I mean its fair to say that its deliberately on the nose. However, I would argue that despite being definitionally correct, Palantir still represents a misinterpretation by discarding the works in their whole. I brought it up because postmodern does correctly imply a reaction to what is "modern", but its also a body of work in its own right.
This is not to say that Tolkien's authorial intent is final, nor necessarily discernible, but we are obligated to examine the palantirs' presentation as not just a passive object with certain, defined qualities, but as devices that have their own consequential histories within the narrative. Thiel naming his company after a tool presented textually as fallible, misleading, and myopic (in addition to its obvious power) with ostensibly no desire to attach such connotations to the company requires, in my mind, at least a superficial reading. We can even disregard the fact that these were mostly tools for an evil opposed by Tolkien, and not make the (valid) argument that their presentation within the text is could be considered direct argument in opposition to their creation. I personally think that to build a company and name it after a work that argues against that company's mission/purpose requires misinterpretation of the reference material, both in terms of poor comprehension of metaphor and as a poor response to the text and the body of discourse that surrounds and infuses it.
>Postmodernism did indeed follow modernism and come into being as a reaction to modernism.
I definitely agree that, strictly speaking, postmodernism is a somewhat loose label for an eclectic set of ideas and expressions following modernism. My issue was not with the label being denotatively incorrect – that postmodernism implies a deliberate and retrospective relation to what is labeled "modern" – but rather that the term invokes a spirit that is utterly missing from the project.
There is no rejection of teleological narratives, and in fact by misapplying this term acts to reinforcing them. It doesn't meaningful critique the projects its in conversation with except in terms that reinforce the underlying assumptions that motivated their production. It critiques Vim in terms of codebase complexity and multiplexity, and these concepts are nothing if not deeply familiar. Even with regards to the concept of coding as the composition and production of language, Helix only looks to make that process more efficient, rather than examine how this process reproduces itself, or how intent is masked and produced through abstraction and reference to the work of other programmers/authors.
I am not saying that it should have done that. It is by all means a perfectly good editor. But a perfectly good editor does not a postmodern editor make.
If anything, one could argue that the process of vibecoding is more recognizably postmodern, especially as a strict rejection of the modernist belief system that produces that process of coding. Its nondeterminism rejects efficient, coherent processes. It requires one to reimagine production as its ends, rather than by beginning with conventional initialization rituals. Its discursive rather than dictatorial.
Not to say vibecoding is the end of coding or even the way "forward", just as to say postmodernism is not the teleological end to thought.
>It's a joke. If Neovim is the modern Vim, then Helix is post-modern.
It's interesting that postmodern is so often used by people, perhaps less familiar with the arts and the humanities, to mean "an update to modern" or a progression thereof. They use it in a strictly literal sense, eschewing the precise meaning of the term they're referencing by mere addition of discontinuity as incremental difference.
Obviously, there's little impact to this. The term is hardly degraded by engineers advertising to other engineers. It looks a touch unread, but then again we have people like Thiel and Luckey misinterpreting Tolkien, so again it's hardly the most egregious example. I guess it just jumped out to me because I was hoping to see something creative truly postmodern.
Maybe it's my familiarity with R and the tidyverse paradigm, but I think in general this paradigm and syntax is pretty readable. The example you chose is perhaps a case where brackets and commas go a long way, but that aside it's really not too bad in context of the rest of the language. `:` seems to consistently be treated as keyword arguments, and `=` for aliasing.
I totally agree with doas being a good program with really good rationale. I also get that suckless does have a bit of a reputation that isnt for everyone (I've heard that it's basically impossible to make a PR to any of their projects). Theyre obviously not philosophically aligned, that was terrible wording, but I mentioned OpenBSD because its an excellent project that deserves more mention and a lot of the criticisms for modern software design in this post and thread are addressed by their design philosophy. That said, the compiling issue aside I think the overall embrace of simple, self-contained, C code is where you could compare the two.
I use Suckless terminal myself, but if I'm not mistaken it's actually not the fastest terminal out there, despite its simplicity[^1]. My understanding is that many LOCs and complex logic routines are dedicated to hardware/platform-specific optimizations and compatibility, but admittedly this type of engineering is well beyond my familiarity.
Also, OpenBSD's philosophy is very similar to Suckless. One of the more notable projects that come to mind is the `doas` replacement for `sudo`.
[^1]: This is based on Dan Luu's testing (https://danluu.com/term-latency/). I don't know when this testing was done but I assume a few years ago because I remember finding it before.
While I really hope the claim that hating on Comic Sans being ableist is facetious, I do kinda like the font, and use Fantasque Sans[^1] in my terminal.
This is not to say that Tolkien's authorial intent is final, nor necessarily discernible, but we are obligated to examine the palantirs' presentation as not just a passive object with certain, defined qualities, but as devices that have their own consequential histories within the narrative. Thiel naming his company after a tool presented textually as fallible, misleading, and myopic (in addition to its obvious power) with ostensibly no desire to attach such connotations to the company requires, in my mind, at least a superficial reading. We can even disregard the fact that these were mostly tools for an evil opposed by Tolkien, and not make the (valid) argument that their presentation within the text is could be considered direct argument in opposition to their creation. I personally think that to build a company and name it after a work that argues against that company's mission/purpose requires misinterpretation of the reference material, both in terms of poor comprehension of metaphor and as a poor response to the text and the body of discourse that surrounds and infuses it.