Analogies like this work because they invite reflection rather than certainty. Tools themselves are neutral — it’s how people choose to use them, and the values they bring with them, that really shape the outcome.
The funniest thing is a security company called “Palantir”. If they had actually read the books they’d know how ironic that name is… Or ironically on point.
Irony and satire both require critical thinking beyond the scope of what bigots are capable of because it requires them empathy enough to understand the author’s POV; namely that the author is not being literal with their words.
No thanks on this fantastical take. This kind of hyperbolic rhetoric is part of the “AI” grift. Indistinguishable from like Peter Thiel and similar.
- https://biztechweekly.com/cheerful-apocalyptics-how-influential-ai-leaders-techno-misanthropy-threatens-humanitys-future/
- https://bigwildmindmachine.substack.com/p/the-ai-apocalypse-is-a-scam
- https://fortune.com/2026/02/04/peter-thiel-antichrist-greta-thunberg-end-of-modernity-billionaires/
Technology =/= Sauron. Technology is almost exclusively controlled by evil people because of capitalism, but technology is not the part that’s inherently evil.
they absolutely have evil in their hearts and they know it. dare i say they enjoy it.
Be more like Tom Bombadil America.
They couldn’t have read the book
I have never heard of Tech Bros liking lord of the rings? Unless OP in the meme is generalizing about nerds in general which is weird cause there are lots of different kind of nerds like Star Wars nerds, Harry Potter nerds, etc.
Have you heard of companies like Palantir and Anduril?
Those are not tech bros but tech corporates. Big difference. And I dont consider them true LOTR fans. I think they are just trying to use the names for clickbait and to be relevant.
You don’t consider who true LOTR fans? You just said these don’t count because they are companies.
I was talking about the companies Palantir and Anduril. Whoever chose those names are not true Lord of the Rings fans because even though they used names from Lord of the Rings they should know that Tolkien would never have approved of it. Thus, they are not Lord of the Rings fans but rather are just using the names for clickbait purposes. To me personally a tech bro indicates a more casual, nonprofessional - someone who is interested in tech as a hobby. They might do bit coin mining or some casual stock investment but they are not big corporate overlords like those who run Palantir and Anduril. Though of course I could be generalizing too.
Interesting, to me a tech bro means someone who isn’t really interested in tech other than as a vehicle to make money. The people going fad after fad through blockchain, metaverse, NFTs, AI, all as an investment opportunity without actually having any real technical knowledge about any of it. The people who aren’t geeks but are faking it as a front to convince investors and consumers that they invented something of value. A fake interest in LOTR fits my view of tech bros exactly.
The people happy to build the Torment Nexus and name it after a LOTR artifact as if it wasn’t an affront to LOTR.
Likely referencing Peter Thiel and his Palantir nonsense
I don’t think so cause that is a big company not a tech bro but maybe you are right
But to be fair: You can’t judge a tech bro before you walked mile in their shoes
None of us can afford gucci black leather shoes, but I feel comfortable judging them anyway, as I can see they are pieces of fucking shit.
Sound familiar?
HBO’s Game of Thrones?
They’re building Mordor in Gaza
Mordor is New Jersey. Gaza idk, gates of cirith ungol maybe? No more like Sauramen’s Isengaard.
Disagree
I am just spitballing here, but Mordor is like the industrial engine of the empire, not the wasteland of their warring. It’s where the industry of the dark lord, such as it is, spews toxic ash clouds over the land and blots out the sun that never shines bright overhead to the point the orcs find it rather seasonable (orcs being perhaps a cross between men and elves captured and tormented through generations by Morgoth, Sauron’s former boss, the Eldar that went bad, (the other Eldar finally came to Middle Earth and killed/banished Morgoth, but not before the elves warred against him in vain for generations after he stole their prize simaril jewels and murdered some in a betrayal and ran to his middle earth kingdom from valinor.)
So mordor has toxic air, just like New Jersey, in fact endocrinologists have long decreed that New Jersey causes cancer. Their government is corrupt and in league with those polluters in industry that dump their waste under dishonest arguments and pay the politicians to believe it. The D or R next to their names is inconsequential in this regard, they are corrupted by the employers, and are of the party that can win. You don’t let someone poison your family if they have one letter next to their name rather than another do you? You shouldn’t.
New Jersey is the only state I’ve been to where you have to pay to leave, as it’s all private highways, best money you can spend.
Yes, but the eye of Sauron is in Mordor and the plan for Gaza is to build a city run by and ruled by technocrats like Peter Thiel and Larry Ellison who are heading the global mass surveillance systems(eye of Sauron ) This of course will be built on over the blood of the innocent women and children they just slaughtered in a genocide and the project will be policed by the Israeli (orcs) who gleefully engaged in the slaughter of an entire people. I haven’t read the books since I was a teenager but my broad recollection brings me to this conclusion because Mordor is the headquarters of evil and that’s Israel
Tech bros understand Tolkien as well as they understand cyberpunk and star trek
They’re big fans. The stories are full of cool names they could use for their companies and projects!
“[tech bros] don’t have evil in [their] heart” [citation needed]
Yep, their whole heart is made of evil.
Techbros themselves think they don’t. Doesn’t mean it’s true.
It’s important to know, I feel like, that the Curtis Yarvin acolytes like Peter Thiel know about Tolkien lore and think he simply took the wrong perspectivein writing his tales. They actually think Sauron was a hero and represented the right side of history. They are that fucked up, morally and ethically.
Exactly this. They’re the guys who watched Avengers and thought Loki had the right of it - he just went about it too openly.
Fucking melkor simps
Morgoth is a bitch, we are getting those simarills back one way or another.
The melody requires some discord, but not that much
Beware any public housing these guys offer, make sure it’s not just made out of ice. Not falling for that one again.
Spot on!
What about the AI that I run on my local GPU that is using a model trained on open source and public works?
It’s cool as hell to train models don’t get me wrong but if you use them as assistants you will still slowly stop thinking no?
So Nazgûl.
Feels like telling me not to use a calculator so I don’t forget how to add and subtract.
I’ve settled on a future model where AIs are familiars that level up from their experience more naturally and are less immediately omnipotent
your local model wouldn’t exist without sauron (openai)
People were making LLMs before openai/chatgpt tbf.
It’s the “destroy the environment and economy in an attempt to make something that sucks just enough to justify not paying people fairly so you can advertise to rich assholes gambling their generational wealth” that OpenAI invented for the LLMs.
what are those LLMs you mention that people are still using? never heard of them, sounds like a cop out
Sounds like the rings of the Elves to me
That is slightly less unethical than Claude or whatever, but it is still unethical.
Can you elaborate on why this is unethical?
I use 0.2kWh of electricity to spend a day coding with this model:
It is still trained on open source code on GitHub. These code communities seemingly have no way to opt out of their free (libre) contributions being used as training data, nor does the resulting code generation contribute anything back to those communities. It is a form of license stripping. That’s just one issue.
Just because your inference running locally doesn’t use much electricity doesn’t mean you’ve sidestepped all of the other ethical issues surrounding LLMs.
It is not trained on open source code on Github.
But I can use it to analyze a datasheet and generate a library for an obscure module that I can then upload to Github and contribute to the community.
Apertus is most certainly trained on source code hosted on GitHub. It is laid out here in their technical report:
https://github.com/swiss-ai/apertus-tech-report
It uses a large dataset called TheStack, among others.
StarCoderData.23 A large-scale code dataset derived from the permissively licensed GitHub collection The Stack (v1.2). (Kocetkov et al., 2022), which applies deduplication and filtering of opted-out files. In addition to source code, the dataset includes supplementary resources such as GitHub Issues and Jupyter Notebooks (Li et al., 2023).
That’s not random Github accounts or “delicensing” anything. People had to opt IN to be part of “The Stack”. Apertus isn’t training itself from community code.
I’m tired of arguing with you about this, and you’re still wrong. It was opt-out, not opt-in, based initially on a GitHub crawl of 137M repos and 52B files before filtering & dedup.
This is very cool. Any advice a simple software engineer (me) could follow to practice the same?
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Install LM Studio
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Tell LM Studio to download the Apertus model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apertus_(LLM)
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Bob’s ur uncle.
stick to 8B models for video cards with 8GB VRAM.
Thanks! I’ve always wanted an uncle bob, too!
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Along a similar line, guy makes a global surveillance company and calls it Palantir, apparently oblivious to how much of a comic book villain he looks like. Thiel looks at Sauron like “that’s so meee”.
Palantir. The network of seeing stones infamously compromised by just one bad actor. Drove a man completely mad with depression and doomsaying.
Yes, let’s name our security surveillance company after it.
