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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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 :)
incanus77 [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
Gotta admit, I’m a sucker for a well-dressed mysterious preview. Really excited to see what Lefos is all about.
peterldowns [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
tolerance [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Someone convince me that "machine entity" is not an odd phrase.
aikinai [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Oh… not what I expected this to be about.
A_D_E_P_T [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I thought it was going to be an essay on the hero archetype from Earendil to Mario lol.
georgemcbay [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
swiftcoder [3 hidden]5 mins ago
From browsing the Earendil website, I'm honestly not sure if this is a software startup or a cult...
jfengel [3 hidden]5 mins ago
There seems to be a pattern associated with grabbing names from Tolkien.
lordleft [3 hidden]5 mins 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/
jfengel [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I was really hoping for some kind of Nintendo/Silmarillion crossover.
This is good too, I guess.
bitwize [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
HN.zip
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.
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.
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.
The Dark Lord minions are really busy lately.
https://www.sauron.systems/
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/
This is good too, I guess.