Whenever I watch one of Terry's videos, I get highly motivated to program. Not read a blog post comparing frameworks, or a debate about some programming idiom, or even designing some larger project. But literally type stuff into a computer and make things appear on the screen. It is remarkable how watching his TempleOS videos uncovers the fascination I had of computers from my youth, 30 years ago.
Well well now i am curious. That was what drew me towards Linux back in the day as i felt Windows was getting more and more convoluted and opaque. And these days the feeling is rising in me again as i watch what is being introduced above the kernel on almost a daily basis.
One should probably add a trigger warning. He is schizophrenic and not quite himself at times, especially in the comments. Not to take away from his technical feats.
I think it's worth being specific here -- he uses the word "nigger" frequently and regularly makes other nasty comments about black people and other minorities.
When I've seen his website in the past, the crazy religious stuff has always been there, which I can look past, but now it seems like the crazy racist stuff is way way more prominent, which I just cannot.
Completely agreed. I understand that he's mentally ill, and I wish him all the best in that regard. But I can't help but see him as just another racist hick. Super cool project he has, but I want nothing to do with him or anything he works on.
He is a racist hick, who happens to be ill. If that's "another" thing, then so be it. Don't really care which came first. I will not let racists duck undercover of his illness. I stop short of being genuinely upset at him, but hate speech is hate speech. Since he has a large-ish audience, his ideas are becoming part of culture. Agree with him or defend him or apologize for his racism all you wish -- you are kinda/sorta part of the problem.
What an absolutely absurd opinion. I really don't think you appreciate the manifestation of schizophrenia. Would you feel the same about someone suffering from Tourette's for swearing in front of a child?
The guy believes lots of crazy things: men in suits are after him, aliens put things in his body, that he has conversations with god about music, etc. He translates random number generators into ASCII attempting to divine messages from god. He writes long-winded nonsensical rants jumping from detailed technical dissertations to rambling about old war movies. Schizophrenia literally means "split mind" -- ideas, concepts, hallucinations attack his brain and he has no basis for dispelling which are grounded in reality and which are not. It's the biological equivalent of radio interference or a loose wire.
A large chunk of the things he writes are unintelligible. Yes, people focus on his work, because it's pretty amazing that somebody suffering so profoundly from an illness can do such interesting (and esoteric) work. The fact that a subset of his schizophrenic attacks include racist language is something I feel sad, not angry about.
Yeah, the sadness really shows. I wish I could share your clinical detachment. I guess I'm too PC (as someone else implied) or ignorant of mental illness (as you implied). Let's agree to disagree about our opinion of Owens. He's a deranged and schizophrenic genius, I get it. We can agree that he's brilliant and is producing something really cool.
I'm not bothered by his racism -- it's too common for me to be really upset by it. What bothers me is how you and others are so quick to point out how cool TempleOS is, and how smart he is, and how his hate speech is OK because he's ill. You've defended him more than you've defended my disapproval of what he says, which is telling. Enjoy his streams, hell -- make TempleOS your default OS and mail all of your friends/family a copy of it.
Just consider that white males happen to make up the vast majority of his audience. Blacks and whoever else he hates will have a harder time than you do sympathizing with his hateful speech, schizophrenic or not. Again, Hitler was a schizophrenic but that doesn't make his hateful rhetoric OK does it? Oh wait, Mein Kampf was recently a bestseller in Germany and we have a former Breitbart editor in the White House. Touché.
"You've defended him more than you've defended my disapproval of what he says, which is telling."
It's very telling. When someone does something out of mental illness, there is no reasoning them to change their course. When someone does it out of bigotry, there is.
Wait, who is Owens? Terry Davis is the creator of TempleOS. Please read some of the writing on http://templeos.org and tell me that's anything comparable to Mean Kampf. He's not writing political rhetoric, it's quite literally the ramblings of a mentally ill person.
Calling him a "racist hick" makes several claims. One is that he is a racist. Another is that he is a poorly-educated rural dweller. These are frequently paired because some people think that rural dwellers or the poorly educated or Southerners or whatever are all racist (sure, there's a correlation).
Being schizophrenic is a serious problem, and his technical achievements in the face of them are notable. But it's not a free pass for everything. We can distinguish, for example, between people with mental health problems who are danger to themself and others and those who are not.
It's one thing entirely to rail about aliens, because aliens aren't real. It's another use racial invective and epithets against racial and cultural minorities, because Jews and black people are absolutely real.
If you are a mental outlier, the village can agree on torching the next time, somebody must be put on a stake- it might be a good survival strategy, to vent the anger towards a minorities group that is not you. In particular, if you are all ready paranoid anyway, meaning, you basically have a conspiracy theory for anyone you meet.
That was a very vague and meandering allegory, but I think I hear what you're saying. I'm not gonna respond to it, but if you wish to call me a paranoid witch-hunter please just go ahead and do so next time.
Put yourself in the shoes of a jew or black person and watch some of his streams. Then revisit the comments for this story and how they all gush over his unique cool project and wave away his vehement racism as just an unfortunate detail.
Go a little bit further from the curated and (somewhat) tolerant atmosphere of HN, and you'll see Owens' hateful speech being parroted, and being used to legitimatize the promulgation of the already massive undercurrent of racism that lurks in almost every corner of Internet culture.
I hate to confirm Godwin's law, but -- Hitler was also schizophrenic. Seeing an obviously ill person suffer from disease is sad, but it's even sadder to see the social disease of racism so ubiquitous and widely tolerated.
And just in case you really do think I'm "looking for" examples of racism --just last night I joined an IRC channel about my city (DC) to meet people. I had to leave because I heard "nigger" and "brown people get out" one too many times for comfort.
At first i thought that was a bit of an exaggeration, but after listening to him talk in his "What God Wants in Music" video, that is actually a reasonable request to make. He very casually and without warning declares things that might easily make traumatized people relive things.
Clicked a recent video and he rants about random numbers, the lottery and the "whitest of the white scientists of the National Institute of Standards" with a few colorful "monkey niggers" thrown in. ..... uh Okay? Is that guy crazy? In the comments people say he has a 90 day youtube ban.
Yes he is. TempleOs is his literal third temple of god. He is a very skilled guy though. Own operating system, own programming language, own terminal, made first person shooter and flight simulator from scratch.
Just to show you what a skilled guy in different mindset can do.
Cool! This project started out as a way to learn Gr library routines in HolyC, and kind of Frankensteined its way into a game engine. In the coming weeks I'll be doing lots of refactoring to bring the code in line with proper TOS guidelines naming conventions.
(Author here: I cross-posted this comment from a reddit thread, hope it isn't against the rules..)
Can you comment on what the system's like to write for? i.e. development workflow, good/bad points about the language, things you thought were cool, things you thought weren't cool, that sort of thing?
I was kind of interested in writing something for the temple (well, okay, I spent a bored afternoon contemplating giving it a go and half heartedly booting vms and reading code ....)
While I can't answer for the OP, my motivation was specifically that this is kind of an alien environment and the challenge involved in even getting to hello world would definately have seen me walk away at the end the better for the exp, even if walking away from those hours without having gained some marketable understanding of framework foo or language bar.
In the end I didn't do that because the code is insanely complicated (all single letter vars) and my downtime is too precious for such masochism currently; I don't think it's too much of a strech to understand why others might be interested though.
I'm glad to live in a world where such an outstanding personal achievement like Terry's OS really is can exist, and that there are people out there prodding at it.
Isn't it cool that we don't always do things for the money?
I dearly hope that none of the recent templeos projects are attempts to antagonize Terry though. He is a profoundly accomplished software engineer and deserves nothing but respect for his technical achievements from us all alongside understanding of the rest of the package.
TempleOS (formerly J Operating System,[1] SparrowOS and LoseThos)[2] is a biblical themed lightweight operating system created over the span of a decade by the American programmer Terry A. Davis. The software is a x86-64 bit, multi-tasking, multi-cored, public domain, open source, ring-0-only, single address space, non-networked, PC operating system for recreational programming.[3] The operating system was designed to be the Third Temple according to Davis and uses an interface similar to a mixture of DOS and Turbo C. Davis describes the operating system as a modern x86-64 Commodore 64 with C in place of BASIC.
It's interesting and fun that Terry's odd but impressive project is getting a little cult traction. This is kind of neat, though the physics and animations could use some work.
Can someone explain the TempleOS author's sprite and graphics interface? From one of his videos it appears that:
1. Once a sprite set has been defined the user can manually (programmatically?) rasterize it
2. User can set affine transforms
3. It seems like the boundary between 2d and 3d API is small, or easily traversable, or non-existent. In one of his 2d examples it appears he changes a parameter to get animation in the z-axis.
4. Sprites are somehow part of the language (or at least seem to be integrated deeply into it).
To me it looks a bit like editing an SVG, automatically converting it to HTML5 canvas, then switching to WebGL, seamlessly.
> Sometimes it is nice to browse HN with 'showdead' enabled, because you can see Terry commenting on these threads. (his comment is sibling to mine)
Did he give a relevant technical response to my technical questions? If so, are you or someone else willing/able to repost that here?
I really don't want to dig into HN caves and learn about its subculture. I just want to discuss a technical topic that I find interesting (and apparently others do, too, if those little numbers next to the post mean anything).
Did I understand correctly that HolyC is a C like dynamic Language with AOT compilation and dynamic binding?
Does this mean that functions can be redefined in the REPL while the code is running?
Looks like a pretty cool language!
So, they put a game I used to love and hate on TempleOS. Guess I finally got a reason to visit the Temple. Although that comment about the HolyC going into the shell, compiled, and running was pretty cool.
Did you pay attention to what TempleOS is for? Do you know what it was like to program for the C64? It is ring 0 only on purpose! That's the whole point!
The idea that someone would go into a thread about TempleOS, trash TempleOS for one of its central and distinguishing features, and then use the thread as an opportunity to promote some new OS written in Rust is boggling my mind.
Terry has stated that, apart from serving God, the goal of TempleOS is to encourage C64-like hobbyist experimentation. He seems quite happy with outsiders writing software for his system, and has endorsed this MegaMan game on the TempleOS software page:
640x480 isn't a crazy convention at all when you understand what is required to interface with the display hardware and you remember the goals of TempleOS. He wanted to recapture transparency of the C64 system in a 64-bit system. It's pretty clear Terry didn't want to spend all his time writing vendor-specific device drivers and painful workaround cruft.
This also applies to things like the RedSea filesystem and the way memory is used.
It's his OS - but it would've been nice for games and other things if he had added Mode 13h to the mix - at least fullscreen only - for games mainly. That or ModeX - just something with 256 colors. Heck - he could have added some of the more common VESA modes for that matter.
I was looking thru the source to find the graphics init routines, and I am pretty sure I found it (well - once - probably couldn't locate quickly again) - the thing is such a convoluted mess, and I am not sure how much of that is due to it being an OS and how much of it is due to his style and illness?
At any rate, I think it would be possible to hack this stuff in place (mainly mode 13h - as it's the simplest, and doesn't require much to code for). I think it also needs a way to use the parallel port - mainly for a simple parallel port sound card, if nothing else. Interestingly, if you dig into the various source code examples and such, you'll find a bit about a "HD Audio" system (which looks like a soundblaster interface, if I remember my DOS hacking days) as well as a couple of bits of code for manipulating USB devices (he already supports keyboard and mouse in legacy mode, but nothing else).
Honestly - in spite of his various racist rants and views - this code is begging to be cleaned up and expanded just a bit (it's public domain - so there's nothing he could do or say about it). Overall, it is fairly accessible - just a few other tweaks could make it perfect, IMHO.
Yes, I remember reading that article and thinking how ridiculously complex an OS is. I can't imagine being confident enough to even contemplate starting to write one.
The subculture of OS makers is far smaller than the subculture of esoteric programming language enthusiasts. Its inevitable if templeos works the esolang people will descend upon it. There's probably a hundred, maybe a thousand Intercal programmers for every templeos enthusiast and they all love a new challenge.
Personally I've been thinking of doing make-a-lisp in templeos. There's no point in doing make-a-lisp in qbasic or gnu awk or makefiles because its already been done. But make-a-lisp on templeos is, I believe, completely uncharted ground ... so in my infinite spare time ...
Nope, it's standard, Terry Davis is the author and he's a very religious schizophrenic. He's a very smart guy, but he got banned many times on HN and Reddit for going off about "India niggers" and spamming blocks of random words.
Actually all the times I've read him use the word "niggers" (and it is an offensive word, I won't dispute that) he actually means something different than you would expect.
I can tell you why I'm inclined to downvote this comment, though I don't know if it's the safe reasons others have. Note that I can only see the question, not whatever you removed.
Those outbursts are bordering on full schizophasia, they are symptoms of his mental illness. He is certainly an interesting person, and it's perfectly natural to be curious about his condition. But you're asking for a video depicting him suffering some of the most severe effects of his mental illness, which borders on voyeuristic. Being interested in him is fine, being interested in schizophrenia is fine, but that curiosity has to be balanced with some degree of constraint and respect for a person who is suffering from a debilitating condition.
Again, nothing wrong with curiosity, and I don't doubt that you meant no harm in asking. But it's important that we don't let discussions about Terry devolve into some sort of carnival freak show, and your question stepped too close to that line.
I really don't understand this community sometimes. If you are going to downvote a comment, why not explain why? Is there a perceived laziness? Or have I missed something???
That is largely interpreted as 'mostly refrain from talking about voting'. Keep in mind, downvoting here happens for many different reasons, it's not always negative and it is best not to take it personally or make assumptions about why it's happening. You could think of it as symmetric to upvoting & ask yourself whether you want an explanation for every upvote... maybe not? The goal is to have a high signal to noise ratio, and discussion of votes is mostly noise and almost always tangential to the article/thread.
I also didn't see the parent comment, but Terry & TempleOS have a long and complicated history here, so it might be a good idea to reserve judgement.
Here's the thing: Sometimes there are people who are exceptionally talented in a given field, yet suffer from a serious illness or disability. The symptoms can be apparent in their physique (such as Stephen Hawking), or in their mind (such as Terry Davis). I can understand why people who do not have direct experience with mental illness might have trouble separating the symptoms from the person, but I would encourage those who criticise Terry for the highly unfortunate way his illness manifests itself to try to find compassion for the man, not ridicule.
I'm willing to bet pretty good money that less than 1% of people on HN, and the software development industry in general, could achieve the technical feats on the level of what Terry has done. In fact it's probably considerably fewer than that. Here's a guy who's built an entire platform from scratch, including kernel, development tools, user interface, and applications. While there are obvious flaws (such as the visual appearance and lack of memory protection), some of the other design decisions like presentation of documentation and the way different parts of the system integrate with each other put mainstream operating systems to shame.
We should be emphasising Terry's technical work, not the symptoms of his debilitating illness.
What you quoted is a textbook example of "word salad," a symptom of schizophrenia. Look at it, it's not even close to coherent. Racist delusions are not exactly unheard of in paranoid schizophrenia. Unless we have information about what Terry was like before he developed schizophrenia, it's impossible to tell if this apparent racism is him or the disease. Honestly, I'm inclined to think it's the disease. I've seen him write coherent things and I've seen him write incoherent things, but I haven't seen any instance of him talking coherently in a racist manner.
What know I cannot do is construct an coherent or even intelligible argument from the quoted paragraph. I can extract meanings from some of the sentences; but I also can see you have not even bothered to explain your objections to them.
More importantly, it seems you don't even care about coherency. It looks like that to you, if something "feels bad" then it is bad.
> More importantly, it seems you don't even care about coherency. It looks like that to you, if something "feels bad" then it is bad.
I don't understand where this is coming from. Please explain what you mean, and why you think that.
> but I also can see you have not even bothered to explain your objections to them.
My objection was that the parent post claimed the quote was "word salad" and I claim it is not, because the quote obviously has a message and it is not difficult to figure out what it is.
If you meant that I didn't bother explaining the message, well then here is how I interpret the quote:
>Reputation is worth more than gold. Niggers have a reputation -- no fathers.
He's talking about stereotypes here, and how there is a stereotype that many black men abandon their children/family.
> Irish have a reputation. Germans have a reputation.
Again referencing stereotypes.
> Attacker has the advantage.
Guy who hits first usually wins the fight.
> Jews have a reputation. God said the French once stood for character. (Code of Chivalry) Ironic.
Again, stereotypes. He is obviously referencing WW2 in this context and talking about how the French were easily defeated by the Germans.
> I guess Jews did, too. Woah! God is boss. Too bad the Jews were cowards and didn't assassinate NAZI's.
I'm guessing here he is saying the Jews were God's chosen people, but they didn't live up to that an let the Germans almost destroy them.
So yeah, most people don't talk like this guy in normal conversation, but it is pretty clear to me that he is talking about stereotypes and sticking up for yourself. I might not get the finer details he is trying to communicate, but even so it is far from unintelligible.
You offer interpretations of several sentences. These interpretations are guesswork. Even if we take your interpretations as perfectly correct, they don't knit together into any coherent message.
The man is schizophrenic. You are holding him to account for a kind of performance that he is biologically not equipped to provide. He isn't harming anyone and as far as anyone can interpret what he says, many times he uses words like "nigger" he is complaining about things like how we have made computing overcomplicated. I think it's worth it to cut the guy a break.
That doesn't mean we accept racism in general, it means we don't have to pick on people who can't help the way they express themselves. Do we pick on people with Tourette's for saying bad words?
Yes, of course I can't (nor anyone else) know for certain exactly what someone else means when they communicate.
> Even if we take your interpretations as perfectly correct, they don't knit together into any coherent message.
Well I guess we differ on this point and that's okay. The overall message I got from that quote was that every group has a stereotype, and one's actions affect the stereotype of your race. And so you should stick up for yourself.
That makes sense to me.
For the record, I am not judging the guy, and I don't care if what he says offends people. I know he has mental health issues, and that it affects the things he thinks/says.
I was just saying that the quote was not "word salad", according to the definition I provided. If no one else can see the gist of what he is saying then fine. I guess we all see patterns differently.
Terry's "schizophrenia" just means he perceives reality differently than you do. The "word salad" is actually not random nonsense. Your mind is perfectly trained to value political correctness and money, and so you find his thoughts nonsensical or abhorrent. Terry's mind has developed to value art and speaking the truth as he perceives it without any social filter. What you are seeing is a true artist with a perception of reality so different from your own that you don't comprehend it as rational. If you read it carefully, you'll realize everything he says is perfectly rational, he knows perfectly well what he's saying, and racist or not, from a certain perspective there is reason to it.
Imagine you are talking to someone who has been living in the wilderness for a long time, who has stumbled back into civilization and has gained a reputation for being a crazy person, and they point at a cave and say "bear hole makes the rain go away!" and becomes very frustrated that nobody bothers to try and understand them (and instead just repeats the popular opinion about how they are crazy). Are they actually speaking nonsense? I think that's what [some] schizophrenia actually is.
The Hacker News community deals with those behaviors the same way it deals with them when exhibited by other members of the community. Likewise, Davis' work is recognized as intellectually interesting just like other intellectually interesting work.
I've always felt sad that Terry A. Davis doesn't seem to have a very strong support system (family, friends, children, etc.). There are other brilliant people that have been diagnosed with similar illnesses (Daniel Johnston[0] comes to mind) that were able to retain their public dignity while still doing fantastic work.
That's not right. Dignity is "the state or quality of being worthy of honor or respect". Someone has (or doesn't have) dignity irrespective of how they are treated.
I think it's trivially obvious that some people do not deserve to be treated with dignity (e.g. child molesters, mass murderers, etc.). The fact that you treat them with dignity in spite of that is obviously virtuous, but they don't deserve it. As opposed to people that do: Gandhi, Jesus, MLK, and so on.
> it's trivially obvious that some people do not deserve to be treated with dignity
I don't agree, and I know many people who also would disagree. Another point of view is that perhaps some people don't deserve dignity, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to know which ones and only an omniscient supernatural being would know enough to make that judgment.
For me, this is the most memorable statement that concept; probably not the best, but it's where I first grasped it:[0]
Frodo: It's a pity Bilbo didn't kill him when he had the chance.
Gandalf: Pity? It was pity that stayed Bilbo's hand. Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends.
Also, I don't know of anyone who should throw stones. I hope I'm treated with dignity when I make mistakes; certainly nothing is gained when I'm not.
[0] There are at least a couple variations I found in a quick search; don't take this one as authoritative.
Look here's the deal with him. The man is unwell. What do you have to gain from digging down rabbit holes like this?
In regards to Terry I have taken a "if you don't have anything nice to say don't say anything" policy. Every once in a while, if you like his work send him a note telling him so. Don't endeavor to increase his suffering. The same fate may await any of us.
I don't understand why anyone would do these things.
Terry wrote an entire OS+Bootloader, dozens of remarkable apps for it, the toolchain for the custom programming language it's written in (which he also created) by himself.
The scale of that achievement boggles my mind. There's no -lreadline anywhere there.. No curses.. No gcc. No copy/pasting phkmalloc and so on.
Absolutely nothing that he didn't write himself.
I'm stunned by his achievement.
And yet we're googling for videos where he's manic for laughs?
Have some fucking respect.
If you can't do that then have the manners to keep silent.
This person achieved more than any developer I'm aware of and none of us are in position to mock him.
You can't just blame it all on the sickness. He's apparently an extreme racist, crazy or not. The way you put it sounds like he doesn't even exist and is all just the sickness.
Having read a lot of what he's said, he uses words and phrases in an idiosyncratic way that isn't the same as they would be used by, say, a politician. He may or may not be racist, but he's schizophrenic so we should probably chill out on him and go police someone who isn't schizophrenic instead.
Good job of convincing or educating me with that strong argument. How about you tell me how it works instead? Right now you're making it sound like a schizophrenic can do whatever they want, whenever they want because they are victims. Even if it's outside an episode.
I'm not someone who takes the mental illness excuse lightly, but I have from time to time had the privilege of catching Terry in a more lucid state and let me assure you the man you understand him to be is not who he is.
Would you accuse a person with tourette's syndrome of racism due to their outbursts? This disease is far more pervasive and systemic than that.
Vincent van Gogh was similarly mentally ill as a society we look past the things he could not control and instead focus on what he has created. I suggest the same course of action here as I believe the situations are uncannily similar. This is all I will say on the matter.
