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Mario having to write this many words to justify this decision alone is a red flag already. The fact I can't understand what Earendil is after reading this many

Mario having to write this many words to justify this decision alone is a red flag already. The fact I can't understand what Earendil is after reading this many words is an even bigger red flag. But who am I to judge? If I made a project as popular as pi I'd sell out so fast.

NoahZuniga 7mo ago
There is variation in how comfortable someone is with the idea of "selling out". It seems to me that Mario is less comfortable than many other people in the AI space. How comfortable someone is with the idea of selling out doesn't really seem like a good signal for how bad something is. If Mario had instead just written: "I'm excited to work on the future of PI at Palantir." and nothing else, clearly this is worse? > The fact I can't understand what Earendil is From the article: > I learned a few things. My European brain thinks pi is just another small, mildly useful OSS project of mine with no commercial value. My peers in the space seem to think it has properties that make it stand out over the alternatives. VCs and big corps seem to think that pi has commercial value. Some demonstrated their conviction by sending term sheets or "dream job" offers. Mario thinks there's no commercial value, but clearly some VC people do. If you have the VC money, but don't have any ideas for how to justify commercial viability, why bother? If someone just handed me a big bag of cash and told you to just "do something", I could imagine coming up with Earndil. Make a nice landing page, write some nice guiding principles, and figure out the AI stuff later.
- raincole 7mo ago
  > "I'm excited to work on the future of PI at Palantir." and nothing else, clearly this is worse? Yeah, but mainly just because what Palantir is. It would be better if he just told us what part of the future pi tool chain would be proprietary, but from the article it seems that they haven't even decided on that, so I don't know what to make of this.
tasuki 7mo ago
> The fact I can't understand what Earendil is after reading this many words is an even bigger red flag. Same, but I heard about Armin Ronacher, and the things I heard were not exactly terrible. He's the creator of the Flask microframework, he's contributed to open source more than most people. Perhaps it'll be fine! And, as Mario has written about ten times in his post: Pi is MIT licensed and it's not hard to find the "fork" button on GitHub.
- aryehof 7mo ago
  To quote Ronacher - “Earendil is a venture-backed for-profit, public benefit corporation” Their intention to release products that provide a return for their backers, using a “free with paid premium” model.

NoahZuniga 7mo ago

There is variation in how comfortable someone is with the idea of "selling out". It seems to me that Mario is less comfortable than many other people in the AI space. How comfortable someone is with the idea of selling out doesn't really seem like a good signal for how bad something is. If Mario had instead just written: "I'm excited to work on the future of PI at Palantir." and nothing else, clearly this is worse? > The fact I can't understand what Earendil is From the article: > I learned a few things. My European brain thinks pi is just another small, mildly useful OSS project of mine with no commercial value. My peers in the space seem to think it has properties that make it stand out over the alternatives. VCs and big corps seem to think that pi has commercial value. Some demonstrated their conviction by sending term sheets or "dream job" offers. Mario thinks there's no commercial value, but clearly some VC people do. If you have the VC money, but don't have any ideas for how to justify commercial viability, why bother? If someone just handed me a big bag of cash and told you to just "do something", I could imagine coming up with Earndil. Make a nice landing page, write some nice guiding principles, and figure out the AI stuff later.

raincole 7mo ago
> "I'm excited to work on the future of PI at Palantir." and nothing else, clearly this is worse? Yeah, but mainly just because what Palantir is. It would be better if he just told us what part of the future pi tool chain would be proprietary, but from the article it seems that they haven't even decided on that, so I don't know what to make of this.

tasuki 7mo ago

> The fact I can't understand what Earendil is after reading this many words is an even bigger red flag. Same, but I heard about Armin Ronacher, and the things I heard were not exactly terrible. He's the creator of the Flask microframework, he's contributed to open source more than most people. Perhaps it'll be fine! And, as Mario has written about ten times in his post: Pi is MIT licensed and it's not hard to find the "fork" button on GitHub.

aryehof 7mo ago
To quote Ronacher - “Earendil is a venture-backed for-profit, public benefit corporation” Their intention to release products that provide a return for their backers, using a “free with paid premium” model.