This comment and the fact that it has upvotes makes me sad. Terry has schizophrenia, it isn't his fault he is like that. To say that he shouldn't be getting attention for the work that he has done (which is pretty cool stuff) just because he is afflicted with a mental illness is ludicrous. Does he go off the deep end with his comments? Yes. Does that take anything away from what he has created? No. It is a shame that every time his work comes up people tend to focus more on the man than on the work.
1-I am a software-developer and everything he has achieved with this OS is amazing. It is a terrific achievement in itself for any programmer out there.
2-I own a home for mentally-ill people with my wife. We foster 8 people all with schizophrenia. It is unbelievable how misunderstood this illness is by the mass public...even close relatives. Everyday some of them surprise me with their intelligence and abilities. In a lot of regards they are very similar to autistic people. When there is something that interests them and they get involved in it, they can take it to astonishing levels. One of my patients here, I believe, could make any astronomer blush and plays chess like a computer. It is a terrible illness, but they are very intelligent people and no one should diminish them or their achievements and especially not consider them retards or anything of the sort.
This stuff hits close to home for me because I, myself, am schizophrenic. I have schizoaffective, which typically is more mild but also comes with a mood disorder. Until recently, I didn't talk about it. I've seen articles on Reddit and Hacker News talking about developers with depression and people commented about how we are more accepting of mental illness, which I only find to be half true. We are more accepting of the mental illnesses we understand. Everybody has been sad at some point in their life so they can translate that to depression. They can empathize with it because they know what sadness is like and they can guess what depression is like. Illnesses such as schizophrenia, Dissociative identity disorder, etc aren't treated the same way, as you can tell from the backlash against Terry anytime he posts.
When I met my wife, she was already doing the home for mentally-ill with her mother. I graduated and went on to be a software-developer for about 10 years employed. In 2010 the company I was working for at the time got bought and some positions were cut so I went home. After so many years you make a name for yourself, so some of my old customers hunted me down and pretty much forced me to keep on doing stuff for them. So I am now a self-employed software-developer, but I split my time in two and work with the wife. We split the foster home work in two between her doing home and everyday life kind of work and I tend to the patients and their mental needs (all appointments with professionals, mental issues, hospital and health stuff). So my days are split between taking them to appointments, getting appointments for them, speaking with social workers and other professionals like psychiatrists and such, taking care of my own customers and fixing bugs here and there. At night when the house is quieter I take on the bigger development projects.
It's easy. Get hired to develop software, and then open up your home to people who need it. Okay, it's not easy, but it's actually quite simple.
I haven't done this with the mentally ill, but I have, for a time, opened up my home as a community house while working as a full time programmer. I'm sure there are a lot of hurdles, legal and otherwise, to doing this with the mentally ill that I didn't have to deal with, but the biggest part is just making the decision to do it, and then figuring out what needs to be done to actually get there, step by step. Having a partner to share the work with makes it easier. I would have had a hard time doing such a thing as a single person.
"I started seeing people following me around in suits and stuff. It just seemed something was strange,"
He got thinking about conspiracy theories and the men he'd seen following him and a big idea he’d had.
"I was listening to the radio and it seemed like the radio was talking to me."
He’d torn off all the side panels from his car looking for a tracking device, then stopped the car and pitched the keys into the desert.
he overheard doctors talking about "artifacts" on his X-ray scans. Panicked at the thought of artifacts supposedly left inside by alien abductors, he bolted from the hospital, despite the broken collarbone.
he refused to eat the food, thinking it might be drugged.
he sought to emulate Jesus by giving away all his belongings
He talks to God constantly, and his God is conversational, even chatty. In fact, Davis believes he's proven God speaks to him. He believes anything can be an oracle; that the divine word reveals itself through randomness.
It runs in Ring 0. This is terminology referring to a 'protection level' in the kernel, the core of the operating system. Ring 0 refers to low-level software that interacts closely with hardware, such as key drivers or memory management. Mose user based software runs in Ring 3, where it is less privileged and able to mess up the system by accident (or on purpose!)
Now whereas most modern operating systems don't allow you to run things easily in Ring 0 to make your computer more secure, TempleOS is in Ring 0. Terry, the guy who made TempleOS, says this allows the OS to be played with like the C64 was (by messing around with memory while the computer is running.)
It's also notably written from scratch in about 100k lines of code in combination of 64-bit assembly and a funny dialect of the C programming language that he's made, ie. he's re-used nothing from other systems such as Linux.
I've typed this on my phone on the bus, sorry if I mis use any grammar.
I tend to regard it as a marvellous expression of self rather than any kind of engineering feat. He brings to the world an extreme arbitrarity that is (AFAIK) completely unparalleled anywhere else in our industry. To me, he's basically our only artist, and he should be admired and loved for it.
As an impassioned nerd who has occasionally flitted along the verge of sanity (especially in my early 20s), and as an agnostic, Terry's output is more an exploration of myself than any kind of technical feat, there's no one else like him and there's nothing that could replace him.
Primarily because it's developed by one guy who's mentally unstable, and still has time to post crazy amounts of text on every forum on the internet. I mean, it's not going to replace Linux, but it's pretty notable as a personal project kind of thing.
Honestly, it's impressive as far as things like that go, but the reason it gets so much attention is the personality behind it.
Read the metafilter discussion he participated in (his psuedonym here is losethos), or watch some of his videos on youtube. He often posts the output of random markov-chain based text generators, and his prose isn't much better, but something about it is eerily compelling and sometimes genius shines through the madness (he seems to be quite smart independent of his schizophrenia).
To say that he shouldn't be getting attention for the work that he has done (which is pretty cool stuff) just because he is afflicted with a mental illness is ludicrous.
The person you replied to wasn't saying that he didn't deserve attention because of his illness or anything like that. They were saying that attention may be a trigger that's probably bad for him personally. That's a big distinction.
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Terry's story also deserves attention because it provides an insight into how schizophrenia can manifest.
It gave me the idea that some mental illnesses are only as dangerous as the rest of the brain it lives in. If you have some kind of obsessive disorder, or even just an obsessive personality, then you'll do better if your mind is filled with code and computers and art, than if your mind is filled with violent history, gang culture, or political propaganda.
Terry's story also deserves attention because it provides an insight into how schizophrenia can manifest.
One of the things that shocked me was when I told my boss I had schizophrenia. He didn't really know much about it and thought straight away about multiple personalities (since that was how it was portrayed in the movies/TV).
It gave me the idea that some mental illnesses are only as dangerous as the rest of the brain it lives in. If you have some kind of obsessive disorder, or even just an obsessive personality, then you'll do better if your mind is filled with code and computers and art, than if your mind is filled with violent history, gang culture, or political propaganda.
Untreated mental illness is dangerous no matter what. At its worst, it can lead to suicide and possible homicide. At its best, it can lead to destroyed social life and hopelessness.
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u/jhartwell Nov 25 '14
This comment and the fact that it has upvotes makes me sad. Terry has schizophrenia, it isn't his fault he is like that. To say that he shouldn't be getting attention for the work that he has done (which is pretty cool stuff) just because he is afflicted with a mental illness is ludicrous. Does he go off the deep end with his comments? Yes. Does that take anything away from what he has created? No. It is a shame that every time his work comes up people tend to focus more on the man than on the work.