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Comment by cmdrfred | Hacker News Reader

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.

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I'm with you cmdrfred.

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.

Shame on those who are trying to.

You make it sound like Terry is completely innocent. Have you seen his comments?

A sufferer of schizophrenia is not guilty of the way their condition manifests. They are the victim of an illness.

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.

I suggest the book angelhead to give you some perspective on this. If you come to understand this condition you will regret this comment.

https://www.amazon.com/Angelhead-Brothers-Descent-into-Madne...

You make it sound like he's braindead and has no own will. He posts racial slurs even in his most sane comments.

Your comments have all the empathy of someone who has zero understanding of schizophrenia.

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.

Thank you. If that's the case and he's completely normal without any racism and hatred between his episodes I was wrong and I apologize.

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.

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