10 ms·
TempleOS
- rvnx 6y agoI'm not sure I understand what's going on there ?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dekken_ 6y agoit's a very deep rabbit hole
- newswasboring 6y agoFunny you put it that way. There is a good youtube video about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCgoxQCf5Jg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCgoxQCf5Jg
- nicolascolla 6y agoI would advise against supporting the author of this video in any way. Maybe he is not consciously doing this, but these "down the rabbit hole" videos put a giant target in socially awkward or "unstable" people who are then flooded with trolling or abuse from some of the people who watch them. I'm sure that this video was a reason for the torrent of trolls that started engaging with Terry Davis before the end of his life and contributed to his deterioration.
- morsch 6y agoBefore you watch the meta-commentary about TempleOS, here it is in its purest form: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBE6glZNJuU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBE6glZNJuU They were all like that.
- Epskampie 6y agoAs always, there's a complete explanation on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_A._Davis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_A._Davis
- halayli 6y agoYoutube Terry Davis. There's a thin line between insanity and a genius.
- dekken_ 6y agoyou could say they often overlap
- moron4hire 6y agoI suppose one could say that, but it would not be supported by evidence. This is just visibility bias. Sane geniuses aren't loud.
- Kaze404 6y agoHe was mentally ill.
- christoph 6y agoThe BBC did a reasonably good audio piece about this & it's creator: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000b4r3 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000b4r3
- bmn__ 6y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFab1dN9GXs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFab1dN9GXs
- DaveSapien 6y agoFor those interested in a (very good) overview of Terry and TempleOS in a video documentary format: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCgoxQCf5Jg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCgoxQCf5Jg
- joshschreuder 6y agoI really miss reading Terry's comments here. He was the single reason I turned on showdead - they weren't always insightful and were often offensive, but they were always an interesting view into his mind.
- donatj 6y agoHe commented on my website once that my complaints about binary sizes were alleviated in TempleOS with Holy C. One of the highlights of my life. The world has lost a real gem. https://donatstudios.com/Golang-Binary-Sizes#Comment23602 https://donatstudios.com/Golang-Binary-Sizes#Comment23602
- enriquto 6y agoFirst time that I read about this man. A really sad story, his last years of life (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_A._Davis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_A._Davis ). TempleOS is an incredible achievement!
- thdrdt 6y agoYou can find them here: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TerryADavis https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TerryADavis (small warning: he was very rasist, but because of his illness it is hard to tell if he could do something about this)
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoIt only goes back to 2015, and replies on his oldest comments seem to imply he was known on HN before then[1]. Was there another account? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TerryADavis&next=9260587 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TerryADavis&next=926...
- krebs_liebhaber 6y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=losethos https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=losethos
- jerrycruncher 6y agoThis has been discussed many times in the past [1]. tl;dr: The creator was a brilliant programmer who experienced a psychotic break late in his life, which led to chronic and severe schizophrenia. He killed himself in 2018. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=templeos.org https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=templeos.org
- kratom_sandwich 6y agoIIRC he was an active reddit user as well, so there are many discussions over there as well
- wolfhumble 6y agoOh, I wasn't aware of his passing . . . According to his Wikipedia page #1) He passed away August 11, 2018, just the same day he posted his last video on YouTube (the same as included on his TempleOS home page): https://youtu.be/oH41gGBVpkE https://youtu.be/oH41gGBVpkE His Wikipedia #1) page says the following about his passing: "Investigators could not determine whether his death was suicide or accidental, although the train engineer believed his death to be a suicide. The police report stated that Davis was walking with his back toward the train and that he turned around before the moment of impact". Bless his soul! #1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_A._Davis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_A._Davis
- mkl 6y agoHere are (some of?) his HN accounts: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TerryADavis https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TerryADavis, https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=TempleOS https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=TempleOS Warning: not for the faint of heart - banned for obvious reasons.
- serf 6y ago>Warning: not for the faint of heart - banned for obvious reasons. I lived through it - on 4chan, reddit , and HN. It's still not obvious to me why he'd be banned, I don't think you should hand wave it that easily. The guy had mental issues, but he had some amazing lucidity at times. If I owned a movie theatre or restaurant I surely wouldn't ask someone with vocal tourettes to leave the establishment, and if I did i'd be ostracized all over the media and community -- so it's not as clear to me as you seem to think it should be why he was treated the way he was on the various forums. I get that he said abrasive and racist comments routinely; but I think there is something to be said about the fact that his voice was routinely listened to and considered on 4chan's /g/, and routinely sequestered and removed on HN and reddit. 4chan turning their attention to him wasn't a good thing, nor is it usually ever, but that forum did give him a place to talk without fear of bannings, karma struggle, deaded comments, whatever. Treating someone as good as they are treated on 4chan is a low bar. Back then the HN method of constant deading and shadowbanning felt heavy handed and unneeded; we're supposed to be adults who are aware that mentally ill individuals exist in real life and here on HN, but the way it was dealt with was by silencing an already schizophrenic person so that the 'normal' crowd could go on with business as usual. I can't think of a more head-in-the-sand response, and I'm not even saying that it wasn't a required action to keep the forum discourse on some level of civility , but boy does what happened to Terry make me feel nauseous -- the same kind of feeling I get in the pit of my stomach that is usually a sign for me that I am witnessing something morally uneven. I don't know the solution, nor do I claim to. I just feel bad about what happened. As someone who chatted in emails with him after his bannings, I still feel bad about his treatment and demise, and I miss him and his technical insights immensely. I think he got a poor run of life, and I wish that more people had been supportive of him, able to filter out the profane for the insight -- especially since he became fascinatingly technically capable and astute when spoken to personally with your 'vocabulary filter' on. Terry was an individual by which most mistook his trees for the forest -- and I'm glad to read in this thread that I'm not the only one with that positive sentiment towards him and his memory.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- seek3r00 6y agoAFAIK, TempleOS seems to be the only operating system running everything in supervisor mode. I wonder what would happen if we can find a way to build software protection in supervisor mode, ditching user mode and associated context switches.
- zozbot234 6y agoMS-DOS did the same, as do most embedded OS's today. Separate address spaces are definitely needed these days in order to avoid Spectre vulnerabilities, but that's only an information disclosure concern. Ideally, OS's would explicitly support information protection domains (after all, this is already a feature in some niche, specialized OS's) and only sensitive info/data would be protected by a switch to a different protection domain. Most user tasks which deal entirely with non-critical data could simply run in a shared address space.
- qayxc 6y ago> Separate address spaces are definitely needed these days in order to avoid Spectre vulnerabilities That's nonsense! Separate address spaces have nothing to do with hardware vulnerabilities. The MMU uses address spaces to isolate processes from each other, which is required for proper multi-tasking. If you don't use process isolation, every task can overwrite the heap and stack of every other running task (including the OS kernel and drivers!). Information disclosure (in this context) is only relevant in virtual environments, where multiple tenants have to be strictly isolated from each other and affects (hardware) VM supervisors. It's a different topic entirely.
- zozbot234 6y ago> If you don't use process isolation, every task can overwrite the heap and stack of every other running task (including the OS kernel and drivers!). This is not a concern if all code is rigorously checked for memory safety which is quite feasible in principle, and possibly already the case for some uses of WASM/WASI. (Native binary code would need to be annotated with low-level proofs, to be checked by the OS.)
- lihaciudaniel 6y agoRest in piece King Terry you'll always be the king of the.... CIA and the cattles. You will always be the best
- fauria 6y agoI remember this interesting read about Terry Davis and TempleOS from Vice: God's Lonely Programmer - https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wnj43x/gods-lonely-programmer https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wnj43x/gods-lonely-progra... It was discussed in HN (2014): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8658283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8658283
- kernoble 6y agoI didn't realize he died. It's a real shame that his illness had control of him.
- the_dripper 6y agoHe didn't die because of his Schizophrenia in case you think so. He got hit by a train because he was walking on train tracks and didn't see it.
- diath 6y agoIt was indirect cause though, if it wasn't for his schizophrenia, he probably wouldn't have become homeless and aimlessly wandering through the states which is when that happened.
- hutzlibu 6y agoWas that sarcasm? A person without schizophrenia usually does not walk on train tracks and in case they do, they usually are aware that trains can pass by. So now while also other people sometimes get hit by trains, in his case his mental condition might be related.
- pletnes 6y agoSo why was he walking on a train track? Is this uncorrelated to his diagnosis?
- void_nill 6y agoSome time ago I published four small articles[1] about templeOS. Unfortunately I had less time to deal with this OS. I can only guess that you should have a look at this OS. If you ignore all the religious information you can experiment a lot. Even though Terry was very ill, I have an incredible respect for what he did. There are not many people who have put their own OS on its feet and even implemented very unusual ideas of their own. All this running on ring 0 is pretty exciting. [1] https://alligatorbrowser.github.io/voidnill.github.io/a/a32.html https://alligatorbrowser.github.io/voidnill.github.io/a/a32....
- 0xebfc 6y agoOh, cool. I saved this to my templeOS notes. I've been thinking about writing a technical analysis of TempleOS, in the style of the the Xinu OS textbook [1]. No strong reason for doing so, though it is curious how much more one could learn about him by identifying patterns in the code and OS structure. It will probably take me a while to recover from my current burnout to look at a holy-influenced C dialect, though. A venture into the library of babylon requires preparation. So, I'm just passively collecting writings that already exist, and the likes, like you just posted. I'm on the #templeos IRC on irc.rizon.net, if you would like to chat sometime. It's pretty inactive, with sprinkles of relevant conversation occasionally. 1: https://xinu.cs.purdue.edu/#textbook https://xinu.cs.purdue.edu/#textbook
- nathell 6y agoAlso well worth reading: A constructive look on TempleOS http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos/ http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-temp...
- obecebo 6y agoI ported a SNES/SFC Emulator [1] to TempleOS earlier this year, and more recently started porting the old Apogee game Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure [2] [1] https://gitlab.com/obecebo/bahamut https://gitlab.com/obecebo/bahamut [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPdUoEA8E54 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPdUoEA8E54
- the_dripper 6y agoRIP Terry A. Davis
- Netcob 6y agoI can totally understand why this is a constant source of fascination for programmers. It's a one possible answer to the question "What would I do if I was stranded on a deserted island with a working computer but no OS?". We use all this software developed by other people, and many of us wonder how much of that we could make ourselves, given enough time.
- thdrdt 6y agoThere are many great ideas in his OS and programming language. One idea I miss very often while programming: embed info like pictures in your code (as comment). It would be great to add flowcharts, diagrams, screenshots into code as comments (an IDE could collapse this as needed). Does anyone know if there are languages that also can do this?
- throwaway744678 6y agoI sometimes embed plantuml diagrams in comments; your IDE of choice might have a plug-in to render the diagram (Jetbrains IDEs do)
- thdrdt 6y agoAh wow, I never heard of this. Just installed PlantUML into Jetbrain's Rider and it works great.
- srgpqt 6y agoSeems like this could be achievable in any language with a special doc comment notation that supports image references similar to Markdown.
- zozbot234 6y agoDoc comment notation is not a language concern. You could simply start writing Markdown with image references and if your documentation generator supports it and can resolve these refs, they'll be included. A different approach is to use a literate programming tool like NoWEB in which case the code is included as part of the documentation, and extracted separately.
- diath 6y agoYou could probably embed images in language comments as base64 and then have a plugin for your favorite text editor that renders those (which would probably be easily achievable with Electron-based editors, not so much in others). Even then, that would be a bit of a pain in the ass since other people would just see long strings. I don't think I can name a single language/technology that does it out of the box though.
- smoyer 6y agoI think there's a real lesson to learn from Terry which was perhaps magnified by both his personality and this community. The truth is that there are people all around us that suffer from various degrees (and types) of mental illness. Some are undiagnosed while others feel they need to hide their diagnosis due to shame and/or public stigma. I appreciated that Terry didn't hide who he was, nor did he shy away from saying what he thought. As pointed out elsewhere on this thread, some of his comments could be offensive while others could be brilliant. What we can learn from Terry's contribution here is that, we don't know what demons others here are fighting and sometimes tolerance can be a very charitable gift - not tolerance of abhorrent comments but rather tolerance of the individual. RIP Terry!
- mettamage 6y agoIMO your comment (and others) show to me why privacy is such an important thing. Shame is one thing, and IMO already reason enough to want privacy but one could argue that it's debatable. Being bullied, however, (as stated in another comment) really shows why privacy is needed. Even if you get all the praise in the world, if you get too much negativity, one can die from it (most likely indirectly). I find it very harsh and unfortunate to say, but this seems to be the case. While everything is debatable, I could imagine that not everyone thought about this particular reason (I haven't nor have I ever read this from privacy advocates) and find it a more compelling reason to uphold privacy.
- ndespres 6y agoThe most sad part of Terry's death is that he became the object of fascination and obsession of a forum of internet trolls who actively worked to make his life worse. I think he was off his medication and homeless at the end of his life, due in part to the goading of the trolls. I was interested reading Terry's posts and thoughts, and spent some time playing with TempleOS. Unfortunately some people couldn't leave him alone.
- kenster 6y agoI personally interviewed Terry and delivered a care package for him in '18. I am Kenneth from the BBC interview: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000b4r3 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000b4r3 Things were pretty much on a downward spiral after 4chan funded his drum set: Terry got kicked out, and then Terry's van got impounded along with $1000 of a lot of electronics. Once he was homeless living in CA, people thought (and rightfully so) that he would die on the streets. It's such a shame what happened, honestly. 15+ years of social isolation and events in his past ultimately led to his downfall. His death made me very distraught, especially after meeting him in person months prior. Meeting him left a profound effect on me because he was so appreciative and seemed mentally sharp when he engaged with me.
- rvnx 6y agoI read and watched a lot about the story since this post. It's a very sad story on many aspects and likely controversial (giving him publicity, contacting authorities, ignoring him, banning him, etc); all these actions had consequences and forged his mind this way. I wish more people would support him and his family instead of encouraging him in his dementia. This software is certainly good food for thoughts, not just about computers, but life in general, so it could be worth including it in some sort of museum.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoWhat happened with the drum set?
- gccxsse 6y agoPeople from 4chan donated money for a drumset. He got the drumset and then his parents kicked him out because of the noise.
- diath 6y agoMake sure to check out Shrine (based on TempleOS) that adds networking and many other things. Website: https://shrine.systems/ https://shrine.systems/ Source code: https://github.com/minexew/Shrine https://github.com/minexew/Shrine
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoI ask out of curiosity, not dismissiveness: What is the goal of this project? Without context, it strikes me as somewhat akin to adding details to a Picasso. The reason I'd use TempleOS is to get a peek into Terry Davis's mind, so what happens when someone else adds networking support? Is it seen as a research project? Just something fun to play with?
- diath 6y agoI don't know, I'm not the author, just something I remember seeing related to TempleOS, I'd guess just a hobby kind of thing, we're on _Hacker_ News after all, so tinkering with technology just for the fun of it should be the priority.
- schwartzworld 6y agoI kind of get it. TempleOS seems like a pretty cool project, and making it into something suitable for actual modern use sounds fun and ambitious.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- southphillyman 6y agoI was just wondering what happened to this guy since I rarely saw his comments anymore. Didn't realize he was well known outside of this forum
- Ariez 6y agoPoignant quote https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmltIMPMeP0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmltIMPMeP0
- westmeal 6y agoRest in peace Terry, you were gods programmer.