Not arguing with your basic point, which is good, but when the developer says "The binary name is 33% shorter than ack!", he's referring to the difference between typing "ag" vs. typing "ack". Not the size in bytes of the executable.

It's a little inside joke, because one of the points in favor of "ack", offered jokingly years ago by its developer, is that "ack" is 25% fewer letters to type compared to "grep".

(This feature is still there as point #10 in http://betterthangrep.com/why-ack/, now not offered 100% jokingly.)