Mario and Earendil

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.

Same news here with 76 comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47687533

Gotta admit, I’m a sucker for a well-dressed mysterious preview. Really excited to see what Lefos is all about.

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.

Oh… not what I expected this to be about.

> 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.

Someone convince me that "machine entity" is not an odd phrase.

From browsing the Earendil website, I'm honestly not sure if this is a software startup or a cult...

I was really hoping for some kind of Nintendo/Silmarillion crossover.

This is good too, I guess.

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.

Who even are these people? I thought it was going to be about Nintendo...