I can tell you why I'm inclined to downvote this comment, though I don't know if it's the safe reasons others have. Note that I can only see the question, not whatever you removed.
Those outbursts are bordering on full schizophasia, they are symptoms of his mental illness. He is certainly an interesting person, and it's perfectly natural to be curious about his condition. But you're asking for a video depicting him suffering some of the most severe effects of his mental illness, which borders on voyeuristic. Being interested in him is fine, being interested in schizophrenia is fine, but that curiosity has to be balanced with some degree of constraint and respect for a person who is suffering from a debilitating condition.
Again, nothing wrong with curiosity, and I don't doubt that you meant no harm in asking. But it's important that we don't let discussions about Terry devolve into some sort of carnival freak show, and your question stepped too close to that line.
I really don't understand this community sometimes. If you are going to downvote a comment, why not explain why? Is there a perceived laziness? Or have I missed something???
That is largely interpreted as 'mostly refrain from talking about voting'. Keep in mind, downvoting here happens for many different reasons, it's not always negative and it is best not to take it personally or make assumptions about why it's happening. You could think of it as symmetric to upvoting & ask yourself whether you want an explanation for every upvote... maybe not? The goal is to have a high signal to noise ratio, and discussion of votes is mostly noise and almost always tangential to the article/thread.
I also didn't see the parent comment, but Terry & TempleOS have a long and complicated history here, so it might be a good idea to reserve judgement.
Here's the thing: Sometimes there are people who are exceptionally talented in a given field, yet suffer from a serious illness or disability. The symptoms can be apparent in their physique (such as Stephen Hawking), or in their mind (such as Terry Davis). I can understand why people who do not have direct experience with mental illness might have trouble separating the symptoms from the person, but I would encourage those who criticise Terry for the highly unfortunate way his illness manifests itself to try to find compassion for the man, not ridicule.
I'm willing to bet pretty good money that less than 1% of people on HN, and the software development industry in general, could achieve the technical feats on the level of what Terry has done. In fact it's probably considerably fewer than that. Here's a guy who's built an entire platform from scratch, including kernel, development tools, user interface, and applications. While there are obvious flaws (such as the visual appearance and lack of memory protection), some of the other design decisions like presentation of documentation and the way different parts of the system integrate with each other put mainstream operating systems to shame.
We should be emphasising Terry's technical work, not the symptoms of his debilitating illness.
What you quoted is a textbook example of "word salad," a symptom of schizophrenia. Look at it, it's not even close to coherent. Racist delusions are not exactly unheard of in paranoid schizophrenia. Unless we have information about what Terry was like before he developed schizophrenia, it's impossible to tell if this apparent racism is him or the disease. Honestly, I'm inclined to think it's the disease. I've seen him write coherent things and I've seen him write incoherent things, but I haven't seen any instance of him talking coherently in a racist manner.
What know I cannot do is construct an coherent or even intelligible argument from the quoted paragraph. I can extract meanings from some of the sentences; but I also can see you have not even bothered to explain your objections to them.
More importantly, it seems you don't even care about coherency. It looks like that to you, if something "feels bad" then it is bad.
> More importantly, it seems you don't even care about coherency. It looks like that to you, if something "feels bad" then it is bad.
I don't understand where this is coming from. Please explain what you mean, and why you think that.
> but I also can see you have not even bothered to explain your objections to them.
My objection was that the parent post claimed the quote was "word salad" and I claim it is not, because the quote obviously has a message and it is not difficult to figure out what it is.
If you meant that I didn't bother explaining the message, well then here is how I interpret the quote:
>Reputation is worth more than gold. Niggers have a reputation -- no fathers.
He's talking about stereotypes here, and how there is a stereotype that many black men abandon their children/family.
> Irish have a reputation. Germans have a reputation.
Again referencing stereotypes.
> Attacker has the advantage.
Guy who hits first usually wins the fight.
> Jews have a reputation. God said the French once stood for character. (Code of Chivalry) Ironic.
Again, stereotypes. He is obviously referencing WW2 in this context and talking about how the French were easily defeated by the Germans.
> I guess Jews did, too. Woah! God is boss. Too bad the Jews were cowards and didn't assassinate NAZI's.
I'm guessing here he is saying the Jews were God's chosen people, but they didn't live up to that an let the Germans almost destroy them.
So yeah, most people don't talk like this guy in normal conversation, but it is pretty clear to me that he is talking about stereotypes and sticking up for yourself. I might not get the finer details he is trying to communicate, but even so it is far from unintelligible.
You offer interpretations of several sentences. These interpretations are guesswork. Even if we take your interpretations as perfectly correct, they don't knit together into any coherent message.
The man is schizophrenic. You are holding him to account for a kind of performance that he is biologically not equipped to provide. He isn't harming anyone and as far as anyone can interpret what he says, many times he uses words like "nigger" he is complaining about things like how we have made computing overcomplicated. I think it's worth it to cut the guy a break.
That doesn't mean we accept racism in general, it means we don't have to pick on people who can't help the way they express themselves. Do we pick on people with Tourette's for saying bad words?
Yes, of course I can't (nor anyone else) know for certain exactly what someone else means when they communicate.
> Even if we take your interpretations as perfectly correct, they don't knit together into any coherent message.
Well I guess we differ on this point and that's okay. The overall message I got from that quote was that every group has a stereotype, and one's actions affect the stereotype of your race. And so you should stick up for yourself.
That makes sense to me.
For the record, I am not judging the guy, and I don't care if what he says offends people. I know he has mental health issues, and that it affects the things he thinks/says.
I was just saying that the quote was not "word salad", according to the definition I provided. If no one else can see the gist of what he is saying then fine. I guess we all see patterns differently.
Terry's "schizophrenia" just means he perceives reality differently than you do. The "word salad" is actually not random nonsense. Your mind is perfectly trained to value political correctness and money, and so you find his thoughts nonsensical or abhorrent. Terry's mind has developed to value art and speaking the truth as he perceives it without any social filter. What you are seeing is a true artist with a perception of reality so different from your own that you don't comprehend it as rational. If you read it carefully, you'll realize everything he says is perfectly rational, he knows perfectly well what he's saying, and racist or not, from a certain perspective there is reason to it.
Imagine you are talking to someone who has been living in the wilderness for a long time, who has stumbled back into civilization and has gained a reputation for being a crazy person, and they point at a cave and say "bear hole makes the rain go away!" and becomes very frustrated that nobody bothers to try and understand them (and instead just repeats the popular opinion about how they are crazy). Are they actually speaking nonsense? I think that's what [some] schizophrenia actually is.
The Hacker News community deals with those behaviors the same way it deals with them when exhibited by other members of the community. Likewise, Davis' work is recognized as intellectually interesting just like other intellectually interesting work.
I've always felt sad that Terry A. Davis doesn't seem to have a very strong support system (family, friends, children, etc.). There are other brilliant people that have been diagnosed with similar illnesses (Daniel Johnston[0] comes to mind) that were able to retain their public dignity while still doing fantastic work.
That's not right. Dignity is "the state or quality of being worthy of honor or respect". Someone has (or doesn't have) dignity irrespective of how they are treated.
I think it's trivially obvious that some people do not deserve to be treated with dignity (e.g. child molesters, mass murderers, etc.). The fact that you treat them with dignity in spite of that is obviously virtuous, but they don't deserve it. As opposed to people that do: Gandhi, Jesus, MLK, and so on.
> it's trivially obvious that some people do not deserve to be treated with dignity
I don't agree, and I know many people who also would disagree. Another point of view is that perhaps some people don't deserve dignity, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to know which ones and only an omniscient supernatural being would know enough to make that judgment.
For me, this is the most memorable statement that concept; probably not the best, but it's where I first grasped it:[0]
Frodo: It's a pity Bilbo didn't kill him when he had the chance.
Gandalf: Pity? It was pity that stayed Bilbo's hand. Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends.
Also, I don't know of anyone who should throw stones. I hope I'm treated with dignity when I make mistakes; certainly nothing is gained when I'm not.
[0] There are at least a couple variations I found in a quick search; don't take this one as authoritative.
Look here's the deal with him. The man is unwell. What do you have to gain from digging down rabbit holes like this?
In regards to Terry I have taken a "if you don't have anything nice to say don't say anything" policy. Every once in a while, if you like his work send him a note telling him so. Don't endeavor to increase his suffering. The same fate may await any of us.
I don't understand why anyone would do these things.
Terry wrote an entire OS+Bootloader, dozens of remarkable apps for it, the toolchain for the custom programming language it's written in (which he also created) by himself.
The scale of that achievement boggles my mind. There's no -lreadline anywhere there.. No curses.. No gcc. No copy/pasting phkmalloc and so on.
Absolutely nothing that he didn't write himself.
I'm stunned by his achievement.
And yet we're googling for videos where he's manic for laughs?
Have some fucking respect.
If you can't do that then have the manners to keep silent.
This person achieved more than any developer I'm aware of and none of us are in position to mock him.
You can't just blame it all on the sickness. He's apparently an extreme racist, crazy or not. The way you put it sounds like he doesn't even exist and is all just the sickness.
Having read a lot of what he's said, he uses words and phrases in an idiosyncratic way that isn't the same as they would be used by, say, a politician. He may or may not be racist, but he's schizophrenic so we should probably chill out on him and go police someone who isn't schizophrenic instead.
Good job of convincing or educating me with that strong argument. How about you tell me how it works instead? Right now you're making it sound like a schizophrenic can do whatever they want, whenever they want because they are victims. Even if it's outside an episode.
I'm not someone who takes the mental illness excuse lightly, but I have from time to time had the privilege of catching Terry in a more lucid state and let me assure you the man you understand him to be is not who he is.
Would you accuse a person with tourette's syndrome of racism due to their outbursts? This disease is far more pervasive and systemic than that.
Vincent van Gogh was similarly mentally ill as a society we look past the things he could not control and instead focus on what he has created. I suggest the same course of action here as I believe the situations are uncannily similar. This is all I will say on the matter.
