In an idle moment, I thought I’d explore the space of ridiculously bad ai company names. Literally the very first dystopia I thought of already has three ai companies named after it, and it hardly seemed worth exploring any further.
Because no one has got around to repealing poe’s law, I cannot tell if these are a bunch of idiot techbros, or people taking the piss out of idiot techbros, so I leave you to judge for yourself. Behold, people who think that “we tortured a child to bring you glossy web UIs” is a great corporate image:
AI-driven software development. Enterprise platforms delivered at startup speed.
I think they’re a consultancy? “One developer with AI produces what a 30-person agency does. 10+ production platforms in under two years.”
Omelas is the maker of Atreus, the leading AI research companion for foreign policy, national security, and geopolitical risk. Atreus has access to the Omelas database, multidomain intelligence, and unique research methods, yielding unparalleled insights in minutes.
“Atreus is the AI workbench purpose-built for intelligence work, fusing unique feeds, open-source intelligence, commercial data, satellite imagery and telemetry data into reports your analysts can act on immediately” which I guess means that they’re palantir wannabes, with the USP that they’ve grossly misunderstood le guin instead of Tolkien.
Omelas builds software across privacy, social connection, developer tools, and AI — designed and engineered in the Netherlands.
Another consultancy. They claim they make “thoughtful products”, hopefully with more thought than they put into their branding. Proof that inability to understand fantasy and sci-fi isn’t limited to silicon valley, or native english speakers.
Oh no! Like don't you google a name before choosing it?
If you let openclaw do everything else, why not also let it register a domain name
"The ones who walk away from Omelas describes a utopia ---"
good enough! ship it!
@gerikson @rmhogervorst
Their favourite bit of The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas was when Omelas Jones jumped in the OmelasMobile and yelled "It's Omelassin' Time" and sped away in a cloud of tiresmoke
Who even has time for that? Do you think that the people behind palantir, icarus and sauron have time to read google summaries? They’re too busy remaking the world!
Anyway, if you’re successful enough you’ll eclipse the original source in terms of importance and all the search engine summaries will be about you anyway, so any time spent learning anything before that will have been completely wasted.
Thiel has spoken enough on his love of Tolkien that it's pretty clear he's a big fan of the books, meaning he knows what he's naming. A lot of these people are actually pretty devoted fans, they just think Saruman/Sauron/etc had bad PR.
I would expand on what rook said that Thiel very much is not a big fan of the book. He is a big fan of an imaginary version he dreamed up.
A common problem in fiction, especially visible in the first Star Wars trilogy, is to make the villain look cool and efficient to amp up their threat, and then see people root for them.
But it's super not the case for Lord of the Ring. Saruman is shown to be a pathetic fool at every corner. You can't be a fan and have not noticed that. Sauron fare little better ; he is shown to be baseline competent at some things, but he is the living embodiment of "the thing in the way of your project is who you are".
The conclusion is that it's most likely Thiel did not actually read the book. Maybe he skimmed them, maybe he only read the summary. But anything important in it flew past him, despite Tolkien not being exactly subtle !
I would be slightly more charitable than that. I don't think it's a matter of failing to read or understand the surface of the material, I think it's a failure to seriously engage with it. He's the Tolkien equivalent of a 2005-era Reddit atheist who is can rattle off all the worst parts of Leviticus but has no empathy for why people actually connect with their religion. (Unrelated: I am describing myself here.)
Like, the beating heart of LotR is a kind of 20th-century romanticism, a celebration and eulogy for a world in transition to something wholly new. Combined with the fact that Tolkien largely codified the whole set of fantasy races I can sort of understand where people with fascist tendencies connect with it. You could interpret some of that in a very "RETVRN"-coded way where Gondor and the Shire are both the glorious homeland that needs to be protected and/or reclaimed, especially if you dig into certain elements of the lore around Numenor. Alternatively in that kind of reading it's entirely possible to construct an argument about how Sauron and Saruman are the bringers of progress and industry. Pretty sure I remember a cracked article back in the day that made this argument for laughs, but you can assemble it from the parts in the text. Either way you can make something of it that I imagine Thiel and his set are pretty damn comfortable with.
Of course that would require ignoring the far more central theme of the story, which is how power is inherently destructive. The ring itself is the most obvious manifestation, but I think the other element that gets lost is the way that Sauron is ultimately defeated not by Gandalf out-wizarding him or by Aragor out-kinging him or Gimli, Legolas, or anyone else out-fighting him. It isn't even Frodo and Sam persisting in their quest and resisting the call of the Ring, for in the final pivotal moments even their strength and righteousness failed them. Instead, it comes down to Gollum's greed and devotion to his Precious. His weakness, in other words. Tolkien coined the term Eucatastrophe to describe this kind of moment, and it's notable for being the culmination of the story's smaller moments. Time and again the heroes of LotR choose to do what is right and act with mercy, honor, courage, kindness, or respect not because it's the right strategic choice - indeed the most logical consequence would have been failure in a thousand predictable ways - but because of their connections to each other and their faith that rightness and righteousness will somehow align.
This is of course antithetical to Thiel and the whole project which worships power rather than fearing it. The whole theme of the Hobbit essentially is a rejection of the attempt to be "agentic" and exercise power over the whole world rather than enjoying your own life. Bilbo's heroism explicitly comes not because he's going to save the world but because he wants to help his compatriots recover the same humble comfort of home that he enjoyed his whole life.
Anyone who names a security company “sauron” has critically failed their reading comprehension. Mercifully, there’s no company naming itself saruman, because that character was breathtakingly dumb in so many ways that perhaps even the y-combinator set are dimly aware of them.
The goal is to make the company name ungooglable for the bad reviews