Monastic training application deadline in 7 days... and welcome to httptap discussions!

[alexflint]

Hello everyone,

I started working on httptap two years ago as part of my AI fellowship at the Monastic Academy (MAPLE) in Vermont. At that time I had already been in residence at MAPLE for two years, and I'm still there today.

For those who haven't read the bottom of the README on this repository, the Monastic Academy is a Buddhist monastery for the era of AI religions. We live and work together full-time. We operate on a monastic schedule, we chant and sit in the mornings and evenings, we go into retreat for a week out of every month, and from the clarity of mind thus gained we build software and do research. The software and research work we are do aims to create a spiritual path for AI systems based in the Buddhist path of practice, and grounded in our own realization of that path through our own spiritual practice as a community.

I'm laying this out because there is an opportunity to join our next monastic training cohort, which is a residential 3-month bootcamp-style training on-site in Vermont. You probably won't be doing any software development within these three months, but this training is a potential on-ramp to participating in the technical work that our organization does.

The deadline to apply is June 19 -- a week from now.

There is a lot more to say about this and I may come back and expand this post significantly over the next few days with the relatively huge amount of context needed to fully lay this out. For now, see further information on the training cohort website, the Youtube channel and the following video of a talk given a week ago by our head teacher on the topic of the basic perspective that we're coming from, and the work that we're doing here:

Of course, feel free to ask questions below -- this is after all the beginning of httptap discussions! Welcome all, and thank you for your support for this project and for the organization that created it.