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Mario and Earendil
- aikinai 6mo agoOh… not what I expected this to be about.
- A_D_E_P_T 6mo agoI 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 6mo agoI thought it was going to be an essay on the hero archetype from Earendil to Mario lol.
- gweinberg 6mo agoI 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?
- swiftcoder 6mo agoFrom browsing the Earendil website, I'm honestly not sure if this is a software startup or a cult...
- jfengel 6mo agoThere seems to be a pattern associated with grabbing names from Tolkien.
- bossyTeacher 6mo agoPalantir, Anduril... The Dark Lord minions are really busy lately.
- cushychicken 6mo agoDon't forget Sauron. https://www.sauron.systems/ https://www.sauron.systems/
- lordleft 6mo agoThere's a dark irony in start-ups appropriating names from the work of a devout catholic attached to beautiful, old modes of life.
- FrustratedMonky 6mo agoSo, is Earendil, just Pi?
- bossyTeacher 6mo agoThey also have an AI mailbox service called Lefos.
- jfengel 6mo agoI was really hoping for some kind of Nintendo/Silmarillion crossover. This is good too, I guess.
- bombcar 6mo agoPerhaps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBvo6AZnHV4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBvo6AZnHV4 or https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BgpBZB3Apno https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BgpBZB3Apno will satisfy.
- JimDabell 6mo agoSame news here with 76 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47687533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47687533
- moffers 6mo agoGotta admit, I’m a sucker for a well-dressed mysterious preview. Really excited to see what Lefos is all about.
- dgb23 6mo agoThe first one I remember was the old whatisthematrix.com. Seems to be updated now unfortunately.
- georgemcbay 6mo 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 6mo agoYeah. This was terrible branding, and is terrible branding. The clash between "Earendil" and "Pi" is so overdetermined it might have required earnest effort.
- ahhhhnoooo 6mo agoI 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.
- teddyh 6mo agoGood thing my project is not a company, then: <https://www.recompile.se/mandos https://www.recompile.se/mandos>
- incanus77 6mo ago> 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 6mo agoI 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 6mo agoRight. 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.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- incanus77 6mo agoFair.
- bitwize 6mo agoI thought this was going to be a comparison between the archetypal features of the Tolkien Legendarium and that of Nintendo games' lore, but no.
- peterldowns 6mo agoMy 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 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.
- tolerance 6mo agoSomeone convince me that "machine entity" is not an odd phrase.
- dude250711 6mo agoWho even are these people? I thought it was going to be about Nintendo...
- egonschiele 6mo agoArmin - creator of Flask https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armin_Ronacher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armin_Ronacher Mario - creator of Pi https://pi.dev https://pi.dev
- flohofwoe 6mo agoMario Zechner aka badlogic - (co?)creator of libGDX (for us old farts who were around in the early Android days): https://libgdx.com/ 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/ https://esotericsoftware.com/
- spacechild1 6mo agoAh, that guy! I think I've seen him give a talk about Spine at Game Dev Days Graz a couple of years ago.
- vingilot 6mo agoGood luck Mario! Just don't tarry there in errantry
- niemandhier 6mo agoI was hoping for a piece on how Tolkien and Nintendo secretly interacted.
- projektfu 6mo agoThat would have been the love hotel/pachinko era, no?