7 comments

  • vessenes 1 hour ago
    It's a somewhat liminal experience to walk with a famous sci-fi author through a tech conference; there are many, many callouts. Money is never sent in thanks for the inspo. The one that sticks out to me the most is Facebook rebranding to "Meta" -- Neal Stephenson coined the term in 1992. As far as I know, they never sent thanks in any form.
    • pryce 40 minutes ago
      It was 'metaverse' that Neal Stephenson coined (which Meta did take and use in a way that does not, to my untrained eye, seem legally defensible.) "Meta" is a prefix from Ancient Greek, dating back thousands of years.
    • chr-s 48 minutes ago
      It's a shame we've lost "meta" and "grok".
      • chrisweekly 38 minutes ago
        I will not stop using good words like those. (We really do need a direct replacement for "trump" in card games, though.)
      • nekusar 39 minutes ago
        Dont forget Lord of the Rings too.

        Palantir (of Orthanc).

        Anduril

        Narya Capital

  • koolala 14 minutes ago
    I'm glad it failed to trademark. Autodesk is one of the worst corpo's around when it comes to being corpo. How un self-aware for them to make that 'street' joke. They were like a 100+ million company back then.
  • cubefox 3 hours ago
    Meanwhile, "cyberpunk" has been successfully trademarked in the US, even though it describes a literary genre. That's like someone trademarking "space opera", "romantasy", "film noir" etc.
  • jMyles 2 hours ago
    Whatever else is real or myth with regard to these trolly pranking trademark spats, I think it's pretty reasonable to say that the term "cyberspace" emerged amidst - or at least adjacent to - a lot of LSD and Grateful Dead tapes.

    https://w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/HTML/...

    • Eric_Gullichsen 1 hour ago
      Timothy Leary did say "The PC is the LSD of the 1990s" on the back cover of his 1994 book, Chaos & Cyber Culture (Ronin Publishing, ISBN 0-914171-77-7).
  • hilde574 1 hour ago
    [flagged]
  • Eric_Gullichsen 4 hours ago
    [dead]
  • zeristor 4 hours ago
    [flagged]