We've discussed before the influence of David Chapman and his Tibetan Buddhism among TPOT, but it's worth also noting the fairly big notoriety and footprint that San Francisco Zen Center has in the Bay Area and northern/central California more broadly. Anyone who ends up in the Bay and goes looking for "alternative" spirituality with a relatively rigorous grounding is likely to encounter some aspect of SFZC or its outreach pretty quickly. To say nothing of enduring idol Steve Jobs' association with the practice. It might seem surprising from the outside, but given the facts on the ground, I'm not surprised that dashes of Buddhism got roped into the techbro stew.

Note, of course, that Chapman's Tibetan lineage is something notably different from SFZC's lineage, and that the parent institutions can't be held totally liable for misinterpretations by lay practitioners and dilettantes. (Myself being one of the dilettantes!)

Directly comparing Scientology-speak to the beliefs and practices of the rationalists and their offshoots seems like it should be a ground-floor understanding of the whole mess, but perhaps that sort of blunt simplicity is what some folks on the margins need to avoid being sucked all the way in.

Yah and sign up for their newsletter too

high end medical equipment like it was another AI powered furby knock-off

Bbbbbut making high-end medical equipment profit margins on cheap Furby knockoffs is the new Silicon Valley ideal!

A step up from last week's uncritical fluffing of Aella, and the hard target on Pinker is nice, but still kinda highlights how the publication grows out of semi-parasocial social media crushes and grievances. I'll take it, but they've still got a ways to go to convince me that they're not gonna turn out to be Neo-The Atlantic 2029

Props to Lemmy for doing... something... with the katakana URL. Was still able to follow the link on Safari.

Even as someone herding along a few perpetually-in-progress Gentoo setups, piping curl into sh to install random stuff staggers me. I don't see how this can be taken seriously; the software and the surrounding hype complex come off as a gimmick to catfish impressionable high-schoolers who don't know any better. After reading this, I can only imagine that Omarchy is most frequently distributed out of a shoddy panel van parked at a judicially-mandated distance outside of school zones. "Hey kid, want to try some Linux?"

Nitpicking, but at what point do we start calling it race pseudoscience? Letting the creeps have even a tiny bit of legitimacy is too much, especially as mainstream outfits are working overtime to legitimize them.

On the other hand, bombing foreign data centers, likely located in densely populated urban areas, would be justified and morally upstanding if it seems like they might be incarnating the imaginary computer god! I'm glad we have such a nuanced thinker guiding our modern morality.

"Leaking rationalist-evidence-bits" is an unexpectedly top-tier euphemism for the aftermath of digesting Wendy's chili

How interesting, a volcel who only thinks he’s an incel. Many such cases

data moat

The Hollywood bankruptcy auctions in a few years are gonna be lit