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On Terry A. Davis

schizophrenic.io

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Re: On Terry A. Davis

#81

Post by skissane »

whstl wrote: post #80
AlecSchueler wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure none of my colleagues have heard of the James Webb Space Telescope either but I'd still say it's a notable thing. You're conflating mainstream fame with notability. Honestly I doubt many of my colleagues are familiar with Linux either (I work in a supermarket).

What GP says is unfortunately true, though. From talking with other people online, most people and articles fetishize the disease and the posts with racist words, and never really paid any attention to the OS itself. Which to me is the saddest part. Before Terry started being banned from every place in the internet, he was chatty and always trying to drum up interest from others in hobbyist communities. Almost nobody…

TempleOS is rather unusual for a hobbyist OS is being written in its own programming language.

There are people who develop their own operating systems as a hobby. There are people who design and implement their own programming languages as a hobby. For a single person to do both, in the one project, is actually pretty rare. Most people find trying to do both, together, is biting off way more than they can chew

Re: On Terry A. Davis

#82

Post by whstl »

jamesu wrote: post #72
xanderlewis wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he’d run a program and it would generate some random output and he said that those were words from god. I have to assume that this was very much because of his condition. I actually think that seems perfectly internally consistent from the perspective of someone who seriously believes in a god. If (pseudo)random numbers and therefore the output of that program aren’t controlled by god, what is?

It amazes me how much terry latched onto that idea, even binding the "god says" functionality to the F7 key in TempleOS. Sometimes I wonder how he would have reacted to ChatGPT and LLMs.

It's not that different from divination, lots of people latch into those ideas too.

In the end Terry just found a faster source of randomness.

Even as a non-religious person, I think that was one of the most relatable aspects of him. He really wanted to communicate.

Re: On Terry A. Davis

#83

Post by SonOfLilit »

YPPH wrote: post #10

Not to trivialise his achievement, but I'd be willing to wager any moderately competent systems programmer, if given 10+ years and no other commitments (work or family) could write a programming language, compiler, and real mode operating system for an x86_64 system. Side note, why were Ticketmaster hiring systems programmers writing such low level code? I grew up in the 90s/00s so missed this era of computing.

I have the skills to pull this off in a year or two, but would get bored after a month. Actually doing it is super rare and very admirable.

Re: On Terry A. Davis

#84

Post by whstl »

codetrotter wrote: post #14
lukan wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Because providing a 'product' is the sole criterion for success?" Wasn't the OS made to be used by people for real and not just as a toy? Could people use it for real? As a daily driver to get things done? (A real product) I do not think so, so what do you think what was the point of TempleOS then?

> what was the point of TempleOS From what I’ve seen from videos where Terry was talking about TempleOS, it seems that a large part of the point of the OS and the programs that shipped with it was as a way of “talking to god”. Where he’d run a program and it would generate some random output and he said that those were words from god. I have to assume that this was very much because of his condition. Either way, a te…

> it seems that a large part of the point of the OS and the programs that shipped with it was as a way of “talking to god”

That was just a personal interest of him, and something that the rest of the internet latched into heavily.

I personally remember him preferring to talk about technical stuff whenever possible.

Unfortunately he failed to find communities that wanted to talk about his preferred flavor of tech with him. The more I type those messages the more I remember: he just wanted to chat and drive attention to his OS.

Re: On Terry A. Davis

#85

Post by whstl »

skissane wrote: post #81
whstl wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What GP says is unfortunately true, though. From talking with other people online, most people and articles fetishize the disease and the posts with racist words, and never really paid any attention to the OS itself. Which to me is the saddest part. Before Terry started being banned from every place in the internet, he was chatty and always trying to drum up interest from others in hobbyist communities. Almost nobody…

TempleOS is rather unusual for a hobbyist OS is being written in its own programming language. There are people who develop their own operating systems as a hobby. There are people who design and implement their own programming languages as a hobby. For a single person to do both , in the one project, is actually pretty rare. Most people find trying to do both, together, is biting off way more than they can chew

There were quite a few of those in the OS communities where I met Terry :)

I was actually one of those. Started with an assembly, moved on to bigger things.

Sure, the squares were using POSIX and C. But we did things different.

Re: On Terry A. Davis

#86

Post by johnisgood »

skissane wrote: post #79
astrobe_ wrote: post #15

> Let’s be clear: schizophrenia does not cause racism Depends on the type of racism. If it's a false sense of superiority - probably the most common type of racism - well, maybe. But if it's the belief that some type of people are hostile to you for some reason, and your personality makes it so that you return it, then it is a persecutory delusion, just like conspiracy theories.

Schizophrenia absolutely can induce racism in some people. Schizophrenia (and other related disorders) can induce in some people obsessive socially unacceptable thoughts, which can include racist thoughts. It doesn't happen to everyone with schizophrenia – there are plenty of people with schizophrenia who aren't racist. And even if a person with schizophrenia is racist, it isn't necessarily due to their schizophrenia…

can, just like many things.

As for socially unacceptable thoughts, yeah what yesterday was acceptable is today unacceptable. :)

Re: On Terry A. Davis

#87

Post by skissane »

johnisgood wrote: post #86
skissane wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Schizophrenia absolutely can induce racism in some people. Schizophrenia (and other related disorders) can induce in some people obsessive socially unacceptable thoughts, which can include racist thoughts. It doesn't happen to everyone with schizophrenia – there are plenty of people with schizophrenia who aren't racist. And even if a person with schizophrenia is racist, it isn't necessarily due to their schizophrenia…

can , just like many things. As for socially unacceptable thoughts, yeah what yesterday was acceptable is today unacceptable. :)

More to the point, in Terry's case, we don't know.

It is possible, that without schizophrenia, he would never have been racist. (At least if we define "racism" in terms of explicit statements/actions, as opposed to unconscious biases.)

It is possible that he always was racist, and would have been even without schizophrenia, but schizophrenia took away his ability to hide it from others, or made him not care about doing that.

Nobody can really know.

Re: On Terry A. Davis

#88

Post by skissane »

whstl wrote: post #85
skissane wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TempleOS is rather unusual for a hobbyist OS is being written in its own programming language. There are people who develop their own operating systems as a hobby. There are people who design and implement their own programming languages as a hobby. For a single person to do both , in the one project, is actually pretty rare. Most people find trying to do both, together, is biting off way more than they can chew

There were quite a few of those in the OS communities where I met Terry :) I was actually one of those. Started with an assembly, moved on to bigger things. Sure, the squares were using POSIX and C. But we did things different.

I'd be interested if you could point to some examples.

Re: On Terry A. Davis

#89

Post by squigz »

johnisgood wrote: post #86
skissane wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Schizophrenia absolutely can induce racism in some people. Schizophrenia (and other related disorders) can induce in some people obsessive socially unacceptable thoughts, which can include racist thoughts. It doesn't happen to everyone with schizophrenia – there are plenty of people with schizophrenia who aren't racist. And even if a person with schizophrenia is racist, it isn't necessarily due to their schizophrenia…

can , just like many things. As for socially unacceptable thoughts, yeah what yesterday was acceptable is today unacceptable. :)

> what yesterday was acceptable is today unacceptable.

This is how society works to make progress, yes.

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