I'd say it's different this time, because LLM can form and substantiate opinions of their own, on their own. You could actually assume you have the full source code of any binary for it to analyze, since in theory everything is decompilable, and you could then also diff between releases to save 99% tokens.
The idea of emulating a lightweight Alpine Linux in the browser to make this work, without overengineering don't-know-what custom niche solution is definitely intriguing.
I wonder how much work would it be to port a given Linux USB driver to WASM alone?
I've been thinking of doing something similar AI-ran personalized TV channels, which basically would 'broadcast' the user's media collection, can produce news based on the user's interests, report weather, stock exchange information, all kinds of useful mini-bulletins, without any obvious AI-produced content. Maybe just radio-style announcements in between programmes (like they do in the UK for example), and the scheduling itself.
Not mentioned in the article, but the latest generation Xbox and PlayStation run completely custom firmware with their own proprietary boot chains, and locked-down hardware. So much for the "uniform" x86-64 "ecosystem". I'm sure there are more examples.
I wonder if this is the future of "I need to run my legacy Windows enterprise app on modern hardware"?
I suppose we're also not limited to WinNT look and feel, and can render dialogs, buttons, windows with any CSS framework?
Although, as the cost of building software is tumbling down, it will make more sense to re-build from scratch, targeting whatever runtime or platform you need.