I see a Tolkien name on a tech company, I assume the founders deeply misunderstood Tolkien and probably are pretty gross. I haven't been wrong yet.
egonschiele 11 days ago [-]
Armin is pretty well-known in the tech space. He has contributed a ton to open source and generally seems like a fairly principled person. I think this may be the first case where you turn out to be wrong :)
ahhhhnoooo 11 days ago [-]
Here's hoping!
meowface 11 days ago [-]
He's not, he made Flask/Click/Jinja/lots of other open source projects.
(That said, he possibly is the first person to break this pattern, yes...)
I see someone accusing someone else of misunderstanding an author who disavowed any allegorical meaning of his novels and said that their only purpose was to create the kind of world that made the language he invented seem real ...
> First things first: I think you should read Mario’s post.
And from that:
> Despite its Tolkien-inspired name, Earendil is not a tech company with fascist tendencies. Quite the opposite. They are basically well-meaning hippies in my book, who think software, and specifically AI, should serve humans, not the other way around.
So, somewhat hopeful? I'm not sure I can take any more of this grossness.
dpoloncsak 11 days ago [-]
I know nothing about Earendil and this is not meant to take away from them, but half of Alexander Karp's (Palantir CEO) book was "We are basically well-meaning hippies in my book, who think software, and specifically AI, should serve humans, not the other way around."
popalchemist 11 days ago [-]
Right. And now he brags about being part of an automated kill chain and being proud that he kills his enemies.
Words carry no weight in a world where every person in power weaponizes lying.
11 days ago [-]
incanus77 11 days ago [-]
Fair.
tietjens 11 days ago [-]
Why should we cede Tolkien to those villians?
popalchemist 11 days ago [-]
The right wing completely misunderstands Tolkien and/or is deliberately co-opting it in an attempt to gaslight the world about their nature/motives.
tempaccountabgd 10 days ago [-]
[dead]
georgemcbay 11 days ago [-]
> Trademarks: our main mechanism of protection is trademark enforcement. When you see pi, it’s a product of Earendil, with Mario, the creator of Pi, at the helm.
Interesting, considering I doubt I will ever see Pi in the context of computing and not immediately think of Raspberry Pi first.
I realize that legally speaking they can hold a distinct trademark for software when the other Pi is hardware but it just seems odd to me to lean so heavily on the trademarking of a commonly overloaded two letter name.
aaroninsf 11 days ago [-]
Yeah.
This was terrible branding, and is terrible branding.
The clash between "Earendil" and "Pi" is so overdetermined it might have required earnest effort.
My very first real tech job in the bay, my new boss recommended I study up on Armin's open source code in order to get better as an engineer. It's been very interesting following his work over the years. I'm extremely curious to see how Earendil goes — no surprise if it's a success.
Congratulations Armin, and Mario, and good luck.
Dug up the email, here's what my boss said directly:
In terms of tech to keep up on, it might be worth while to play around with node.js a bit as we've been doing a few small projects using the Express MVC framework. A great reference for js, (which I remember chatting with you briefly about) is Javascript the Good Parts (Douglas Crockford). You may also consider seeking enlightenment on Armin Ronacher's github page (he's a python master, leader of flask, genshi, pocoo, long time python contributor) https://github.com/mitsuhiko. His code is pretty top notch. I follow Kenneth Reitz quite a bit too (Armin and he often work on projects together). Kenneth is know for le*git and python's request library.
niemandhier 11 days ago [-]
I was hoping for a piece on how Tolkien and Nintendo secretly interacted.
projektfu 11 days ago [-]
That would have been the love hotel/pachinko era, no?
aikinai 11 days ago [-]
Oh… not what I expected this to be about.
A_D_E_P_T 11 days ago [-]
I unironically thought that it was going to be an essay on naming characters in fiction. Like simplicity vs. self-imposed complexity.
Ah, anyway, what's clear enough is that Earendil is a tragically bad name for a company.
cm2012 11 days ago [-]
I thought it was going to be an essay on the hero archetype from Earendil to Mario lol.
gweinberg 11 days ago [-]
I thought it would be a team-up between two. Presumably the elf would help fight turtles and donkey kong, since what good is a plumber in a world without plumbing?
moffers 11 days ago [-]
Gotta admit, I’m a sucker for a well-dressed mysterious preview. Really excited to see what Lefos is all about.
dgb23 11 days ago [-]
The first one I remember was the old whatisthematrix.com. Seems to be updated now unfortunately.
bitwize 11 days ago [-]
I thought this was going to be a comparison between the archetypal features of the Tolkien Legendarium and that of Nintendo games' lore, but no.
swiftcoder 11 days ago [-]
From browsing the Earendil website, I'm honestly not sure if this is a software startup or a cult...
jfengel 11 days ago [-]
There seems to be a pattern associated with grabbing names from Tolkien.
lordleft 11 days ago [-]
There's a dark irony in start-ups appropriating names from the work of a devout catholic attached to beautiful, old modes of life.
Mario Zechner aka badlogic - (co?)creator of libGDX (for us old farts who were around in the early Android days): https://libgdx.com/
Later also heavily involved with Spine, which IME is still the defacto industry standard for 2D skinned animation in mobile/web games: https://esotericsoftware.com/
spacechild1 11 days ago [-]
Ah, that guy! I think I've seen him give a talk about Spine at Game Dev Days Graz a couple of years ago.
Rendered at 13:10:35 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
(That said, he possibly is the first person to break this pattern, yes...)
https://x.com/mitsuhiko/status/2041855748481695774
And from that:
> Despite its Tolkien-inspired name, Earendil is not a tech company with fascist tendencies. Quite the opposite. They are basically well-meaning hippies in my book, who think software, and specifically AI, should serve humans, not the other way around.
So, somewhat hopeful? I'm not sure I can take any more of this grossness.
Words carry no weight in a world where every person in power weaponizes lying.
Interesting, considering I doubt I will ever see Pi in the context of computing and not immediately think of Raspberry Pi first.
I realize that legally speaking they can hold a distinct trademark for software when the other Pi is hardware but it just seems odd to me to lean so heavily on the trademarking of a commonly overloaded two letter name.
This was terrible branding, and is terrible branding.
The clash between "Earendil" and "Pi" is so overdetermined it might have required earnest effort.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47687533
Congratulations Armin, and Mario, and good luck.
Dug up the email, here's what my boss said directly:
In terms of tech to keep up on, it might be worth while to play around with node.js a bit as we've been doing a few small projects using the Express MVC framework. A great reference for js, (which I remember chatting with you briefly about) is Javascript the Good Parts (Douglas Crockford). You may also consider seeking enlightenment on Armin Ronacher's github page (he's a python master, leader of flask, genshi, pocoo, long time python contributor) https://github.com/mitsuhiko. His code is pretty top notch. I follow Kenneth Reitz quite a bit too (Armin and he often work on projects together). Kenneth is know for le*git and python's request library.
Ah, anyway, what's clear enough is that Earendil is a tragically bad name for a company.
The Dark Lord minions are really busy lately.
https://www.sauron.systems/
This is good too, I guess.
Mario - creator of Pi https://pi.dev
Later also heavily involved with Spine, which IME is still the defacto industry standard for 2D skinned animation in mobile/web games: https://esotericsoftware.com/