Imagine Isaac Newton (and/or Gottfried Leibniz) saying, "Today we're announcing the availability of new mathematical tools -- contact our marketing specialists now!"

The linked article isn't about mathematics, technology or human knowledge. It's about marketing. It can only exist in a kind of late-stage capitalism where enshittification is either present or imminent.

And I have to say ... Stephen Wolfram's compulsion to name things after himself, then offer them for sale, reminds me of ... someone else. Someone even more shamelessly self-promoting.

Newton didn't call his baby "Newton-tech", he called it Fluxions. Leibniz called his creation Calculus. It didn't occur to either of them to name their work after themselves. That would have been embarrassing and unseemly. But ... those were different times.

Imagine Jonas Salk naming his creation Salk-tech, then offering it for sale, at a time when 50,000 people were stricken with Polio every year. What a missed opportunity! What a sucker! (Salk gave his vaccine away, refusing the very idea of a patent.)

Right now it's hard to tell, but there's more to life than grabbing a brass ring.