Terry Davis has died
templeos.org
templeos.org
Terry's HN account https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=TerryADavis
TempleOS creator Terry Davis is homeless and living in a van https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16105043
TempleOS is applying to Y Combinator. Partners desired, send an email https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9246855
A Constructive Look at TempleOS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9681501
TempleOS: 5 minute random code walkthrough https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8349910
Porting third-party programs to TempleOS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9843065
TempleOS: FlightSim and FirstPersonShooter https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9673554
Mal Lisp for TempleOS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15840054
Mega Man for TempleOS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13971627
Lots of fake screenshots are circulating around, so "proofs" by screenshots of emails are doubtful at most.
The guy who admittedly impressioned Terry on social networks is also known for taking money from Terry's PayPal. (Along with at least another guy who manipulated Terry into giving him $200). He said he did all of this "out of concern for Terry" It's the same guy who first claimed Terry's death on twitter.
He's now in damage control and wiping his internet presence after the infinity Chan crowd is trying to link him to the events.
Lot of disinformation around. Some people refuse to believe Terry's death until confirmed by a third party. Some other are spreading FUD and flood with stuff like "he's dead lads. Let's all forget and move on, shall we?" Some are just trolling around falsifying screenshots and "proofs". And some are just derailing threads to pull down any constructive discussion. And in this shitfest, kiwifarm is avoiding the blame and accuse others and whenever someone point a finger at them.
This is one of the things that should be remembered when people say "don't use facebook": if you're not on there and you're a "public figure", even in a very small space, it opens you up for someone else to impersonate you. I know a couple of people who have Facebook presences solely to prevent fraudulent facebook presences from being created for them.
Well, I didn't have `show dead` on. It's actually really nice that HN has a setting for disabling this filtering.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wnj43x/gods-lonel...
Discussion on hn: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8658283
I hope someone writes a book about it. I love learning about long term solo artworks like this that are difficult to appreciate.
Pouring one out for this passionate artist tonight. rest in peace
It was the kind of crazy that I'm sure resembled Tesla's less-good ideas, but everyone there was in agreement that while we didn't plan to switch, what he showed was truly original.
Like many of you, this story makes me really sad. I struggle with mental illness, but not like Terry did. It had to have been hard - not a strong enough word - and I never feel like we're doing enough to help.
All I can do, at this point, is stand and be counted.
While I'm nowhere as severe as Terry, I do suffer from manic depression (bipolar II), and if it weren't for the support of friends and family I'm certain I would have offed myself years ago.
Terry suffered from an illness, but he was undoubtedly a smart guy. TempleOS and HolyC, even if they were niche, are certainly interesting projects, and aren't something that any lay-person could make.
While I'm relatively certain that his racist profanity-filled posts are how he's going to be remembered, I'll try and think of him as a misguided and misunderstood person who needed more help than society was really able to provide.
He needed a lot of help, but a great hacker has passed, and we should remember him for his work
Seconding this. He was a great programmer, and deserves to be remembered.
God decreed that 640x480 in ring 0, was enough.
He made and OS that was far beyond an average person. He also spouted hatefull messages constantly. It's a package deal
I'm not quite so sure. Michael Jackson, for example, isn't remembered today as a pedophile or a degenerate, even though everyone was quick to demean the man while he was alive. Maybe the same will be true for Terry Davis. Respect is often something that is given posthumously. People tend to forget and forgive when the negative is vastly outweighed by the positive.
There may be some element of feeling guilty because he was shadow banned here. It seems to be a common pattern that people who didn't know how to help when the person was alive feel some kind of responsibility for the death, like he might have lived if only we could have figured out how to engage him more effectively or something.
Individual outcomes are never entirely individual. There are always a great many factors involved and that makes it complicated to figure out who is responsible for what and how much.
I didn't really know him. But it's nice to see some of the remarks here. I sometimes am very angry when I see nice comments about a dead person who was excluded in life. But I don't have any idea how it could have been handled differently in this case.
Some things are simply tragic.
In short, a tragedy should be upsetting, especially when at the heart of the tragedy was a bright man with a serious illness.
His last youtube video from the local library made it sound like he wasn't having a particularly good time there.
He's suffered so long from his mental illness, frankly I'm surprised it didn't happen earlier. I can't begin to imagine how difficult it's been living such a challenging life for all these years.
From what I saw, occasionally watching his streams, there was a significant amount of internet bullying and general predation going on with Terry and it really messed with his already strained life.
It's all a huge bummer.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/TempleOS_Official/comments/9c63qr/t...
Our lives have far more worth than we know, of this I am convinced.
The Internet bullying angle angers me.
He would probably still be alive had he never started streaming. It was brutal. He was unable to distinguish fake manipulative interactions from the truth. He live-streamed things like reading spoofed emails from internet crushes, presumably with those responsible watching as it unfolded, with total disregard for his well-being and mental condition.
He didn't really interact with his followers too much. Most of his later live streams were just him broadcasting his thoughts. If you followed his train of thought for like 7 or so minutes you could see the kernel of some truth.
His live streaming also enabled him to collect donations from his followers. I gave him a few bucks numerous times when he was hard up.
I'm going to call it. From his last video(Aug 11th 2018): https://youtu.be/oH41gGBVpkE We see he is at the Dalles county library.
Later in the evening (Aug 11th, 2018), The Dalles Chronicle reports an unknown man was hit by a train: https://tinyurl.com/ybakopls*
The only question which remains is wether it was suicide or not. A witness described him as "straddling the tracks". It doesn't seem likely to be an accident.
If you require more authoritative firsthand confirmation, phone the PD yourself.
Yes, the police department of The Dalles, OR. I believe you have both their phone number and email address.
"there was a significant amount of internet bullying and general predation"
Hmmm, I think it's more complicated than that... Terry (because of his illness) said a lot of horrible things, including claiming to commit pedophilia, rape and murder. His comments were very often filled with racist rants.
Yes, some people responded very poorly to those comments. You can maybe forgive them for either not knowing Terry had a debilitating mental illness, or not knowing how to respond to someone with that illness.
But if anything I think there was an enormous amount of sympathy and defense of Terry.
There were also a bunch of copycats making those same racist and violent rants. Perhaps they were just pretending. Perhaps they were being ironic. I believe echoing the dark parts of his behavior was exploiting his illness, more than anything. Others acted like it was celebrating him.
Regardless, I hope he is in peace now. I believe he would have wanted people to keep TempleOS going, and I hope someone does. I also hope we all learn a bit more about mental illness and how best to respond to it.
I don't know, maybe I'm more crazy than average, but this feels like a good explanation of why people are so obsessed with him. Not every homeless person in the US gets enough donation money from 4chan to run their own website and video show.
Terry was the proverbial homeless person: Schizophrenic and paranoid. Too sick to be helped or supported. It's easy to get frustrated with the homeless people you see day to day, but I think it's extremely important we acknowledge these people's humanity and keep them from becoming wallpaper.
I disagree with that. He definitely was not too sick to be helped or supported.
Taking a shot at people with whom you disagree undermines your message. What might have been thoughtful is now a diatribe based on a stereotype.
Though Wikipedia already has such a link confirming it. I don't think you need to prove it.
Edit: Or did. I can't find it now. I was sure there was a really short page for him on Wikipedia when I looked the other day. At the moment, he only appears on their disambiguation page without a page of his own. It also shows a death year of 2018.
(I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to log in to FB and search for his name.)
It is worth noting that he would not have been able to truly participate in this very discussion, due to the shadowbans he received on multiple accounts.
We hackers and founders obviously suffer from mental illness and poverty, yet some of us do really well -- rich beyond most folks' understanding.
I don't want to get into a discussion of "what's wrong with society". I just want to know: why aren't we taking care of our own? We obviously have the resources. If we can do a basic income experiment, we can take care of the Terry Davis's in the world. Why aren't we?
Our medications are not good enough, nor are they well-tolerated enough, and sometimes even with medication and money and strong supports and a willingness to try to improve patients still don't get better.
An important point. I am not talking about giving people money. I'm asking if we care enough to try to figure out how to help them. I make no assumptions on what kinds of help would be useful or not.
1. Resources. Money and people are the two hardest resources, although space can also be a problem, especially when you start taking eg homeless shelters. It's not enough to have a big pile of money to spend on the problem, it's hard to find people who want to take on a front-line position in solving it.
2. Morality. It's odd to say, but one of the harder questions when trying to help people is how to do so morally. What if someone doesn't want help? What if they don't want the sort of help you want to give them? The low-hanging fruit of helping people is giving help to people who want it. What to do when someone refuses to leave a dangerous situation or refuses medical treatment is a hard question if you still want to help them.
3. Information. Having resources available to provide help to people who want it is all well and good, but if you don't know who needs help and people who need help don't know about you trying to give it, it doesn't do much good. Knowing who needs help is a really hard problem. Even if you have a vague notion that your neighbor is having a rough time of things, you don't always know how rough of a time, and they don't always tell you.
4. Risk. When you put yourself out there to help, you make yourself vulnerable. That scares a lot of people. Most people are nice people and most people aren't dangerous but some people aren't and are. If you do anything in the world that involves people, including helping them, problems will crop up. The challenge here is mitigating the risk of them without losing your humanity in the process.
If the four points above don't daunt you, then the next thing is to avoid the classic hacker mistake: reinventing the wheel unnecessarily. There are countless organizations already trying to help people out there. Can you join one and help it help more hackers?
I learned of Terry only after he was shadow banned. I don't know what went down before that.
How a person's issues are addressed by others can amplify or mitigate their issues. The dismissiveness, social isolation and similar typically exacerbate their problems.
If Joan of Arc were alive today, she would be in some psych ward getting her meds adjusted, not playing handmaiden to the birth of a country.
In order to reach someone like Terry, you need to genuinely respect them. This means entertaining the possibility that something real and meaningful is happening that isn't mere insanity. Even if you aren't comfortable calling it "God actually talks to this person," you have to allow for the idea that they are experiencing something meaningful and not merely chalk it up to insanity because it falls outside of our current mental models for certain things.
That's a rather tall order.
When I was homeless, a different forum actively heaped abuse upon me and told me it was my fault. They did that to a lot of people. I wasn't the only one.
That sort of behavior is super common and can drive you crazy if you don't start out as such.
(I will add that they ultimately banned me for basically bullshit reasons that boil down to "No, you just aren't allowed to have a positive experience. There is no redeeming yourself in our eyes because you never did anything wrong to begin with and we aren't willing to admit it's us, not you." Many people get behind the 8 ball socially and find that no matter what they do, the world won't let them get out from behind it because the world is racist, sexist, classist, whatever. It's designed to justify their abuse.)
I don't fit in anywhere. I never have. I have a lot of (personal, not financial) assets in some sense and I'm still struggling to make my life work.
It's hard to find a place to talk about my experiences and make sense of them. The fact that I was homeless for nearly 6 years makes it hard to relate to anyone.
If I talk about those experiences, I'm assumed to be complaining, a drama queen, a political activist etc. You talk about going to the office and no one thinks that's some bid for attention or whatever. I talk about my life, it's somehow a problem to say it at all, no matter the framing.
I'm extremely fortunate that I was on the street with my adult sons. They knew me as something other than a total fucking loser. That helped enormously with preserving my identity and head space from the worst of what can happen to your mind on the street.
My sons also knew to just not leave me alone and also not engage the crazy when I was suicidal. It was a best case scenario that most people will never see.
I'm also fortunate to have reconnected with a forum I participated in years ago that is full of really great people who are actively helping me try to figure out how to socialize "normally" again.
Spending a lot of time homeless creates an inherent barrier to feeling like society cares about you, you are acceptable etc. Every time you open your mouth, you have to decide between denying those experiences happened or accepting the stigmatization that goes with admitting to it. It's psychologically a no win situation.
That's kind of rambly. I'm trying to engage your question in good faith, but it's a difficult thing to talk about because people want to act like mental health is something bad happening in that one defective person's mind. They don't want to hear that there is a huge social component and how we treat such people is part of the problem.
I wasn't here before Terry was shadow banned. I don't know if the forum could have handled it better. But I have seen far too many cases where people who are different are mistreated and then told it is their fault. And I'm absolutely certain that's literally a crazy making experience that helps paint people into a corner from which there is no escape.
Thank you for asking.
This seems like a no-brainer.
It's controversial to talk about Facebook's origin story, but the generally accepted interpretation is that at times Zuckerberg worked with other people and subsequently turned around and screwed them. "Ladder kicking"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_review_board
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uLzaKlZSQQ
Clearly a very intelligent and insightful guy. On the other hand, he also comes across as racist and an egomaniac, and it's debatable how much of that we can chalk up to mental illness.
On a cynical level, I don't think he was the "right" kind of mentally ill person for a charity campaign. Someone who is rendered, for lack of a better word, pathetic, or pitiable, by mental illness is a good poster child that will encourage visibility, donations, etc. However, no one wants to be the company sponsoring a guy who brazenly and defiantly calls everyone who disagrees with him a CIA n-word, while repeatedly claiming himself "the smartest programmer who ever lived". Simply put, no one pities an asshole.
That's not a judgment on him specifically, more on society as a whole and how there are social repercussions for showing pity on "the wrong" kind of people.
EDIT: I'd also argue that giving him a platform whereby his worst behavior can be encouraged and goaded by faceless followers is probably the worst thing you can do to a mentally-ill person.
I agree that for some mentally-ill people that it can make them more sick.
But is "more sick" better than dead? I don't care how obnoxious or racist the guy is. I hate his opinions myself. From looking at the video, this is not somebody I would want to be associated with. But I don't hate the person. I hate his opinions. No matter how worse his behavior becomes, if he's alive, there's hope, right?
Isn't this the problem? People from a particular looked-down-upon outgroup are those that we would really, really not like being around, and we don't know how to help them, yet we feel that we should? (regardless of the group or why we feel we should help them)
The sad fact is that it's very hard to take care of and control people like Terry due to their illness. They have delusions and think you are out to get them.
If you look at the criteria for schizophrenia it becomes a bit more clear: https://www.webmd.com/schizophrenia/schizophrenia-tests
For this, we need no UBI. Simply donating to him suffices.
This is a democratic vote in terms of money about society's problems. This vote shows that most people find this all quite OK.
I do not argue for that, but I argue that the behaviour of many people provides strong evidence that this is the opinion of the majority.
This is why we need UBI... because charity doesn't scale to the level of societies unless you force it to.
The unfortunate reality is that we haven't yet figured out how to really help these people. There are no perfect solutions. There aren't even really any good ones. Even for a family member who's motivated to help, and who's spent a lot of time and effort understanding these illnesses, there's very little that can be done.
For the most severe illnesses, the drugs that are available are still too primitive to ease the symptoms without bringing other side effects that many people have trouble accepting. Some classes of illness work so that while taking the medication, the person doesn't believe they need it, and without taking it, they're incapable of making the decision to start taking it. Keeping those people medicated is difficult, at best.
For anyone suffering with less severe forms of mental illness, I'd strongly encourage you to try out different doctors and medications until you find something that works for you. Many illnesses seem to progress with age, and the people who are treated early in life have much better chances of living happier, healthier, longer lives.
There are no easy answers, but I think that early treatment and de-stigmatization of mental illness probably offers our best chances of real progress.
NSFW, prepare for an abundance of profanity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBgIBF9Y6PE
http://ia600600.us.archive.org/31/items/TerryADavis_TempleOS...
from what I can quickly see - lots of videos, articles, ISOs, etc.
R.I.P. Terry!
https://thepasteb.in/p/O7h5jQ47DAQFq
In Memoriam Terrance "Terry Muthafuckin" Andrew Davis Rest in Peace, 1969 - August 11th, 2018 Terry was hit by a train on August 11th around 9pm in The Dalles, Oregon, where he had been living on the streets, shortly after uploading the last video to his youtube channel [citation: https://media.8ch.net/file_store/8f7768746a7f506321a02470643...] Furthermore, BipolarBear, var-g, and some others claim similar emails/ phone calls to the police, as well as to The Chronicle (the paper that first published the train story) In addition, Therese Davis (Terry's sister) released a FaceBook post about his death, as well as some other poorly timed deaths. Furthermore, it seems TheTemple, who opperated a fake Terry Davis FaceBook account, released rumors of a fake Terry's death shortly after the real death but before anyone had knowledge of it.
Archives of Terry media:https://archive.org/services/xsl.php?xsl=/includes/locations...
> Therese Davis (Terry's sister) released a FaceBook post about his death, as well as some other poorly timed deaths.
What does that mean?
It's a real shame, sometimes. I feel there is a lot that can be learned from Terry Davis and TempleOS.
https://ia600600.us.archive.org/31/items/TerryADavis_TempleO...
That somebody [his family?] was encouraging people to donate to the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation. I know from my own research into nonprofits that this is seemingly a good and legit charity for mental health research. I would encourage HN readers to check it out.
There's a lot of discussion we, as citizens in the US, should have about safety nets for people with mental illness, and I think it's clear Terry wasn't getting the help he needed. There are homeless folks in every major city in America who are similarly dealing with mental illness, we just don't hear about them because they aren't brilliant programmers working on such an odd project that it almost demands attention from fellow nerds.
We have no idea what hardships Terry's family dealt with. He was certainly brilliant, but not always kind or calm. I've found him fascinating for years (in a sort of "there but for the grace of god go I" sort of way, as severe mental illness runs in my family), but he could be incredibly hostile and unpredictable (in addition to the overt racism that ran throughout his work and words). He was banned from HN numerous times (someone linked an HN profile of his but he's had several) for his hostility and racism. I'm not saying this to speak ill of the dead here...it just seems awful to blame his surviving family when we know so little about what went on that led to him being homeless. I don't know that they'd ever see it, but it's still kinda shitty to blame someone's family for not doing enough, especially when we don't know anything about them or what they did for Terry.
The sad truth is that while he had family that cared about him that wasn't enough. He should have been hospitalised imho.
About 11 months ago, his parents kicked him out.
Source:
> https://www.reddit.com/r/Drama/comments/7218gh/templeos_crea...
I didn’t know you...but I respected you. You had mad coding chops and a sense of humor one can appreciate when they view your YouTube videos. Reviewing the code of TempleOS made me a better programmer.
Long live Holy C and 640x480...
RIP and thank you.
A virtual friend.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBgIBF9Y6PE&t=451s&has_verif...
9:20 mark. It's Terry so the language is NSFW.
RIP
I'll make sure to tell the legend of "el solitario programador de dios" to my fellow countrymen.
Descansa en paz Terry.
http://www.thedalleschronicle.com/news/2018/sep/07/man-kille...