As someone who first knew Terry Davis from Slashdot where his clearly mentally ill posts seemed to get downvoted a lot of the time, it is remarkable to see that the products of his madness have become regarded as real art with staying power. He is like the Adolf Wölfli of the hacker crowd.
"Glowing" was used as a description of government agents before Terry's "popularity"; the most common modern version is tongue-in-cheek "jokes" using the term while "outing" someone, usually someone who is asking odd, or personal questions, especially in a security or privacy community.
TempleOS is actually pretty cool, when viewed as the product of one man's dream. How many people can say they've written a 64-bit, multi-core, protected mode OS that comes with its own programming language? Then, throw in a flight simulator game, just for giggles.
Honestly, if it weren't the product of religious delusions common with schizophrenia, I'd say TempleOS and HolyC would be more than enough of a resume to get hired into many programming jobs.
For someone so delusional, it's interesting that he was effective enough to do anything. How far detached from reality can you be and still create something that objectively works?
Could someone delusional also create a rocket ship? Or is there something special about programming that makes it compatible with delusional thinking?
"Delusional thinking" is a pretty broad umbrella. There's nothing that's fundamentally incompatible with a delusional thought process per se, but the particulars might be a problem.
In Terry's case, it sounded like he suffered from a lot of delusions of persecution (e.g. thinking the CIA is after him), and religious delusions. Neither of these are fundamentally incompatible with any sort of technical or scientific thought process. Had he not been delusional, I suspect we might either never have heard of him, or he'd be one of the people making the front page of HN on a semi-regular basis.
> Could someone delusional also create a rocket ship? Or is there something special about programming that makes it compatible with delusional thinking?
Newton studied alchemy and Linus Pauling believed against all evidence that vitamin C cured cancer and basically everything else. Humans are very good at applying their (ir)rationality to certain subfields while abandoning it in others.
I'll give you Pauling, but Newton studying alchemy in the 17th and 18th centuries would have been far from delusional when you consider "Robert Boyle pioneered the scientific method in chemical investigations"[0] around that time. According to the same Wikipedia article, it was only sometime between 1720-1740 when "alchemy" came to mean "attempts to transmute other materials into gold." Newton died in 1726.
Vitamin C cures cancer like ivermectin kills COVID-19 - it doesn't actually fix the bigger problem, but, if your body has been trashed so badly that you actually have medical need to have one of these put into your arm, the improvement in your immune system would be drastic.
> Could someone delusional also create a rocket ship? Or is there something special about programming that makes it compatible with delusional thinking?
Programming (eg, TempleOS) can be successful as a solo endeavor. I'm not sure we have enough technical leverage for a single person to create a rocket ship (ie, something capable of lifting real loads to orbit). Maybe in the future when AI systems can fill in some of the details and/or automate the construction.
If you have to coordinate with other humans, insanity is tough. Nobody else can hear the voices in your particular head.
Sort of related, I was browsing the github of the author of the Hyprland wayland compositor to see what else he's built. Smiled at https://github.com/vaxerski/Holy6800 - I love this kind of useless but cool project.
I totally agree; regardless of Terry Davis' strangeness, there's no doubt a certain level of brilliance to it. Honestly, I think that's kind of why TempleOS has been so compelling to people. It's insane, but also beyond the skills of 99.99% of the population.
So much of the so-bad-its-good stuff required effort, and TempleOS is no exception.
> Honestly, if it weren't the product of religious delusions common with schizophrenia, I'd say TempleOS and HolyC would be more than enough of a resume to get hired into many programming jobs.
He actually was employed as a programmer before the whole schizophrenia/TempleOS arc.
He had a master's degree in electrical engineering from Arizona State University and worked at Ticketmaster as a VAX programmer. He also started programming in assembly from an early age.
He comes from a time where they had to share 2 MB of memory among 100 users. He can run circles around many modern programmers.
It's interesting, because in reviewing TempleOS, and his way of explaining what he had done, and how he spoke about it, I always got the vibe that the religious references were him "doing his duty" (what he was compelled to) while just being a hacker.
"Temple OS Theme / Rice For Arch Linux" is the description of the repo on the page. I understand the sentiment, but I don't think the title's the right place to correct the original author.
interesting background. He suffered from mental illness bipolar + schizophrenia. Being persecuted / talking to god are common afflictions of this illness.
Reminder that Terry being hellbanned on this website was cited by those who tracked him down in person towards the end as very not good for his mental state/part of reason for his extreme decline towards the end.
Whether that’s true, no clue. But I like to think he deserved better.
I don’t have a good answer for the question of hellbanning Terry. Spamming every HN thread with irrelevant nonsense and long stretches of randomly generated text is naturally going to get anyone hellbanned. Would it have been merciful to try and make an exception for Terry personally? I don’t know.
The thing is, it never stopped him from posting, nor did it stop those of us with “showdead” enabled from seeing his comments. For me at least, Terry was a fixture of the old HN. Every story on the front page would have that one dead, greyed out comment at the bottom that didn’t make very much sense to anyone but him. I miss seeing those comments.
It's not viable for a community that wants to maintain quality discourse to allow continued posting by somebody who reliably mixes in slurs and bigotry.
I feel bad for Terry, because by all indications those posts were driven by mental health issues rather than intentional bigotry, but the effect of allowing them in the community is the same.
And while you or I might be willing to put up with that as we're aware of the person and circumstances, there are many more people who don't know who he is and his circumstances and merely see the profanity-laden ramblings, and will simply leave. Keeping Terry on HN was untenable.
> Reminder that Terry being hellbanned on this website was cited by those who tracked him down in person towards the end as very not good for his mental state/part of reason for his extreme decline towards the end.
Yikes. That's some serious deflection from the 4chan crowd, where the trolls came from who made it their mission to completely destroy this vulnerable person's life via the internet.
But did Terry fell that 4chan were his own people? He probably felt that the HN crowd was, and therefore being ostracized from them could have hit just as hard as the 4chan trolling.
They're totally orthogonal, the trolls weren't going to leave Terry alone regardless of his HN status.
HN had nothing to do with assholes "gifting" Terry a drum knowing it would completely disrupt his elderly parent's home he shared, and was subsequently forced to leave for living out of a minivan.
Then they preyed on his internet crushes discovered through his livestreams, watching those same livestreams as he read spoofed emails they sent from said crushes.
Ultimately what really ruined everything for Terry IMHO was live-streaming. You can't have vulnerable people live-streaming like that. It's when everything went off a cliff for him. There was realtime live video feedback for everything the trolls were doing anonymously to him. Instant gratification and optimization for their end.
The turning point was when he was kicked out of his house. That's when he became homeless and started living in a van.
That affected him in many ways, and it was noticeable. Before, he was always shaved and clean. After becoming homeless that changed.
Someone sent him a drum set and the noise annoyed his parents. He also annoyed them in other ways. Trolls were entertained by stressing the relationship between Terry and his family.
It was all the work of glowposting trolls. A reminder that we should not hesitate to drive into the glow.
That's sad and I feel for anyone whose mental illness drives wedges between them and society. I can't imagine many things more horrifying than to be a sentient mind trapped in a brain determined to play tricks on it.
That said, you can't just let someone with those issues spew awfulness even if it's caused by a medical condition. That's a rough situation for the person being banned but I'm not sure what the less bad alternative would be.
Sure you can, you just recognize that the person saying it is a very different kind of person.
Who was actually offended by Terry’s schizophrenic ramblings? Is the n word really that disturbing when used by someone without a firm grasp on reality and in the midst of a word salad? Is it racist or just nonsense?
“Rule are rules”… well, people in wheelchairs get a different set of rules and I’m perfectly fine sacrificing some of my own personal comfort to make accommodations.
I don’t think it’s remotely the same thing. What comfort are you sacrificing for the disabled in the real world? On the pseudo anonymous internet it’s impossible to tell whether you’re dealing with a very different type of person or just a troll hellbent on sabotaging your community. When the quality of discourse is in the dumps, who caused it or why won’t matter when folks have lost interest in engaging with that community any longer.
It was very, very easy to tell that Terry was a “very different type of person” and not just a troll hellbent on sabotage. Nearly any post from him had a particular word salad (or a link to such word salad on his TempleOS page) that was readily recognizable as a sign of mental illness, and I’ve never in my decades of following news-for-nerds sites seen a troll emulate it.
Obviously you don't have "showdead" set to "yes", because I do, and I see mentally ill racist people posting the n-word and other unhinged hate speech word salad to Hacker News all the time.
Are you saying we should un-ban them all too, just because they are obviously insane?
And that all you have to do in order to openly and repeatedly harass anyone you feel like with sexist, racist, homophobic, and anti semitic hate speech is to act insane?
> when used by someone without a firm grasp on reality
Implicit in this question is the idea that everyone viewing the thread is on the same page about why the person is spewing racist crap. This is never the case.
Imagine you stumble upon a brand new forum, where you know nothing about the regulars or years of built-up social dynamics. You find someone making racist remarks, and everyone is just... fine with it. You have finite time before you die: you're not going to wait around to see if there's a good reason for it. The reasonable thing to do is write it off as a forum that tolerates racism and move on with your life.
What do you want to do, flair people with "kind of crazy, don't worry if they say racist shit sometimes" labels? How are you planning to verify these people and tell them apart from people who just want to say racist shit? I guarantee there are a lot more of those than there are Terry Davises. This is, to put it gently, not scalable.
I've seen this is at small scale, too. Tolerance leads to the problem getting worse over time. You need to stand up for your rules of conduct, and hope the offender learns the right lesson from it. If not, that's not your responsibility. Your responsibility, as a group leader or admin, is the environment everyone shares.
>The missing stair is a metaphor for a person within a social group who many people know is untrustworthy or otherwise has to be "managed," but around whom the group chooses to work by discreetly warning newcomers of their behavior, rather than address them and their behavior openly. The "missing stair" in the metaphor refers to a dangerous structural fault, such as a missing step in a staircase; a fault that people may become used to and quietly accepting of, is not openly signposted or fixed, and that newcomers to a social group are warned about discreetly. [...]
>Meaning: The analogy of the missing stair makes it clear that the problem is the predator (the missing stair) and that the solution is stopping the predatory behavior (fixing the stair).
>An article about industry sexual harassment on comics news site ComicsAlliance posed the question: "Which one of these statements makes more sense to say: 'These people need to find more ways to stop people from harming them.' OR: 'These people should stop causing harm.' If you ever find yourself saying the former instead of the latter, take a moment and ask yourself why."[3]
>In a 2014 post on the anti-rape blog Yes Means Yes,[4] lawyer Thomas MacAulay Millar wrote that the missing stair analogy was consistent with his understanding of rapists' motivations and behaviors, based on research carried out by clinical psychologists David Lisak and Paul M. Miller, and by Stephanie K. McWhorter, a researcher with the U.S. Naval Health Research Center. Millar wrote that while a small number of rapists are "one-timers" who may be making a mistake or are confused about consent, the majority are repeat offenders, averaging six rapes each.[5] "We need to spot the rapists," Millar wrote, "and we need to shut down the social structures that give them a license to operate. They don't accidentally end up in a room with a woman too drunk or high to consent or resist; they plan on getting there and that's where they end up."[6]
> Is the n word really that disturbing when used by someone without a firm grasp on reality and in the midst of a word salad?
Yes. Absolutely. 100%. While I get what you're saying, it's not on the recipient of an n-bomb to look up the person who just called them the n-word to judge their mental competency.
> “Rule are rules”… well, people in wheelchairs get a different set of rules and I’m perfectly fine sacrificing some of my own personal comfort to make accommodations.
I vehemently disagree. I can't think of any way that making accommodations for wheelchair friendliness inconveniences anyone. The doors and aisles are wider? That's great when I'm carrying a large box! Text is printed largely and in high contrast for people with vision impairments? Yay, now I can read it more easily!
I'm not saying Terry was a bad person. However, his illness caused him to say some outlandishly awful stuff to people. Why should they have to endure having those epithets hurled at them?
> I can't think of any way that making an accommodation wheelchair friendly inconveniences anyway.
Well, I've sacrificed a heck of a lot of great parking spaces to accommodate the differently-abled.
> Why should they have to endure having those epithets hurled at them?
I contest that the mere act of reading or hearing certain words could be construed as a task of "endurance" - one is perfectly free to avoid reading or hearing such things if one finds them overtaxing.
On the other hand, if one chooses to "endure" for a moment, one might realize that the schizophrenic delusions of a madman have little bearing on the exact epithets being "hurled" (hurled where? Nowhere in particular, unless one glows in the dark!)
Sticks and stones... RIP Terry. I also don't mind that he was banned from here though, as much as I'm for unfettered speech, if the person in charge decided they didn't wish to host his, that was their prerogative. Terry certainly had other outlets.
Would you be this hard-line on a tourettes sufferer with coprolalia? Society seems more ready to make concessions for them. Terry was closer to the illness "uncanny valley" for some, I guess.
My father had schizophrenia, and my wife has tourettes.
It's a completely different scenario. Someone with tourrettes knows what just happened. They're probably deathly embarrassed and apologetic.
In the schizophrenic case, they're being aggressive, hurtful, belligerent -- no one is obligated to sit through that. There's no reasoning with them, there's not even a discussion happening.
If the sufferer was repeatedly and unapologetically throwing n-bombs at specific people, yes, of course.
I'm sympathetic to Terry. His illness turned him into a right bastard, though. If someone's illness caused them to punch people, I don't want to be around them because I don't want them to punch me. It's not because I think it makes them a bad person. I still don't want to be punched.
And darned if I'm going to be the one to tell a black person that they have to let someone call them the n-word repeatedly without wanting that person to go away.
> it's not on the recipient of an n-bomb to look up the person who just called them the n-word to judge their mental competency.
This is absolutely true, but the context of the conversation was how community members and leaders could/should "manage" such a person, not as much how should the victims of mentally ill drive by retorts respond.
One other terrible thing about mental illness like that (as if there needed to be another) is that it's really, really hard for people with mental illness to navigate the healthcare system to get proper treatment. Even I've experienced this, with ADHD. I joke that I take medication to remember to take my medication, and that's sometimes kinda true. I can only imagine what it would be like with delusions of persecution and voices in my head telling me to do stuff.
Another thing is that in the US, it's incredibly hard to get someone like Terry on medication if they don't want to be, even if it's in their own best interests. Most of the time, I'm generally in favor of this stance, as I don't think that anyone else, particularly the government, should be able to force medicate people against their wills. (NB: I'm not talking about vaccines here.)
The unfortunate result of these things is that people with really severe mental issues can easily end up homeless, or, at the very least, on disability and unable to work, and there's nothing anybody else can do about it.
Schizophrenia in particular is a real bastard of a disease, as you noted. Apparently, symptoms only go away in 70% of people who get treatment, and 15% of people with schizophrenia end up institutionalized.[0] The symptoms apparently also trend less severe over time, but there can be sudden and severe regressions.
Terry got dealt a bad hand, it's true. But, I don't think it's fair to say that getting banned from a website led to his death. If that was all it took, then just about anything could have caused him to go over the edge.
I remember learning the ‘Rule of Thirds’ in relation to schizophrenia prognoses:
> According to this rule, one third of patients will have just a single psychotic episode during their lifetime; another third will experience different psychotic episodes that will recede without causing much deterioration and they will preserve psychosocial functioning; and the final third will present psychotic symptoms continually, as well as suffering notable deterioration and functional incapacity.
