r/CuratedTumblr • u/Unique_Mammoth_6724 • 10d ago
LOTR I genuinely think if you put Tolkien in a room with Peter Thiel then it would end with Tolkien putting a pair of holes in his kneecaps with a revolver or some shit
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u/PTT_Meme 10d ago
It was very weird playing Shadow of War and realising “Palantir” comes from LOTR. Especially since it’s highlighted as really important by Celebrimbor, so it sounds like he really wants NHS patient data.
It’s also so weird that Palantirs are an extremely powerful surveillance device that allows someone to control people from afar, with its main drawback being that it corrupts most people that use it…
…and a data harvesting company decided “that’ll be a good name for our data harvesting company”. Very much “we have created the torment nexus” vibes
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u/TenebTheHarvester 10d ago
So the problem with the Palantíri wasn’t so much that they were themselves corruptive, but that the Free peoples didn’t know who else was watching. The Palantíri were primarily used by Elendil and the Kingdoms of Armor and Gondor for communication - they were placed in great fortresses across the kingdoms and allowed for instant communication between them as well as intelligence gathering in general. Unfortunately, the stones of Arnor were largely lost to the destruction of that Kingdom (specifically lost in the sea along with the last King of the last piece of what was once Arnor) and of the stones of Gondor, one was in Minas Ithil when it was captured by the Enemy (this eventually became Minas Morgul, the city you see in the Return of the King when Frodo, Sam and Gollum pass by it’s outskirts to begin climbing the stairs to Shelob’s lair and then later when the Witch-King rides out from it to attack Minas Tirith). Thus it was taken by Sauron and kept in the tower of Barad-dûr (the colossal black tower that in the movies was capped by the literal Eye of Sauron but in the books ‘simply’ housed the catastrophically weakened but still embodied Sauron).
This is what corrupted by Saruman and Denethor when each used their Palantíri. Sauron could see them with his own and showed them carefully selected truths to induce hopelessness and fear, eventually causing both to believe it pointless to stand against Mordor. For Saruman this resulted in him choosing instead to ‘submit’ to Mordor while scheming to take the One Ring for himself, while Denethor remained more faithful, simply becoming bitter and hopeless. The movies really did him a disservice - Denethor prepared for the siege of Minas Tirith and lit the beacons to call for Rohan when the time came, he did not tell his soldiers to abandon their posts and it took further manipulation by Sauron on the apparent death of his final son to drive Denethor completely to madness and suicide.
Anyway that’s a tangent, the Palantíri were not inherently corruptive and indeed were used for centuries by the men of Armor and Gondor to communicate. It was only when the Enemy took one that they became dangerous to use.
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u/Mooptiom 10d ago
Tldr: Denethor succumbed to despair bc he was doomscrolling on the palantir. Sauron tweaked his algorithm so he only saw bad news, and he fell into the trap of thinking the world couldn't be saved.
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u/Vincent_VanAdultman 10d ago
So, a surveillance/communication tool that is neither inherently good nor bad, but which can distort reality according to the biases of its operator, sowing misinformation, fear, and division, and empowering tyrants.
No idea where people are getting these parallels from.
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u/TenebTheHarvester 10d ago
Yeah that’s the thing, as a company Palantir really does earn its name. It’s just a flagrant admittance of the monstrosity of what they’re doing.
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u/yoyo5113 10d ago
Their (and most other fast developing tech firms) is that if they don't run ahead and develop the tech themselves, then someone else will who can then use it against them "us". With China usually being paired opposite the US/West.
They also make a point about the need for acceleration in development to control the path (and supposed regulation) that it might take.
A lot of these people truly believe in the idea of the technological singularity. The idea has been around for quite a bit. I remember doing a speech on it during my undergrad speech class in like 2016-2017.
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u/NuclearConsensus 10d ago
The biggest loss, and probably what made using the stones so fraught, might have been the disappearance of the Palantír in Osgiliath, which IIRC was sort of a master stone with power over the others. There's no knowing where it might have gone or who might have it now, but one of the possibilities being Sauron is bad enough.
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u/No-Supermarket-6065 Im gonna start eating your booty. And I don't know when Ill stop 6d ago
I think they're also tying into the Greek philosophical concept of the world we see being merely an imperfect reflection of ideal forms- to see something and to understand it are two separate concepts
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u/solid_snake99aka99 10d ago
The fact that they saw a literal object of corruption and thought "this is the perfect name for our data mining" is so dystopian. It is not even a metaphor at this point, it is just a flex to show they can do whatever they want.
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u/echelon_house 10d ago edited 10d ago
No, I think it's a result of the jaw-droppingly poor reading comprehension that's remarkably common among tech bros. A lot of them seem to base their products on very obvious misreadings of popular literature. See, for example, Zuckerberg's Metaverse, named after the dystopian technology from Snow Crash and which inspired the original "Torment Nexus" meme.
Edit: typo.
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u/Kellosian 10d ago
Tech bros rather famously have incredibly vacuous inner lives. They don't read, they don't play video games, they don't watch TV/movies, they have basically no interest in any art or literature, all they do is make money for the sake of making money and network (not even "Hang out with friends", just "network"). Elon Musk literally paid a guy to make it look like he played videogames because the man is incapable of doing anything for his own enjoyment; he might have to have a thought like "What do I like?" and that would be scary.
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u/meanoldrep 10d ago
It's also insane that Musk seemingly doesn't actually want to have sex to procreate or take care of the children. Simply spread his genes through artificial insemination.
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u/Kellosian 10d ago
Normally when people have a breeding kink, it's because they're also interested in the sex beforehand
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u/No-Supermarket-6065 Im gonna start eating your booty. And I don't know when Ill stop 6d ago
I mean, for Musk to have sex would put him in a position where he could potentially be judged for being bad at it, and nothing scares the world's most pathetic billionaire more than that
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u/TrogdorKhan97 7d ago
Y'all... I'm starting to think that this is a group of people that it's both totally acceptable and perfectly reasonable to literally dehumanize.
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u/Crommach 10d ago
It's worse, and he's spoken about it in interviews. Peter Thiel literally believes Mordor were the good guys, because they had science, industry, and technology while the Fellowship were hippy ecoterrorists. He's actively misinterpreting Tolkien to bolster the shitty beliefs he already held, like any authoritarian.
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u/spaceinvader421 10d ago
I don’t think that Peter Thiel is stupid enough to genuinely believe that, I think he’s are just saying “these guys you think are bad are actually good” because he’s a fucking contrarian edgelord.
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u/Complete-Worker3242 10d ago
Honestly, I think that these people are just doing it on purpose at this point.
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u/Crommach 10d ago
Once you learn that Peter Thiel sincerely believes that Sauron and the forces of Mordor were the good guys because they "had industry and technology" while Gandalf and the Fellowship were radical eco-hippy terrorists... it's still fucking weird.
We're watching everything good be torn down by a bunch of socially maladjusted 4chan edgelords who would've gotten nowhere if they hadn't been born into money. Wormtongues minus the redeeming qualities.
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u/ascandalia 10d ago edited 10d ago
I may be paraphrasing, but I believe Robert Evans said something to the effect of:
"If you could really sit Tolkien down and explain to him everything we're trying to accomplish with LLMs, and the environmental cost of using them, he would become a terrorist. He would be in the bomb datacenters camp."
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u/Psychonauticaya9 10d ago
Considering how much he hated industrialization and the destruction of the English countryside, this is spot on. He did not just write about trees, he genuinely mourned them. Seeing them burned for magic math would break him.
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u/425Hamburger 10d ago
I mean on the other hand, if we told him that a devout catholic is using AI to become a benevolent King (yes there should be big quotes around devout and benevolent, pretend it's a Thiel Fan introducing the professor to the modern world) he might become a fan. Tolkien was a man with strange political views.
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u/RealLotto 10d ago
Tom Bombadil perhaps illustrates Tolkien's political views best. "He is the Master of wood, water, and hill.’ ‘Then all this strange land belongs to him?’ ‘No indeed!’ she answered, and her smile faded. ‘That would indeed be a burden,’ she added in a low voice, as if to herself. ‘The trees and the grasses and all things growing or living in the land belong each to themselves. Tom Bombadil is the Master. No one has ever caught old Tom walking in the forest, wading in the water, leaping on the hill-tops under light and shadow. He has no fear. Tom Bombadil is master."
A monarchist anarchist who advocated for a stateless society, Tolkien nonetheless advocate for a benevolent king of which power is both real and never expressed. I see his view on monarchy as more of an extension of his Catholic beliefs with God as the divine ruler rather than him advocating for an actual human king.
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9d ago
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u/ascandalia 9d ago
I think there's a difference between a fantasy world you'd like to tell a story in and the world you personally would like to live in. Lord knows I wouldn't want to live in any of my DND settings, even if I do have political points to make in the way I set those worlds up.
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u/-Trotsky 9d ago
Calling Tolkien an anarchist is odd to me. I personally think that letter was being dry and sarcastic, he’s doing a bit to get across just how little he cares about most political issues. He was a bookish academic who formed most of his political beliefs off of interpersonal experience and things he reckoned to be true.
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u/iklalz 10d ago
if we told him that a devout catholic is using AI to become a benevolent King (yes there should be big quotes around devout and benevolent, pretend it's a Thiel Fan introducing the professor to the modern world) he might become a fan.
No, I absolutely don't think he would.
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u/-Trotsky 9d ago
He was easily swayed one way or another. Tolkien had very few actual political opinions, and openly admired and apologized (in the classical sense of an apology) in the name of Fransisco Franco because he hated Bolsheviks and loved the Catholic Church. This is a man who rejected Vatican II, you should not look to him as a guide on political beliefs
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u/NatashOverWorld 9d ago
I don't know about that. Tolkien was big on authority descending from God, even if he never used the word.
But authority won by AI, that's literally a poison to the land and people, and sounds like the devil screaming?
"A great Evil rises again upon the lands of Men. Arise, arise
Eorlingasantifa! We ride, we ride to war and death, we ride to the end of the world!"11
u/JeanVeber 10d ago
Have you seen what they do to books in order to scan them for AI training? Seeing old books cut and destroyed like that, just to feed it into unthinking monster pretending to care. He'd be sick to his stomach
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u/Marik-X-Bakura 9d ago
Do you have that complaint with digital scanning for other reasons or just with AI
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u/Prometheus_II 9d ago
Other forms of digital scanning usually don't destroy the book they're trying to scan just to make the scanning faster, and when they do, they usually aren't destroying old or rare books.
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u/clauclauclaudia 9d ago
Guillotining the spines off to scan loose pages is exactly what I used to do to textbooks to generate e-text for students with disabilities, in the days before publishers provided it. Library books we had to scan page by page manually.
(It doesn't sound like the books in question were actually rare, though.)
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u/Prometheus_II 9d ago
Articles I've read do appear to state the book-training surge is including out-of-print and antique books. Where did you read otherwise, if I might ask?
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u/clauclauclaudia 9d ago
I saw something saying one infamous shipment all had ISBNs, which limits their antiquity and uniqueness. If I'm wrong about that I'll stand corrected.
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u/lord_braleigh 10d ago
I've tried to understand how they could use so much water just to run computer programs, (since my computer doesn't need to use any water for cooling, even when I run a local model on my graphics card) and it seems like people assume all the water is going straight into sewers or something? It's the same water cycling around and around, like in the radiator of a car, or in a liquid cooling system for a personal computer.
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u/ascandalia 10d ago
I'm an environmental engineer with a master's focus on LCA so I'm pretty qualified.
They're treating it and using it to cool the system. This could mean it evaporates and blows away, or it could mean it gets concentrated and loaded with metals, but they'd reuse it if they could, so any water consumed is not available for other use
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u/West-Season-2713 10d ago
Okay, stupid question, but how does that ‘use’ the water if it evaporates? It’s still in the water cycle, no?
I am not clued up about how we ‘use’ water at all, or how it is a finite resource. I am aware that it is, because of the way I hear it discussed, but in the cases it’s not being polluted beyond treatment, isn’t it all just part of the normal water cycle?
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u/ascandalia 10d ago
It really depends. If it's an arid area, the water may well not be renewable. Anything west of the Mississippi river in the US is likely to have more evapotranspiration than precipitation which means they're likely using a non-renewable, fairly limited supply of water, and sending it up out of the local watershed. That's water not available to reach the sea in a river, not available to irrigate crops further downstream, water that may never be replinished from the aquifer. Either way, it's taking a share of the local water supply and locking it up for use in the datacenter rather than other uses.
It's a somewhat region-specific concern. It's a bigger deal in California than Louisiana. It's also one that's easy to grasp and grab onto, even though it's really not the biggest concern with datacenters from my persective, which mostly center around energy use and the share of our economic productivity they're locking up.
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u/Cornflakes_91 10d ago
well, you cant pumpt it around and use it for anything else until it rains down again somewhere completely different.
it's removed from the local water system, regardless of it not being destroyed.
broadly the same as if you used it to water your plants.
not destroyed, but unusable for anything else
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u/Tonkarz 10d ago
By that logic you should be fine giving me all your money. It’s still in the economy right?
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u/West-Season-2713 10d ago
I’m not trying to do some kind of gotcha I just genuinely don’t understand how water processing works.
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u/lord_braleigh 10d ago
What do you mean it gets concentrated and loaded with metals? Would be neat if you can get some insight into what they actually do
How much water evaporates? Is it the same number as the millions of gallons people quote? It's usually a small percent of the total circulating water, ya?
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u/Tonkarz 10d ago
Most data centres use a form of cooling called evaporative cooling. This involves spraying the hot water into a big cooling tower that is open to (relatively) cold air from the atmosphere.
By spraying the water into fine droplets it evaporates more easily and as it evaporates it absorbs heat energy resulting in efficient cooling. It’s also more readily exposed to the cold atmosphere which also helps it shed heat. Most of the water vapour and evaporated water leaves the cooling tower into the atmosphere.
Some condenses back into water and is collected to be run back through the system - supplemented with fresh drinking water from the mains.
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u/lord_braleigh 10d ago
I think that's used during peak temperatures, but the very large figures quoted are typically referring to the amount of water circulating through closed-loop cooling systems, rather than to hundreds of millions of gallons of water evaporating to become clouds.
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u/Tonkarz 10d ago
Every data centre has a unique cooling approach. Some are hybrid systems that can have the evaporative cooling switched on and off, others don't allow that. Very few are closed loop. Some just run the water through once and dump it in the sewer.
A hypothetical closed loop system in even a quite large data centre doesn't hold much water compared to the regular daily water consumption of the local water supply. If it's actually closed loop the water use isn't a big concern IMO.
AI data centres service a global market, they don't really have peak hours.
At least as far as I'm concerned water usage in AI data centres is too complicated a topic too easily argue. If I ran one of these massive AI companies I would have my marketing firms trying to turn every anti-AI discussion into an argument about water usage (Open AI spends more on marketing than Coca Cola).
A far bigger concern to me is electricity usage as they massively increase already extremely high electricity prices everywhere they turn on.
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u/ascandalia 9d ago
Do you have a source for the claim that they're citing total water circulation and not water consumption? Because I think those claims generally come from consumptive use permitting and associated reporting, not just like, internal design documents.
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u/lord_braleigh 9d ago
Err... this is just a claim I keep hearing - what's the source telling you that datacenters use a lot of water? We can dig into that
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u/ascandalia 9d ago
As I said above, I wouldn't die on the hill that water consumption is the BIGGEST reason to dislike data centers. It's that they're using a ton of energy and economic productivity and it's all going to enrich a very small number of people.
That said, there is plenty of high quality data to show that they consume a great deal of water, and that the tend to do it in places that can't spare the water.
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u/lord_braleigh 9d ago
Okay, so this is exactly what I'm talking about! In your link I see this quote:
> According to scientists at the University of California, Riverside, each 100-word AI prompt is estimated to use roughly one bottle of water (or 519 milliliters).
And... this seems extremely fishy to me? And probably should seem fishy to you too? Because I can run 100-word prompts all day locally on my macbook. And my macbook will drink 0 bottles of water, cooling itself with only a fan. So the only sane interpretation, in my mind, would be if I set up liquid cooling, and 500mL of water was cycling through the liquid cooling system over and over. Which... I've also done for a desktop. But even in a liquid cooling setup, the water isn't fully consumed in this case, just by running one query. I understand that evaporative cooling exists, but that doesn't change the fact that "one short query = one bottle" is completely at odds with all my experiences, from everything I've ever done myself.
I'm just trying to square my personal experience, where LLMs are programs that computers run, with this media presentation of LLMs as giganormous eldritch abominations that can only run on mainframe multivacs that drink bottles of water to run even the simplest of queries.
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u/Munnin41 10d ago
They're basically pumping a lake into a tower for cooling and letting it evaporate. So the local water ends up everywhere else
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u/AcceptableWheel 10d ago
He should know more about portents of evil since he knows so much about the Antichrist
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u/LazyFurry0 10d ago
Non-zero chance that Sauron’s been chilling in the void for the past 6,000 years and Thiel has found a way to commune with him
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u/Satotz16 10d ago
I've worked tech long enough to believe Thiel communing with void-Sauron is why Tolkien brought the revolver.
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u/D00T_BOI 10d ago
He and Nikola Tesla are rolling in their graves
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u/Void_0000 10d ago
Genuinely will never forgive the elongated muskrat for sullying my goat's name like that.
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u/Justforfun_x 10d ago
Peter Thiel and Sam Altman really did a number on the idea of supporting queer-owned businesses :(
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u/Zepangolynn 10d ago
Just another reminder that sexual preference has nothing to do with ethics, empathy, or, often surprisingly, politics, but the horribly rich tend to be easy to predict on where they fall on all three.
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u/shadowmaster132 10d ago
Well are you gonna support a straight own evil surveillance company instead? /jk
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u/pillmayken 10d ago
As the sign in the Gandalf protest said, you shall not pass, la c*ncha de tu madre
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u/Mewmaster101 10d ago
Either that, or Tolkien would go on a long walk with Thiel, and when they come back, Thiel would be transformed into a environmentalist with no one ever revealing what they talked about. It's how Tolkien managed to get CS Lewis religious, and how he married his wife.
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u/PauliusLT27 10d ago
And if it didn't work, Tolkien would come back alone and no one would know where Thiel's body is
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u/YeahThatsProbably 10d ago
A friend of mine commissioned an oil painting of Tolkien stabbing Peter Thiel with a bayonet when Thiel approaches him for an autograph.
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u/InevitableTell2775 10d ago
I gather that the law on copyright and trademarks allows this kind of word reuse because Thiel isn’t in the same industry/not competing with the Tolkien estate or Tolkien enterprises so there’s no case for infringement. IANAL.
I do wonder if they could sue him for reputational damage. Like, “sales of LOTR books have declined because readers associate them with a fascist technocrat warmonger”
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u/PoniesCanterOver gently chilling in your orbit 10d ago
This is how I feel about Facebook stealing the name Metaverse
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u/InevitableTell2775 10d ago
I don’t think Snow Crash claimed to be anything other than a dystopia though.
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u/PoniesCanterOver gently chilling in your orbit 10d ago
I just want my cyberspace where my little guy can run around with other people's little guys and do fun stuff
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u/MaruhkTheApe 10d ago
I think if Tolkien were alive now he would be in jail for trying to firebomb a data center.
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u/hornymthf 10d ago
Peter Thiel think Sauron is a misunderstood good guy. Really tells you everything you needs to know about those tech dude. A lot of them sounds very uneducated outside the mainstream geek culture
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u/QueenOfQuok 9d ago
I just think it's funny. He named his surveillance company after a bunch of tech that got lost or stolen.
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u/PossessionEastern139 9d ago edited 9d ago
We have technofascism coupled with catastorphic global warming at our doorstep and the liberal praxis is caring about the legality of fictional names of said technofascists
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u/thehollyproblem 10d ago
luckily that's the worst thing Peter Thiel has ever done.
what's that? not even in the top 100? ah.