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Comment by rylando | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how Tolkien would’ve thought about the use of LotR names being used by all these AI and tech companies.. especially since they all seem to use the names of things that were corrupted by darkness.

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From their CEO:

> When I'm old I want people to remember Tolkien named companies for things other than weapon and surveillance systems.

Source: https://x.com/mitsuhiko/status/2041855748481695774

Armin is the CTO ;)

Whoops! my bad TIL HN comments have a 2hr timeout for editing

Funny that he is building a middleware layer to a biggest surveillance system in all our history, the one which will spy on everything people are typing on their digital devices forever. How nice of him :)

i would argue that the way internet infrastructure in general already works as such system, local AI tools just set that as a commodity

Quite funny because Earendil is the old english word for Lucifer aka... Satan

Ehh it's Old Norse and tied to Norse mythology and its exact etymology is not clear, and Lucifer was the Roman name of the planet Venus. Christianity does not get to define the words it steals.

I wonder much the same thing, but this seems like a slightly odd place to say it since so far as I can see the only LotR name in the linked article is the company name Earendil, and AFAIK Earendil-in-Tolkien was very much not corrupted by darkness.

> LotR name in the linked article is the company name Earendil, and AFAIK Earendil-in-Tolkien was very much not corrupted by darkness.

I think they mean that most companies that use these Tolkien names, are on the dark side.

Eärendil is fine in that respect.

Though I find it funny that they put “Bearer of Light” as a description, at least on their GitHub page. AFAIK Tolkien did not used the phrase, it is maybe a bit too close to the Latin version, Lucifer. Talk about a thing corrupted by darkness.

Well there’s https://disconnect.blog/peter-thiels-influence-over-a-networ... and https://www.reddit.com/r/lotr/comments/1lrc27y/how_do_tolkie...

I always thought Tolkien had taken those names from the IKEA catalog.

A lot of Tolkien names come from old Germanic languages. Eärendil for example from Ēarendel, the Old English name for a figure from Norse mythology [1]

Or maybe from the 9th century poem Christ I [2], which translated to modern English starts off with the words

    Hail Earendel, brightest of angels,
    Sent to men over middle-earth,
    And true radiance of the sun,
    Fine beyond stars, you always illuminate,
    From your self, every season!

IKEA catalogs using Swedish names, and Swedish being a Germanic language that stayed truer to its Germanic roots than English did, it's not that far off. In a weird way

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurvandill

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_I

“The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real things of its own. I don't think it gave life ..., it only ruined them and twisted them.”

Putting the makers of an OSS harness in the same moral group of Palantir and Anduril is laughably silly.

LLMs in general are a corruption in a literal moral-neutral way. You stop worrying about whether something is correct or not, or how it works and just give in to the vibes, doesn't matter what goes in the backend or in some data center or mine far away, everything reduced to producing digital nuggets.

Not all LLM use is vibe coding.

yeah, I didn't refer to vibe coding specifically, all that applies to generic llm usage

> You stop worrying about whether something is correct or not, or how it works and just give in to the vibes,

Are you sure about that? All llm use is like this?

Yes, for an encyclopedic use-case for example, asking a fact question, when compared to Google or Wikipedia, using an LLM is less deterministic and provides less auditable metadata, it's just the answer and trust me bro.

Then don't use it like that. Ask for summaries and links. That's what I do. You don't have to use llms like magic.

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