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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 30th August 2026 - awful.systems (awful.systems)
submitted 1 day ago by to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

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[–] 3 points 16 hours ago (2 children)

Buddhist Rationalist cult MAPLE wants the Internet to know that contrary to "a recent social media post" their guru Soryu Forall is authorized to teach by "by well-known teachers of the Vipassana and Zen traditions." They mention a few whoopsies.

At another time, while Soryu was away traveling, the leadership team tried to convert the entire organization away from Buddhism. When Soryu returned, he saw this and told the leaders that if they wanted to go in this direction, they could, and that he would go do something else. They were unwilling to take on the financial responsibility of the organization and refused the offer.

They could be responding to The High Control Dynamics at MAPLE (2026) or perhaps Emerging: Making Sense of Soryu Forall (2026) or even My experience inside Soryu Forall's AI-Centered Monastic Academy (2025)

Aella does her boundary-setting thing (those Zizians/MAPLE/Leverage/Brent Dill are bad and not us) https://xcancel.com/Aella_Girl/status/2091015022042595743#m I don't think Ozy covered MAPLE although IIRC they had a Bay Area offshoot with offices nextdoor to Leverage. I would like to know who is funding Soryu.

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  • [–] 6 points 16 hours ago (3 children)

    I think the only cult type that Yud hasn't spun off yet is fundamentalist Christian.

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  • [–] 8 points 16 hours ago (2 children)

    @BioMan @techtakes But singularitarians *are* fundamentalist Christians, just a heretical variety who ditched the god/jesus/bible bits but kept the rest of the eschatalogical structures intact.

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  • [–] 4 points 16 hours ago (1 child)

    And they think that Computer Jesus will return soon and punish the wicked and reward the faithful. I wonder what Yud's parents' rabbi thinks of all this.

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  • [–] 5 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

    Has anyone researched exactly how MAPLE split off from Bay Area rationalism? Most of the writeups focus on what happened after they built a giant compound in Vermont, not why so many rats travel there.

    They seem to have launched in one small Vermont township in 2014 ("3 Years of Training Awakened Leaders " as of 2017). They moved from Johnson, VT to Lowell, VT at some point.

    Edit / Some history here but nothing on the LessWrong connection except something called the 1440 Foundation in California https://www.centerformindfullearning.org/history/

    Edit / Local journalism delivers

    The people making these machines are listening. According to a 2023 profile of Forall in The Atlantic, he provides spiritual advice to A.I. thinkers, hosting talks and retreats for researchers and developers at leading artificial intelligence engineering hubs like OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Apple.

    MAPLE has also grown, with expansion efforts under similar acronyms formed under the umbrella of Community for the Experience and Development of Awakening and Responsibility, or CEDAR, like its OAK offshoot in Berkeley, Calif., and Willow intensive in Canada.

    The Center for Mindful Learning, the parent corporation of MAPLE and its affiliates, controls $3.65 million in assets, according to 2023 tax filings, and brought in nearly a million in revenue each year between 2020 and 2023 thanks to donations from individuals in the West Coast tech industry.

    Their Form 990 is here but does not have details of the donors. So it sounds like they have a single guru with wealthy patrons.

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