As much as people like to throw stones at Terry, TempleOS does some really interesting things. It really is impressive that he's built an entire operating system from the ground up from first principals. There are some novel concepts in there; I loved his integration of sprites into source code.
I don't think people (here at least) really throw stones very much, and those that do usually get downvoted or rebutted pretty mercilessly. Some past Terry Davis threads:
The majority of people really seem to respect his technical achievements, and "TempleOS does a really interesting thing ____" isn't an uncommon comment.
His video contrasting TempleOS with Linux is really interesting. It's unfortunate that many of the people who watched it didn't understand the points he was trying to make or just couldn't get past his inflammatory language. TempleOS seems to address many of the deficiencies of Linux for desktop usage.
The stones people throw are at a part of Terry that may be a side effect of the same thing that made him build his temple, but from what I've seen his digital work is universally praised in isolation.
Mental illness aside - he accomplished something that I can only dream of. I'm sure if I sat down, quit my job, and read hundreds of tutorials I could come out with some sort of OS. I'm not a fan of the whole religious aspect - but the core of the project is pretty amazing I think.
His illness is far beyond anything I've ever experienced. If anything, I believe that what Terry has accomplished is a powerful testament that people with serious mental illness are still capable of creating amazing things.
I knew someone else who made a jit C compiler similar to this, but for 68K (also where the entire environment is in a single memory map). Functions could be compiled when called. The advantage is that the compiler could treat arguments as constants for further optimization.
It's impressive that he made his own optimizing compiler, even if it is not C standard. From the video it has at least constant folding, dead code elimination and jump optimization. It's interesting that the intermediate code is in the form of a double-linked list for easy editing.
I would suggest to try to make a compiler which uses SSA- it's pretty simple and allows more optimizations, particularly CSE. I worked with Bob Morgan at one point, and I suggest his book on compilers as an accessible resource. He would like your jump optimization outer loop: repeat while we're still making progress.
I've often thought about this idea. It could be as simple as `#pragma jit` before a function call. If you're about to call a function that chews on a big dataset for several seconds, it's probably worth the effort. In particular I'm thinking of hot loops with an `if` statement or function pointer / virtual call.
I always find his videos fascinating but this is way over my head.
Can someone in the know please provide a bit of a breakdown of the design decisions he has taken and how they compare with other compilers?
Everyone here should download the ISO and give it a go in virtualbox. It's surprisingly painless and quick to boot, and has an interesting and helpful startup guide. Take the time to check it out, it is truly fascinating!
I have followed Terry's endeavors throughout the years.
1. Why do all the source and headers have a .Z at the end?
2. I truly wish there was a way to help Terry share his gift. What he is capable of is truly a huge, huge accomplishment, especially for a single person.
Terry, if you read this. Thank you. Watching your videos makes me get in gear and read more..
I see his work as a real testament to the power of the individual when given the ability to focus and freed from restriction to pursue their calling in life.
Not drawing any parallels here, but I am sure that there have been many 'Joan of Arc' and 'Moses' in history, and only a very tiny number of those received any recognition or praise. How many doubtlessly countless numbers were forgotten or plain ignored? Their lifes work and passions laid bare for all to see, only to be shuffled away when they weren't successful by others measurements.
Tl;dr I see Terry as a reminder to march to your own drummer and to support others to do the same; whether they win or lose.
It is possible to recognise the creativity his opportunity to focus on doing his own thing has allowed him to express without intending it to downplay the challenges of his mental illness.
My comment focuses on the positive of his work and not to enter the category of personal attacks; which there is plenty of room to do so. But this is not a forum for discussing medical or psychological issues is it? It is for technical discussions. So I discussed the related I observed.
My advice though to you directly though is there is more to life than casting judgements, and when it comes to personal desires I have a hard time telling someone they are wrong if they are not infringing on anyone else.
You might do better to keep a more open mind to what drives people yourself.
> the power of the individual when given the ability to focus and freed from restriction to pursue their calling in life.
Most people with severe mental illness do not describe it as something that has freed them, nor given them focus, to pursue the one thing they really want to pursue.
There's a bunch of positive stuff about severe and enduring mental illness; and we need to protect people so that they can live the way they want to live; and we need to be careful to avoid the abuses of treatment that happened in the past (and still happen today); but romanticising a severe and enduring mental illness is fucking annoying.
This isn't his calling, it's his delusion's calling. and he's not freed from restriction - that's a fucking idiotic thing to say about someone who lives in relative poverty with severely limited options about where he lives and who with.
The near complete lack of understanding of severe mental illness, coupled with glib feel good platitudes, do real harm to many people.
I don't see that as saying that Terry is free to pursue his project because of his schizophrenia. Rather, Terry happens to be free to put a lot of time into TempleOS and the results are pretty amazing. Terry is also schizophrenic, but this is not freeing.
I have found in my experience that the people using and applying the label 'mental illness' see it as some sort of barrier betwixt the person they are discussing and themselves. This is the 'normal' barrier. by relgating the person to this place (behind the wall as it were) a number of very large assumptions must be made, and my inclination is that some of these assumptions are pointless.
once upon a time, abstraction may have been viewed as a nasty 'mental illness'.
"Look at Grok. He so dumb. He tell me finger number could be more than hand plus hand. retard say dumbest things."
We call people who are socially inept mentally ill because they do not fit will into the structure of society, not because they are actually broken. There is a difference between Down's and Autism.
I won't claim TempleOS is useful, but as far as I know it's pretty interesting technically, especially as a one-man project. There's no shortage of personal side projects out there which are completely useless, but interesting to look at just the same. The only difference here is a much larger scope and a weirder motivation. I'm definitely not going to feel ashamed for being interested in the technical aspects of such a project, just because the author happens to be delusional.
In any case, either discuss the actual stuff at hand, or if you think it doesn't belong here then flag it and move on. Filling up the whole comments section with discussion of the guy's mental health, ground which has been so thoroughly trodden that it's in danger of breaking through to the magma, is just ridiculous.
It doesn't look like garbage code to me. And even if it were, a custom multitasking kernel, compiler, filesystem, and more written by a single guy is still technically interesting even if it's not well written.
On what basis do you claim sockpuppets? I don't believe it. Terry has a pretty distinctive writing style that I've never seen from any account besides his own.
Shadowbanning the guy and having very occasional discussions about his work which center almost entirely around his schizophrenia doesn't seem like "indulging" to me. It certainly gets much less indulgence than the usual march of "I built a PaaS using node.js.ruby and WebGL to create Uber for Dachsunds with only $20 million in VC funding" that's on the front page pretty much non-stop.
He's written an entire 64 bit operating system by himself. He is also mentally ill. Does the second fact make the first fact untrue, or not worth talking about?
The fact that it's garbage which is totally unusable makes it not worth talking about. Someone investing a lot of effort in something doesn't make it good or worthy of discussion. There's lots and lots of stuff out there that mentally ill people have spent an incredible amount of effort on. This just happens to be one that keeps getting submitted to HN and that the HN admins have stupidly chosen to indulge.
As you can probably guess, I strongly disagree with this decision. TempleOS articles have been appearing regularly on HN because the dude behind it has realized it's a safe haven for his nonsense. There is nothing to be learned from it, it's the ravings of someone with mental illness. Indulging him and giving him this "safe haven" where he gets the impression that professional programmers are treating his garbage seriously is doing no one any favors. Nor is the minority of developers on HN who actually do take it seriously doing anyone any favors.
It certainly isn't helping the quality of content on HN, if that's all you care about.
It pretty much is all I care about. And I respect that you disagree. Such moderation calls are far from obvious even to me, and must seem obviously wrong from many angles.
But you're in the minority in thinking that TempleOS doesn't belong on HN at all. Terry and his work are something that a lot of HN users care about, sympathize with, etc. No doubt some of the interest is just gawking and the pseudo-debates we invariably get about it are a scourge, but I don't think it would be fair to just ban the subject completely. Certainly many legit HN users would be upset if we did. So it's likely to remain one of those uncomfortable grey areas with no agreement and no clear solution.
Could you please stop calling this code "garbage"? Virtually everything else you have to say about this situation is colorable, but "garbage" is pure distilled meanness. I cringe at TempleOS threads too, but I'm discovering that comments like yours make me even more uncomfortable.
Of course, for lots of reasons. First, it's a flamewar topic that has been prosecuted ad nauseum on this site for many years, and the guidelines specifically ask you not to introduce those "unless you have something genuinely new to say about them" [1], which you didn't. Second, venting indignation is not what HN is for. That's noise, not signal, and the worst noise is noise that leads to more noise. Third, debating a human being's mental health in public, which some of you are all too eager to do, turns HN into a freak show that is a form of sickness in its own right. Let's call it social illness. Fourth, once you've seen all of this dozens of times it becomes bone-achingly tedious.
In short, nothing is less in the spirit of HN. I'm sure you didn't do any of the above intentionally, but the trouble with all such problems is that they're the sum of unintentional addends.
Well ok. I really did my best. Maybe you can work out how you'd like to note that this story is a direct link to a video of a guy who continually uses wildly racist language and then make that note the way of your choosing on such direct links to videos of such individuals? Maybe you'll get a different result.
Personally I find comments like yours far uglier than most of what Terry posts, because his posts tends to be incoherent and obviously disturbed rants that few people are likely to take seriously, and so their ability to hurt is likely quite limited. Particularly, of course, since on here you need "showdead" on to even see them.
Yours on the other hand is condemning behaviour that you yourself appear to accept to be the effects of mental illness and may not be deliberate. And you're doing it to a much larger audience than Terry's banned comments gets.
To me, your comment is a bit like standing up in a crowd, pointing at a mentally ill person and telling us his behaviour is utterly unacceptable before said person has even uttered a word.
How about warning your friend that this guy has mental illness so frequently says some truly horrendous things so don't let it take you off guard?
The gentleman has uttered plenty of words. The first time you take an interest in the eccentric TempleOS it's very confronting and there's no escaping it.
For my part I tend to be much more offended by comments that are deliberate and still manage to be vicious than I am about someone making rants that are easy to realise are not made with sound mind.
If what you had written was a brief warning about his rants, then that would have been fair enough. But what you wrote was not a warning.
That's a reasonable and nuanced criticism not of what I did but the subtleties of how I did it. You are entitled to it. Other than to suggest someone reading what I wrote would not be warned, I think that over reaches your point by a margin.
I am similarly entitled to note that you did not write such a warning in whatever style you advocate and neither did anyone else. I'm comfortable standing by my noting his behaviour is unacceptable, because it is.
Terry’s entire life and sense of reality are twisted in ways you probably can’t even imagine unless you’ve tripped before. You seem to lack the empathy to imagine what it’s like to live as a Schizophrenic. I just ignore the racist bullshit along with the religious nonsense just like I would from someone with turrets syndrome or dementia. By doing so, it frees me to admire the beauty of his mind and work. I’m sorry you can’t.
I have empathy for violent criminals with frontal cortex damage resulting in poor impulse control too, but I don't excuse the violence or say it's ok or pretend it didn't happen and doesn't exist. Do you see the distinction?
While I share your loathing of racial slurs in general, what do you think of someone with Tourette's Syndrome? They also are unable to control their ticks and outbursts, should they also be condemned for it? Because either way it's out of their control, and condemning them for it (especially publicly like you just did) only exacerbates the situation for them.
If someone were going to be hurt by the language, I would warn them before making introductions. I wouldn't want someone thinking I actually wanted them hurt for no good reason and agreed that they deserved to be hurt. At least I guess...
I probably wouldn't have someone with tourettes making welcoming speech to a group of people who were not aware and whom I really didn't know much about. It's all a bit hypothetical though.
"Among his faults the man uses a lot of racist slurs. I won't and don't excuse that. I don't care how eccentric, imbalanced or in need of better psychiatric care and drugs he is. I wish to point out that his behavior is totally and utterly unacceptable."
- "Among his faults..."
His "fault" is a mental disorder. You have a very 17th century approach to that.
- "I won't and don't excuse that."
Fine, that's your choice. But when you choose to attack someone over their mental state, you become the insensitive, intolerant jerk in the room. Again, you have a choice whether to attack someone over their mental state; your victim didn't choose to be disabled.
- "I don't care how eccentric, imbalanced or in need of better psychiatric care and drugs he is."
I think you make it abundantly clear that you don't care. Again, that's your choice, but it shows exactly what kind of person you are. Would you also not care if it's a loved one who is afflicted with a disorder? Based on what you've said so far, I have to wonder.
- "I wish to point out that his behavior is totally and utterly unacceptable."
Behavior that, again, is out of his control. You are blaming a patient for being sick. That is reprehensible. Yes, he needs help, but what you are doing is the opposite of help, especially since you know for a fact he reads this forum (and in fact I think that is your true motivation for attacking him here).
I don't accept your interpretation of my words. I acknowledged the possibility of mental illness being a reason for his racism. I don't know it as a definite fact, I doubt psychology is at the state where anyone could.
I've said elsewhere in this thread that (as Robert Sapolsky notes) those with frontal cortex damage to their brains sometimes commit heinous violent crime. That brain damage might be a reason, but doesn't make it ok for them to commit violent crime. It may be completely beyond their control.
His behaviour is unacceptable. I do not accept racist abuse as being acceptable behaviour. Do you?
Why is accurately representing Terry so offensive to you?
Why is political correctness so important to you?
1. Because hating entire races of people is a bad thing and it's something we ought to consider along with his achievements.
2. Some people would rather not hear/read a bunch of racial slurs so it can be helpful to give others a heads-up if they're thinking about checking out this guy's videos, so they can make their own call.
3. In some ways his unique mindstate is relevant to his work; TempleOS is a monolithic work, created in isolation. His mental illness renders him unwilling/unable to work with others, perhaps contributes to his bizarre racial outbursts, and yet also in many ways makes him able to create TempleOS - something many of us find fascinating.
Please note that nobody here is advocating that Terry shouldn't be allowed to have his say or that threads about TempleOS don't belong on HN.
Personally I really enjoy them and I find TempleOS fascinating.
But do you find racial slurs acceptable when rappers use them, or when they're used in Hollywood movies, or books like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? I guess I don't understand why people selectively find it so offensive.
I'm not sure how I could have been any more explicit there. I explicitly said I enjoy reading news about TempleOS.
So clearly I accept them even though I don't like his racial epithets one bit. They're just one (somewhat unavoidable) facet of the whole TempleOS phenomenon.
I guess I don't understand why people selectively find it so offensive.
There's a big difference between fictional characters in movies and Huckleberry Finn (a book I love!) using slurs and a guy like Terry using slurs in earnest in a non-fiction setting.
Huckleberry Finn is a create example, actually. Huck uses the n-word freely, but he is an unreliable narrator, and Mark Twain's stories about Huck often parody the shitty racial attitudes of many white Americans at that time.
You did not address the question as it pertains to hip-hop. I'll make it even larger: are you ok with members of the black community (around your area, i know it is not some monolithic club) using the terms, "nigger" and "bitch" constantly? I just moved to North NJ and i must say i am not OK with it. But if i bring it up i am some kind of 'bigot' that just doesn't understand 'culture'.
I mean, I totally understand where you're going with this: The world is so unfair to white people. "Straight Outta Compton" is a big box office hit, but Terry's not allowed to have racist diatribes whenever he feels like it, and it's a double standard because they're both using the n-word. Why can black people call each other that as a term of affection, but it's not okay for white people to use the same word as a slur?
Don't worry, you're like the 10 millionth person to go down that line of reasoning and I don't agree with it (bonus points for being even more confusing by throwing sexism into the mix) but I'm also not going to change your mind so it's cool, whatever.
wow. at no point was i advocating its use as a pejorative or a term of endearment. you may not be aware, but black folks use both as both. addressing the term 'bitch' should not be that confusing, unless of course you espouse the ultra progressive ideology of always being cognizant of differences (so maximum sensitivity is attained) whilst always being completely blind to difference (so maximum non bias is attained) Then i could so how having to think about use case could get tricky.
As much as it might please you to be otherwise, that was not my line of reasoning. i asked if you decry racism against whites (or asians, or latinos, or any subgroup) the same, or to the same level that you decry racism against blacks. Your tirade is answer enough.
Satire does not typically switch between parody and self righteous condemnation, but maybe your just breaking new ground in the virgin fields of online humor.
No it is not. My taking exception to constant use of the word "nigger" as a deliberate form of abuse and noting it is what it is. There will be some who won't know it and will dig into it and wonder why it escaped without so much as a mention. They might actually be hurt by it. I've said why I take exception, making people feel unwelcome who I think should be made to feel welcome.
I've said maybe he doesn't mean it because he's in need of psychological help, perhaps help of a kind that it wholly unavailable at this point in history. This is a tragedy but it doesn't make it acceptable.
Political correctness is something else entirely. Political correctness is it being unacceptable to have dissenting views from the powerful. The phrase comes from, I believe, the China of the 1970s. People who were deemed politically incorrect were treated very badly indeed by a pretty hideous and oppressive regime. It's something quite different from the right to claim my kind are superior to yours while being free of criticism for saying so. It's something different to saying the phrase 'political correctness' as an excuse to be abusive.
I do not object to this man's dissenting political views. He is unwell. He is abusive of people I would wish to make welcome. Look around at the demographic again at any conference, any place of work in this industry. I don't buy arguments that skin melanin or estrogen make for poor engineers, I know some do.
Given I'm not buying that, pointing out abusive behaviour and noting that is pretty awful doesn't seem unreasonable or oppressive of legitimate alternate points of view to me. Does it really to you? I doubt strongly there is any abuse I could direct at you that would make you doubt yourself. Would it were so for those smarter but less confident that you or me.
I am not saying suppress the story, that this story should not be here, just that we shouldn't pretend that awfulness isn't there.
If on the other hand you find racism, of the most gross kind, acceptable as long as it's not directed at a specific person on HN you and I diverge views quite strongly at that point.
I don't recall Terry ever being racist. He uses nigger a lot, but it doesn't seem directed at black people. It's used as a generalized insult. Just as someone describing poor tech as "lame" isn't against cripples. So while I hear that people find the very syllables upsetting, there seems to be no racism actually here. I'd hope people on HN (and people we want on HN) would be capable of understanding this.
(And anyways, Terry's accounts all get hellbanned here, so it's just links and discussion of his cool work. Except for these low-signal threads that will hopefully be detached as off topic.)
>might actually be hurt
>I think should be made to feel welcome
>He is unwell
>he is abusive
>look at the demographics [presumably of the tech industry]
>abusive behavior
>doesn't seem unreasonable or oppressive to me
>I am not saying suppress the story, that this story should not be here, just that we shouldn't pretend that awfulness isn't there.
How i wish the immediately above statement were applied liberally to the US culture, as opposed to just EuroAmericans and just Males.
All the other quotes are the big markers of a highly subjective point of view being flogged as the only objective point of view. But that's just, like, my opinion man.
