructions, like "please make a favicon." So I think that bit is valid, the AI is simply farming out work to the human agent.

My question, though, is why the "Live, public build log" only showing up to milestone 3, but the artifacts go up to milestone 15? And there are different index.html pages in the artifacts list, one for milestone 14 and one for milestone 15? Are there different conceptions of "milestone" in here? What's up with that?

"Solve Garbage Collection in C# for HFT · $10.00 raised of est. $200.00 target"

This can't be serious.

Broader point I am making is, what differentiates genuine ideas from the token burn? What happens when the pool exhausts but the task is not done?

The sarcastic solution is to use C# bindings to a non-GC language. Put all available memory under control of a pool allocator and enjoy the perf gain.
You keep putting money into the slot and pulling the lever
Real question is, how do you get press for this site after this falls off HN?
It indicates the level of trust people have in the platform, and the combination of the product-platform behavior. If someone with the wherewithal to solve garbage collection for C# for HFT could actually describe why GC in C# was a problem, they wouldn't be asking for $10. But for $10, for something something you're dimly aware of is a problem? I'd throw $10 at some nonsense I read on the Internet.

> What happens when the pool exhausts but the task is not done?

Have a stupider LLM aggregate similar questions.

I feel like using Fable in the name is a mistake, who knows how long that model will be around.
You could call it aiproductsexchange.com
Bold move leaving out the dash between words a la experts-exchange lol.
always have a backup plan (:
thatsthejoke.jpg

expertsexchange.com was a site from the before times.

I don't think using the name Fable is wrong, but I think a pool of Fables should be called a Grimm, or possibly an Aesop.
It's how they name classes of models, presumably this implies something about the relative quantization / size of model, not about the specific performance. E.g. Fabel 5 will be better than Opus 5, better than Sonnet 5, etc. The 5 is the version number of the particular iteration / training run at this class of model.
I think they mean: I feel like using [Sonnet/Opus/Fable] in the name [URL] is a mistake, who knows how long that model will be around
But it sounds like FableFool so it has that going for it.
Even if that product disappears, OpenAI will never Anthropic forget it.
So the completed sample was estimated at $0.35, actually cost $0.52, but spend $0.55

This bot is almost as bad as I am at estimating projects.

Did it not charge anything for the estimation itself? I wonder what model they’re using for that
> Build a completely greenroom, open source AWS

> est. total target $516.00

Lol

[delayed]
A lot of AWS is built on open-source. This is obviously ignoring hardware costs. I don’t know if it is all that ridiculous anymore. These models are very good at wiring together open-source systems. The world is crazy right now…
You, my friend, have drunk from the goblet of koolaid.
lolz. build aws. no mistakes.
I think the bottleneck is testing. I want to build a replacement for Zwift, a virtual gym game for bike trainers and treadmills, but testing it could be difficult without a real person on real hardware. How does the LLM know about the hardware protocols and stuff like that.
Same way you’d do it without AI. Record sample data, test against that, generate more data, test IRL, record more data, loop until it’s good enough.
I don't have one. how through is this blog post reverse engineering it? https://www.makinolo.com/blog/2024/07/26/zwift-ride-protocol... ?
it's remarkable how easy it is to identify websites built with the "frontend-design" skill in Claude
I managed to write one that at least didnt had the font and colors (using 4.5)

Yesterday, I prompted Fable to improve the frontend to make it look different from Claude style, gave detailed examples etc. 15 minutes and $32 dollars (!) later (used cursor lol) it gave me the shittiest more claudiest website ever, basically ignoring everything I asked

Before putting in money to this small anonymous website, I'd love to hear about the people behind the project. There's a single mention of 'Barras Industries', but not much mention about them online, or what else they've worked on.
They should have called this "WishingWell". I'm wishing them well, but some of these projects are so over the top pie-in-the-sky silly, and funded with $0.25.
"Make Fable 6
Man, I really hope this kind of effort could be put into auditing the security situation of open source projects (via Mythos or not.)
Everything turns into a computer game and entertainment.

Maybe add a "Build a worm that shuts down all Anthropic data centers."

This, unfortunately, gets flagged for cyber and you would need to be on the unlocked Mythos.
Fantastic idea for a rug pull
Hear me out: the same idea, but hire live developers.

(Given the price of tokens, it can even be not entirely a joke.)

This was a pre-LLM YC startup AssemblyMade which was basically this
I don't understand how that would not be a complete joke even if tokens were 2 orders of magnitude more expensive than they are.
Not affordable, unless the devs are in somewhere like Vietnam. And there's still no way they can build as fast. And still, at that price point, quality would be highly questionable. So yh this doesn't survive beyond the joke stage.
The mention of quality puts it firmly into the joke territory, indeed.
I wonder why that didn’t happen on kick starter. Product hunt was kind of this. It’s actually interesting. Why didn’t this ever happen?
I think because you don't know /which/ developer you're going to get.

One interesting aspect of LLMs is that each one, weights frozen, can be thought of as a single developer whose work you have already evaluated.

The cost of finding, evaluating, and negotiating with a new human is tremenous.

If you put that behind an API, you could sell the service much like the AI providers
And then get sued for fraud and go under, like Builder.ai
What if, and I know this is utterly batshit insane to suggest, but what if we don't lie about what we're doing?
Thats called Kickstarter
Sort of but in reverse.

If users posted ideas, voted on them and then other people built them then that would be the same. But kickstarter is the producer posting an idea for presale

how expensive do you think tokens are, and/or how cheap do you think a developer is?
Someone posted 20k/month Fable budgets only a few days ago. That's nearly 250k/year, which is what Oxide pays their employees.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48471771

It can work for students as a grant
Fable will actually finish the job.
This strikes me as crowd-funded prompt caching, but with humans in the loop.
Has anything been successfully built?
Fable’s been out for like a day and this site seems more recent.
This is literally an idea by the primegean on his YouTube under predictions. Self prophecy really with his reach but credit where it's due?
He's been right about other things before, such as this: https://youtu.be/m-bT5v5Tm7w
Slop cannons lol.
Awesome idea.
Kinda fun but the approach today is strictly oneshot. Waiting for agentswithwallets to post.
attach github to this. this is the new way to do opensource i guess
Like DeFi but for agencies.
Brilliant idea! We need consensus protocols for voting on phases. Similar to the "twitch" plays Pokemon phenomenom.
anyone who donates gets to vote (?)
This is a genius idea, I love it!!
It would work if an engineer steered the pools. But doing this autonomously is a pipe dream.
Hell yeah, $516 for a complete AWS replacement, I'm in lol!
If you look at the milestones it's a small subset of AWS features, but yeah, the estimate is still off.
Reminds of the four college kids that were going to clone Facebook. Turns out it's hard than it looks, if you have never tried it.
I wonder how the estimates are being created.

I doubt an LLM would estimate an AWS rewrite to cost $500.

https://fablepool.com/projects/7 It didn't even put a picture in!
Cypherpunks will be proud once there is a version of this cryptocurrency funded to providers receiving the cryptocurrency.

Or maybe there is? or a version where only those funding have access to the results.

Is this the new open source?
This is a good idea and for features and modifications you can make it so whoever chips in the most money gets more votes.

This is one of those ideas that sounds bad on paper (Like people renting out their houses. But if implemented correctly could get some traction.

This is a fantastic idea.

There are lots of projects, software that shouldn't be SaaS subscriptions that Fable can build in public that can be free for everyone and also OSS.

Neat project idea, but truly ruined by requiring a google sign-in both to submit new projects and to donate to projects. Dead service to me until that's gone.

Remember, Google aids and abets militaries of governments that the UN has found to be committing genocide.

Weird how people seem to forget this.

> Dead service to me until that's gone.

Lets just hope the project is able to soldier on without you.

Ok who wants to pool up to build GTA 7? /s
This is such a good idea. Hell yeah
Lol.
"I want an open source AWS" with $500 budget made me guffaw
"I have a turbofan model, pls build an Airbus" sounds about right
OpenStack already exists