TempleOS creator Terry Davis is homeless and living in a van | Hacker News Reader

TempleOS creator Terry Davis is homeless and living in a van

reddit.com

178 pointsfounderling132 comments

As far as I can tell, Terry Davis has been given multiple chances to get well. He chooses to be sick.

It's tragic, but you can only lead a horse to water, you can't make it drink. I've been on the side of trying to help a family member get better. It's impossible to help someone who doesn't want help. And it's one of the hardest things in the world to give up on someone who doesn't want help. You question your decision for the rest of your life. And sometimes you go back, and get reminded almost immediately you did make the right decision.

Also as far as I can tell, the only reason most people care about anything involving him is because of some stories about him being a "heroic" programmer. Not that they've had any realistic confirmation of that experience, because they almost certainly haven't tried any of his software. So there seems to be this perverse, backwards reasoning that "Terry says terrible things, but it's ok, he's sick, but he chose to be this way, but it's ok, he wrote his own OS".

It's terrible that anyone should have to live this way, even the worst people in the world. But I'm not terribly convinced that the concern I see expressed is anything other than asshole programmer worship. Take away, "he wrote his own OS", and I just have a really hard time imagining very many people giving two shakes.

I agree with your first sentence, but let’s not forget the defective equipment that needs to be fixed or stabilized with medicine is the same equipment responsible for the decision to take it or not.

TempleOS has no process isolation, so it's completely unaffected by Spectre and Meltdown. I'm starting to think there's a lot of wisdom in its design. Complexity of modern computer systems keeps increasing but the value I get from that complexity isn't increasing nearly as fast. Spectre and Meltdown are just recent examples of some of the cost of that complexity. Do we really need an OS too complex for any one person to completely understand?

That's like saying "I don't have any doors in my house, just open frames. So I'm not affected by the weaknesses in locks."

Yeah but TempleOS also lacks networking so the house is also in interstellar space completely isolated from burglars trying to steal your stuff.

It's a very interesting design, I recommend to atleast play a bit with TempleOS.

If lack of doors was standard, everybody would see the open frames, and culture would adapt to them. Weaknesses in computer security are much harder to spot. Spectre has been possible for decades without mainstream attention. It's this lack of understandability that I think is dangerous. Many people will assume systems are secure just because they don't see an obvious way to exploit them, and because the complexity has grown far beyond what will fit into a human brain there will undoubtedly be non-obvious flaws. Is weak security really better than no security? The "no security" model really means "socially enforced security", which is playing to human strengths. It's much easier to understand than figuring out the full consequences of speculative execution.

I might believe that stance if you can think of any human scenario where there is value and nobody tries to take advantage of it.

We can’t have nice things/utipia as long as some people are evil.

This is not the first OS without kernel/userspace isolation. LISP machines for example used virtual memory but not process isolation.

In fact it was a top advertised feature that you could get your hands on any piece of data and code running on the system at any time.

We generally speak about the first OS with that isolation; of course early OSs were without it.

Which could be fine, if we have a society without theft or the house is in a gated community etc. I think that was the point of the grandparent: when do we really need it?

Locks are just propaganda anyway.

May I suggest a social construct ?

It's a bit similar to Windows 9x -- anything can do anything.

It might not be suspectible to Meltdown and Spectre per se, but the lack of security that grants that property still means a lack of security.

Windows 9x has process isolation, but has no concept of permissions thus any process can do anything that is provided by the OS API (which includes reading and writing memory of other processes, injecting code into kernel and such things). This means that it is very unlikely for misbehaving process to compromise the integrity of OS itself or other processes (modulo the fact that such process can confuse some other OS component, eg. window manager, such that the system becomes essentially unusable).

You raise an interesting point!

Maybe everything should have access to everything, and then you keep your _real_ secrets, like encryption keys, on dedicated hardware that locks away the key to the outside world and only does signing. Like a Trezor bitcoin wallet or secure enclave on iOS.

It follows the same design ideas of Smalltalk, Lisp Machines, Mesa/Cedar, Lillith, Oberon, JavaOS, ....

The idea being that the isolation can be achieved via the language type system, instead of extra hardware.

People tend to think of kernel/userspace isolation as if the kernel is that piece of rock-solid code and userspace is that which gets you pagefaults.

If only instead of pagefaults you would get thrown into debugger...

>wisdom in its design

Design choices in TempleOS are basically made by rolling dice.

Any program containing some 50-100 KLOC or more is too complex for any one person to completely understand. (Even if that person wrote the whole thing: he or she will have to refer to the documentation, and puzzle over code written months or years ago to figure out what is going on.)

It also has no TCP/IP stack from what I remember.

> Do we really need an OS too complex for any one person to completely understand?

I think the answer to this is yes. But at the same time, I think we're kind of messing up because children today don't have the same kind of systems a lot of us grew up with -- ones that boot instantly into programming consoles with easy ways to make sounds and draw graphics. Terry's vision to create a modern system like that is deeply good, I think. Personally I imagine something more like booting into a console that understood Forth and/or Lisp, and had what we now consider to be reasonable resolution and number of colors... but Terry is building his dream, not mine. Also, God provided a specification to Terry.

The console of today's youth is in the browsers. Any kid can open the developer's console and start typing JavaScript, the results are displayed immediately on the screen. Considering that JavaScript has it's roots in Scheme, it is a good language for kids to experiment on.

For learning lower level constructs maybe Webassembly will help the future generations. The interested kids can also purchase raspberry pi s and dive into a world of low-level programming.

Saying that JS has roots in Scheme is like saying English has roots in Chinese.

From http://speakingjs.com/es5/ch04.html

"In 1995, Netscape hired Brendan Eich with the promise of letting him implement Scheme (a Lisp dialect) in the browser."

And he has stated several times that he was disappointed that it wasn't scheme he was going to implement.

JS is good at being JS, but it has never been close to being scheme.

Would be, if English had been designed by people fluent in Mandarin. If you know Scheme and imagine a curly C-style alternative syntax for it, you basically end up with early Javascript.

> If you know Scheme and imagine a curly C-style alternative syntax for it, you basically end up with early Javascript.

Except without guaranteed TCO, macros, homoiconicity, continuations...you know, the things that make Scheme unique

Javascript is a terrible language for children to start with.

On the contrary I think it's ideal. It can adopt any paradigm you like to learn; imperative, OO, functional...

Just open the console and start typing. Results are immediate. No need for linking libraries or setting-up a virtualenv or whatever.

Javascript is a terrible language.

If you want to draw attention to a schizophrenic person who needs help, maybe linking /r/Drama is the wrong way.

He needs all the compassion and exposure to legitimate people as possible. His worldview is warped by 13 year olds who think racism is edgy and fun. Posting it HERE isn't the tragedy, trust me, as there are entire armies of trolls that collaborate to torture Terry. It's messed up.

IMHO, this attitude is akin to "throwing the baby out with the bath water". I'm sure the readerships of HN & Reddit are not mutually exclusive.

Tomorrow, someone will object to linking a WSJ article as it's a conservative newspaper.

Then, somebody else will object against The Guardian for it being too left-leaning.

From the /r/drama sidebar:

"Do your part to keep our community healthy by blowing everything out of proportion and making literally everything as dramatic as possible."

I think it's fair to consider /r/drama an especially bad place to originate a story about someone who needs help.

That paragraph is prefaced by the definition of the word Drama.

If we want to avoid drama, we should stop sharing a significant number of recent events, e.g. the Meltdown and Spectre drama, launches, touchdowns and failures of SpaceX, a majority of anti-Google comments, etc.

What are you talking about? Do you grasp the basic difference between a security vulnerability and a mentally ill homeless person?

I understand your scepticism about my ability to grasp basic differences, considering that we have never met nor interacted before.

Hence, this clarification...

As per my understanding, there is plenty of Drama in the security vulnerability incident - Intel CEO selling a large chunk of stock after the company was informed of the vulnerability; the differing views on the actual performance impact of the patches, the discussions on whether it was a genuine oversight error or corporate greed that led to the situation in the first place, etc.

The reason I mentioned this along with the original article is simply because I was trying to clarify that there have always been dramatic posts/comments on HN.

Therefore, sharing an article from r/Drama sub-reddit didn't seem sacrilegious to me.

I apologise if I have offended your sensibilities...

The amount of dedication Terry shows for his project is beyond what you see anywhere else in the software dev space.

For anyone who hasn't, I recommend to watch his videos on TempleOS (there are a lot of hymn videos or ranting videos, you can ignore those), they are a genuinely interesting perspective into OS Development.

> The amount of dedication Terry shows for his project is beyond what you see anywhere else in the software dev space.

I'd say Linus Torvalds shows at least the same amount of dedication to the linux kernel.

AFAIK, Tarn and Zach Adams also (Dwarf Fortress).

Terry has been writing on TempleOS (and the previous iterations which were mostly name changes) for about 15 years without pause, even Linus takes breaks.

With all due respect (honestly), he has quite extrem mental issue and thus you should not compare his work ethos to healthy people.

Yeah, competition is only good if i can participate in it.

His mental condition and personal situation is also beyond what you see anywhere else.

I've seen way worse for both, so not really. He's found a way to channel his mental condition into something constructive, something that people enjoy even.

I know he's perhaps not mentally stable, but after all. He has problems and he does some amazing things.

Perhaps consider donating on top of his page: http://www.templeos.org/ ( paypal).

Just donated 5$/month, will keep it up for a year at least. PayPal transactions take a bit of time to go through -- the hardest part was filling out the details :(

I really don't have the resources to arbitrarily afford charity, but fuck it -- I spend more money on coffee in a month and it's been too cold to wander around for a while here. It must feel really awful to some people who make 6 figure salaries to part with just a little money to a person who is both talented and likely lived in agony all his life. Maybe some people can start acting like the ubermensch they pretend to be from their libertarian ideology.

We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the site guidelines. Please don't create accounts to do that with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'd ask you to explain how all libertarians are Nazis but then I guess I'd be taking the bait.

"Ubermensch" doesn't imply "nazism". It's a nietzschean concept referring to humanity going beyond itself, and was then adopted by nazism to refer to a man of pure race, which is not what Nietzsche was talking about.

He wasn't thinking of Nietzsche when he used the word. It's trendy now to accuse libertarians of being neo-Nazis.

> Maybe some people can start acting like the ubermensch they pretend to be from their libertarian ideology.

I know that libertarians are often accused of being Nazis, but how I read that phrase was a general "you libertarians think you are such superior beings, start acting like it".

You sure like to put words in other people's mouth ;) Please tell me exactly what I'm thinking and what I meant -- I'm burning with curiosity at this point. And maybe together we can iteratively refine it.

Okay, what did you mean?

You got it totally wrong, I think you need to understand me better. I'm like the internet special forces on the harsh battlefield of the hn forum -- I dodge incoming bullets of political correctness, I roll away from bombs of guidelines of politeness designed to silence discourse, I shoot my enemies with a rifle designed to make them look stupid, I effortlessly lob grenades made of nothing but words, I pick up random wounded allies and I inspire others to keep going. I run faster and faster until momentum gathers and based upon nothing but air I cause the laws of probability to crash and I do it for no benefit to myself -- ok maybe there is some benefit for me ;)

My only fault is that I slay my enemies too efficiently, I had an excellent sparing partner. I will extend an olive branch and make it easy for you. I lied about donating to Terry

You'd be taking the bait if you actually made a donation to Terry.

Plenty of people have made donations to Terry, so I'm not sure what you're getting at.

Well, I'm in a charitable mood today so I decided to run a fundraiser on a whim using nothing but my phone.

I've donated hundreds. He told me to stop on a livestream because he was worried it would cause him to lose his disability payments.

Telling the truth is easy and pleasant -- he would disable his account if that was the case. Prove you are not lying. Link with irrefutable evidence given the constraint of keeping necessary information confidential.

>Prove you are not lying. Link with irrefutable evidence given the constraint of keeping necessary information confidential.

This is hilariously overblown for a forum post, dude. Chill out.

"a mind for strategy and tactics you have not" -- wise master myaso

Thou shall not make me chill.

It's actually quite worse than that. Terry is kind of going through a "teenager" phase it appears.

Apparently he left his parents house and started living in his car and his family went to visit him unannounced. There was some kind of altercation (probably his family trying to physically get him back) and the authorities were called because of a disturbance and he was charged with "Battery" in Las Vegas. He plead guilty to some minor charges. During the same time he's been seen with what some are describing a hooker.

Unfortunately he also has an ongoing fascination with some famous YouTuber and predators/trolls are taking advantage of him by posing as her to get him to send naked photos =(

The Terry Davis story gets crazier every day and I have a lot of sympathy for him. It upsets me to see the some areas of the Internet exploit him for the whole "CIA" thing.

EDIT - A new development he was arrested in Arizona on the 27th of December for property damage? Get well soon, Terry.

In a recent HN thread fellow HNers were asking what is a real artist: this is it.

No, this what a real schizophrenic is. It's a terrible disease that should not be romanticized in any way.

There surely seems to be a correlation between great art and mental illness. Van Gogh, Rothko, Frida Kahlo... I guess it depends on your taste in art, though. I'd put Terry in this camp for sure.

Those were a few that were lucky enough to earn a living / have people take care of them; that's only a small percentage, the rest ends up homeless, dead, interned, jailed. Terry is headed that way too now.

Great artists who don't suffer from mental illness exist, too.

Are you implying he is not an artist because he is schizophrenic?

An artist is one who creates art, and having used TempleOS I assure you it is among the finest.

He may be an artist AND a schizophrenic. One is not dependent on the other. Sometimes it just happens.

People have problems. You have problems, and so do I.

I think we can romanticize Terry's work while also keeping his condition in mind. They're separable, like a gaussian blur.

We can romanticize his work, but we shouldn't romanticize his life.

Why not?

Life is about how you deal with your problems, not having none.

Terry has dealt with a lot. It's probably harder than any of us can know.

The one guy is followed by the government and writes a book about it. The other guy is followed by the goverment and runs. Both are delusional. All thats missing is the interrupt to reality.

How do you mean? TempleOS is undoubtably a pretty interesting achievement, both in the artistic and technological sense - but Terry has serious mental issues, and we shouldn't overlook them as "oh, that's just how artists are".

Maybe more Outsider Art

In fact, if you do a careful study of history, many of the best artists have "serious mental issues". The question is, how do we define "serious mental issues" and "art"? I don't think its a coincidence that people with off-the-charts creativity are mentally different than most other people. If your thought process is that far removed from others in regards to art ("creativity"), then it only stands to reason that your thought process would be very different from other people in other regards, too.

I think, in part, it comes down to socioeconomic status.

Somebody from a wealthy background who has mental health issues might be able to afford to live in an unconventional way, supported by the people around them, whereas somebody from a poor background is going to end up living on the street when those same issues prevent them from holding down a job and paying the bills.

Art in Swedish is "konst" which is the base for the word "konstig" which means, literally, weird or odd. I'm pretty sure there's a reason for that etymology.

in Danish Kunstig main meaning is artificial or synthetic, secondary meaning - does not seem real, natural, or authentic (of upright standing) http://ordnet.dk/ddo/ordbog?query=kunstig

so I don't know that I would say there is a reason for the etymology that relates in any direct way with artists are weird.

Relating to that is that artificial is "konstgjord" in Swedish, i.e. "art made".

You cant say that- because if you imply that non neurotypical behaviour makes for great artists, you are basically telling alot of people that they will never be great artists.

It also gives people with mental health problems an excuse to not seek treatment - "I don't need your stupid pills, I'm not broken, I'm just an artist!"

At least in the US, the DSMV is used to define "serious mental issues" while everywhere "art" is completely subjective.

I don't disagree with the premise of very creative people having very different though processes from the majority. There is a very fine line between genius and insanity.

Let's not romanticize mental illnesses and lack of responsibility and guidance.

Why not? What is so bad about reminding people of the good that could come from this, if it were not for the missing pieces.

Terry has created an interesting project DESPITE his illness, not BECAUSE of it. It's very likely templeOS could be even greater without it. I've experienced personal projects being helped and hindered by mental issues and obsessions.

Mental illness often causes struggles in other parts of life. How much more effort could an artist (or engineer, anyone can build and create), devote to their work if they didn't have those struggles in other life scenarios?

> Terry has created an interesting project DESPITE his illness, not BECAUSE of it.

I disagree. Were it not for God's mission to fulfill, I believe Terry would not work day and night on it.

The disease makes you constantly form connection between things that are not related. It is a constant creativity generator humming away. Every Shizo lives in a spynovel. In Terrys case one where he got to play the all seeing controller he imagines behind every person. The OS is the sickness and its solutions are created by the sickness.

He has a donate button on his homepage. I wonder if that brings in something? Anybody here who ever used a donate button on their website and can tell something about it?

How does one even receive 'donations'? Is that like getting paid? Do they have to create an invoice for tax reasons? How is it taxed?

It would be nice if there was a number, how much is donated per month. I can imagine donating something. Depending on how much cash flow there already is.

http://www.templeos.org/ on top of the page is a donate button :) ( not affliated or any way. I just feel bad for him)

Example of this done right: https://opengameart.org

Not instant, but looking directly at the Patreon would be closer.

And yes, normally you'd report as taxable.

I wish there was a cure for his and his family's suffering. Irrespective of him being a genius, he deserves to receive the medical attention he needs.

Putting aside all the "mental illness/nutjob" talks that everyone likes to focus on so much, I would just wish that someone somehow would be able to connect with him and channel his genius (it is clear that he is quite good at what he does) into some project with a proper objective and guidance.

Bram Cohen has Asperger's and he could create BitTorrent which is widely used. I wonder if Terry Davis would create some game changer stuff as well if he had better support....

It is a sad situation.

I wish someone would connect with him and get him to accept some treatment. He's created great things, but it seems like his life is a struggle.

Aspergers is a walk in the park compared to what Terry is dealing with.

I've read through a lot of Terry's posts on 8chan and his rants that got him banned from a few websites. He's totally fucked but a genius. I've tried TempleOS. It made my brain hurt to look at it and it really wasn't intuitive in any way at all. I like the concept of the OS, a full OS where everything is in the same memory space. But, it's way too annoying to really play with anything in TempleOS.

Any OS from the era of cooperative multitasking should have much the same behavior, iirc.

Heck, even DOS with a few TSRs could come close.

This is incredibly sad. :(

I haven't got any money to help and I don't even know where I would put it to be helpful.

Does anyone have info about his current status? He has not updated his site since Dec 15.

As far as the van thing goes, he wasn't really homeless. He went to his parents house frequently and he could live there but chooses to live mostly in his van because he likes it.

This was 3 months ago. Apparently he lives happy in his van.

Yes.No.

Schizos have the wanderlust, they try to discover new territories- but they end up socially self isolating- and to reduce the suffering - drugs.

Here is he sitting in his truck and working on his computer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBGgi5Lqn0U

I have so much respect for that guy just looking at his achievement.

Let's drop homeboy some cash (top of page): http://www.templeos.org

ELI5 the story behind this?

He is a schizo autistic programmer who is convinced God told him to make an OS, so he is working on it constantly for 15 years, doing nothing else (it kind of resembles Noah's Ark). He used to livestream regularly on Youtube and became popular on technology boards on 4chan, 8chan etc., for his rants about God and "CIA niggers" and generally "being a living meme". Some people there genuinely like him and even bought him that drum set he wanted, but others (given *chans reputation) just liked to screw with him to induce more rants. But he is really suffering from mental illness and should got professional treatment.

Yeah, professional treatment- what if that is basically offering a life like a living zombie or no-treatment at all?

Not my department is just a lazy early out of difficult problems. Hope you have family. Hope that one day makes it oyur department.

And he also posts on HN, but last time I checked his account is shadow-banned.

He gets banned whenever he posts because his mental illness is taking over and he can't help but include slurs in his messages. Snowflake mods then usually either delete his posts (like on reddit), shadowban him or just ban his whole account. Which is really a shame because ignoring the slurs, his posts give you a lot of insights into his mind.

Mods have good reason to ban him if his comments are peppered with racial slurs: they are doing their fucking job. Mental illness is no excuse for racism. Calling the mods Snowflakes is going a little too far IMO.

This is the guy King Crimson was talking about.

Nothing he's got, he really needs?

When I googled I found more details here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Drama/comments/7218gh/templeos_crea...

> Despite the mean spirited attention he gets, he does have a following of people who seem to genuinly feel for him, and want to do nice things for him. One thing his followers did which at least seemed well intentioned was buying him a drum set. Terry likes to use drum sticks, but didn't have a set, so a gofundme was set up and he was bought some drums.

> But shortly after receiving the drum set, Terry vanished off the interenet for a couple weeks. Eventually, this note was posted on his website:

>> I got kicked-out of my parent's house. I got in a fight with my Dad, went to jail then mental hospital.

>> I'm adapting to being homeless. Hope to get a car to live in but no loan yet.

> At some point after posting this note, he was able to get a van, which he's now living in.

It blows my mind that a mental ill person is ending up homeless like this. Society should take care of theses cases.

Do you think that mental health treatment should just be made available for free, or that people should be forced to use it as well?

Because the problem with the former is that people with mental health issues will likely not cooperate.

And the problem with the latter is that forced medical treatment because someone's mind doesn't work the way you think it should is a very very dark thing to start doing...

Unfortunately, he was born into a society that would prefer the mentally ill take care of themselves.

I can't lay that much blame on society. Have you tried to take care of a mentally ill person? It's common for them to make it extremely difficult. Schizophrenia often seems to cause its sufferers to be absolutely certain they are not mentally ill at all. I've walked around for hours looking for a mentally ill woman to give her a care package, only to be attacked by her a few days afterward.

It really is sad. The only schizophrenic person I've interacted with was thankfully on medication and it seemed to help a lot. A very sweet elderly woman. I have spent a decent amount of time watching https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaUOTQQBc3EO5sVjVusMn8A

She is a schizophrenic woman in Boston iirc. Watching her delusions and obsession with various objects is fascinating and heartbreaking. I really want to talk to her just to try to understand better. I think it is impossible simply because something is wrong inside her brain. I wouldn't be able to rationalize why traffic cones aren't some kind of grand conspiracy of the Patriarchy. I think she is homeless now, I hope she gets the help she desperately needs.

Some people with mental illness reject medical help.

At that point it can be hard to force them to have treatment against their will. This is for good reason - forced psychiatric treatment has been abused before. Forcing someone to have treatment against their will is an interference with their human rights. We tolerate that if they pose a risk of serious harm to other people[1] or to themselves.

Another reason we don't just scoop homeless people off the street and forcibly medicate them is that treatment for psychosis isn't particuarly great - it's not effective for some people and the medications carry a range of severe side effects.

The best thing we can do is provide correctly funded "assertive outreach teams". Here's a description of one assertive outreach worker's day: https://www.theguardian.com/healthcare-network/views-from-th...

The closest thing we offer is prison these days. :(

Hardly surprising in the united states I would think.

Sad. I wonder if the drum kit was a factor.

In getting evicted? Yeah, one suspects. Drums are truly thoughtless presents for anyone of diminished capacity. I mean, it's funny to get a drum for my brother's toddler, but my brother can just throw the damn thing away at some point. I guess we should be happy there wasn't a kickstarter for a box full of fireworks?

Who are the kiddies who keep stirring him up?

Say hello to the offspring of Anon...

Depending on "truck" it can be pretty alright.

See : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UeVsHmKAFA (EV mod of VW kombi)

Make a kickstarter to fund his future green life.

ps: for some weird reason I expected him to look like anderson cooper..

If you have the money, time and experience to invest 7 months (in this particular case) into converting it, then yeah. I think you will find 90% of van/truck dwellers have a very different situation to that.

I'm sure this man can crack a bit of mechanics and power electronics, probably not harder than writing an OS, also I said people could help.

Now for the majority of people in such need, sure it's hard, and I wish we could turn their situation in a similar manner.

He appears to be living on a mattress in a family car (for the last 3 months). I think he’s definitely in that “situation”, with severe mental issues to boot.

From the “van dance” video, appears he has a Dodge Carivan.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com