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Comment by demallien | Hacker News Reader

I Thought I'd repost some of losethos's comment, seeing as he is hell-banned, but the comment was quite relevant.

losethos: Smart American kids my age had C64s and Apple IIs. We all entered 6502 machine code into DATA statements in BASIC programs. Everyone did it. It seems so fantastical and primitive to a monkey, doesn't it. Generally, we used monitor program to disassemble and assemblers, though you had to buy an assembler. Every store had magazines with BASIC programs full of DATA statements with graphic and machine code data. People typed it in. We had xsum bytes on blocks.

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Er, that reads quite differently in context than it does here.

The guy is an sad combination of brilliant and stark raving mad. If he were medicated, I think he'd be a decent guy. In the meantime, he appears to be a homeless guy wearing a sandwich board and yelling gibberish into a bullhorn. Who made a complete operating system.

re: losethos

What I've seen of his writing here (by clicking on my profile, turning on showdead, and going to userpage losethos) is about as mad as this,

http://www.chartrain.org/PDF/Finnegans.pdf

Actually, considerably less mad. Try to read that, and then try to read losethos's comments. which can you at least get some sense out of?

Why, losethos - if you ignore the 'crazy' sentences. If you ignore the 'crazy' sentences in the above link, by contrast, you are left with only chapter numbers and the closing words "Paris, 1922-1939."

At least in Losethos there is something in between the 'crazy' stuff.

Anyway, why did I choose the above link for comparison?

Because it's James Joyce!

So returning to Losethos. He might be 'stark, raving mad', but at least there's something to read and understand if we ignore all the detours.

Anyone who dismisses him outright clearly doesn't have a liberal arts education grounded in having to read real nonsense. After reading some of his posts, I have nothing to declare about his mental health - and neither should you.

> I have nothing to declare about his mental health - and neither should you.

He told the world he was schizophrenic, as well as describing at various times his (clearly schizophrenic) rationale for certain things, such as the random number generator that he believes God uses to talk to him. It's not a secret, and it's not something anybody is just guessing about.

That's useful, and you should link it.

It would have saved this thread a lot of arguing. (People misinterpreted the issue to be that he hand-coded an OS.)

The person who willfully misinterpreted it in that utterly nonsensical way claims to have now done his homework, so he should have found it already. Losethos has left an easily-followed trail across far larger swaths of the internet than just HN.

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=343...

Is...

>>losethos are you schizophrenic?

>Definitely. Are you? One minute accusing me of disability fraud, next minute not ntaking meds.

...the extent of your claim that he "he told the world he was schizophrenic" or can you find a more specific link?

Seems plenty specific to me. There's also [1]. And as far as I've seen, he's never disputed it anywhere.

You've edited it from your post now, but that he has strong credentials is neither in dispute nor relevant. Schizophrenia can present at different times in life, and even when its onset is early and obvious, it may not become anywhere close to debilitating for many years, even without any treatment at all.

[1] http://www.metafilter.com/119424/An-Operating-System-for-Son...

Interesting. In spite of all the outbursts, still more readable than Finnegan's Wake, though.

I can also see someone doing this exact same thing while trolling. So, for now, I will not go from a look at some guy's weird comment history to making a medical diagnosis of a stranger over the Internet. And I don't think anyone else should either.

It would also be interesting for you to apply your diagnosis skills to religious claims throughout history that God has spoken to someone, if you are able to do so over the Internet.

Losethos's behavior is schizophrenic. That the behavior might be an artificial construct of a non-schizophrenic human is possible but unlikely. Such elaborate and prolific trolling kept up over the course of more than a decade is rare if not unheard of.

The idea that supposed prophets were often schizophrenic is hardly a novel notion to academia.

I'm unclear on your motive here. Do you want everyone to think he and anyone else acting similarly is a troll simply to be dismissed? Are you arguing for simply demonizing the mentally ill rather than offering any understanding, because there's a chance they might be trolls? And if they are trolls, might that not be a symptom of a different sort of mental illness?

I assume you're trying to accomplish some sort of goal you think worthwhile, but I'm at a loss to understand what it might actually be.

I've thought about your statements and probably you do have enough evidence to back it up. This is an unusual case, and the evidence should be reported more fully when it is stated. i.e. people shouldn't just claim this without reciting the facts in detail.

More generally, I would not try to read that much about people's personality from their writings on the Internet.

I suppose in an exceptional case like this you can. But isn't it enough to say that the guy cannot communicate without derailing himself onto delusional-sounding and off-topic religious interjections?

That would not require a diagnosis and would explain to everyone why the community regards him the way it does.

Why don't you say what you are trying to accomplish? I'm curious too.

Comparing Joyce with schizophrenia is to understand neither and to do a grave disservice to both.

The problem is that losethos is quite obviously suffering from a severe mental disorder. His posts are not usually so racist, but almost always include a lot of religious, well, insanity. It's sad because a few lines of his posts are usually very much on topic, buried in a morass of debilitating drivel.

I don't know what he's like if/when he's on medication, but to me, it seems a shame that his posts end up not being seen. To that end, I appreciate someone having hoisted the salient portion.

I get that he's mentally ill (I read up on his OS the other day), but I do take exception to the repost of part of his comment. Because his comment is ridiculous. "Monkey" is meant as a racial slur. "American" is meant comparatively (where the smart people learn assembler!), not just incidentally. Taking it out of context like that doesn't make it salient just because it's not as obvious what it means.

So it's fine, I guess, not to judge him, but we ought to keep judging his comments, which are hellbanned for good reason.

I haven't seen anything written by this guy. Can someone explain why people on HN seem to conflate mental illness with writing an operating system? Is this just the HN attitude of having just learned js/ruby yesterday and being afraid of low level details?

I used to work on a small kernel just as a fun hobby project. I haven't had much time to do much with it lately but it was a lot of fun. I would think that this should be encouraged instead of mocked.

No, no, he really is mentally ill and he really did write an impressive-looking operating system [1]. Also the post quoted above really is packed with racist vitriol. Take all of that literally.

[1] http://www.templeos.org/

You're way off base here - consider turning on showdead and reading some of his posts, or even just googling the guy, before making wild assumptions. Nobody is snarking on losethos and designating him mentally ill because he wrote an OS. losethos is genuinely mentally ill.

I did google him. The impression I get from HN comments:

1. I see posts making fun of this guy's mental illness.

2. I see posts making fun of how he's working on an OS.

I don't think either one is particularly cool.

Did you turn on showdead and read his comments as you were advised to, or did you just decide to remain willfully ignorant while drawing absurd conclusions?

Can you please re-read what you're replying to? I do not feel that it went through.

I presume from your response that you are OK with:

1. Making fun of mental illness. (I hope that mental illness doesn't have to afflict your family before you realize what's wrong with that.)

2. Making fun of working on an OS. (Still uncool.)

To answer your question, yes, I read his comments.

I presume from your response that you're an arrogant, presumptuous asshole who can't conceive of the possibility that someone disagrees with your characterizations.

Ouch. I'll keep that in mind for next time I attempt a kind word for people with mental illness, that nknighthb has a problem with that.

Your very first post in this thread was a deliberate insult to the entire community dressed up as a request for "explanation".

On behalf of people with mental and neurological issues of all stripes, please shut up. We don't need your "kind words". Just the opposite. We need people who think they're "defending" us by being holier-than-thou assholes to stop talking.

> Your very first post in this thread was a deliberate insult to the entire community dressed up as a request for "explanation".

IMHO nobody's really made a convincing case that at least some small part of this community hasn't ostracized this guy for either his mental illness or for his interest in operating systems. Having looked at comments surrounding this guy I still see people doing both. I've gotten some nice replies from people who aren't trying to judge him but I still do see other users doing both. I wanted to speak my conscience about that.

> small part of this community

Reflect on that for a while, then compare it to the first comment you made.

From reading this thread I see the original post was clearly off the mark but everything else that asveikau wrote after that seems more than reasonable to me (and not inaccurate either: I have seen plenty of people on HN make fun of losethos for both being mentally ill and writing an OS - both of which I feel are very wrong). On the other hand, you are the one that comes across as a compete asshole here.

Presuming I'm "OK with" horrible things based on no evidence is "more than reasonable" to you? Then it must be "more than reasonable" for me to presume you're OK with victim blaming in other contexts?

Initially, you didn't give me a lot of context when you dismissed me as a pompous ass. You didn't give me any reason to think you had read and understood my original comment. My reading of it, without that context, was to assume you were OK with dismissing people based on their health problems. This especially bothered me because I have a family member with such problems. I've seen so many people be dismissive of this kind of thing seemingly because they have never experienced anything like it, and without a lot of context in your reply I put you in that bucket.

When I saw your reply to my reply I understood a bit better, and so please allow me to say right now: I am sorry. At the same time I did kind of feel that you went a little overboard in your reaction.

Thank you.

I feel like you're reading a different HN than I am. Can you link some concrete examples of someone 'making fun' of either losethos's mental illness, or his OS?

have you turned on showdead and seen some of his recent comments here on HN yet? seriously, you seem more interested in getting up on a soapbox and making wild generalizations about how the community 'makes fun of mental illness' - something I can't say I've seen much evidence of, quite the contrary in fact - than in actually familiarizing yourself with the guy in question.

I may have been tainted by the first thread I saw here making reference to this guy. Someone basically directly, flat out said you'd have to be crazy to write your own compiler and OS. I am searching on Google and using HN search and I can't find that thread. It was a few months back.

But in my searches I did find people making fun of the guy very directly, albeit a long time ago and in some cases downvoted:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4466947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4467278

And the more recent discussions, even in this thread... I do feel they have a bit of a subtext.

Who is making fun of his mental illness?

Could you link to one of the posts making fun of his mental illness or making fun of how he's working on an OS?

Here is the website for his OS: http://www.templeos.org/ (redirected from losethos.com)

It's common knowledge that losethos is a schizophrenic.

> Can someone explain why people on HN seem to conflate mental illness with writing an operating system?

Nobody here does. It's just that this specific guy happens to have written a simple graphical OS from scratch apparently without anyone else's help.

He also believes God speaks to him through random noise and posts random text created from mixing up Bible verses as being what God just said. He is, really, classic schizophrenic. There's no other way to say it. He hears voices nobody else can hear and he believes it is God talking to him.

> Is this just the HN attitude of having just learned js/ruby yesterday and being afraid of low level details?

Now you're just embarrassing yourself.

> Now you're just embarrassing yourself.

No actually, I am not embarrassed to point out that this problem exists on HN. Read any comment thread that deals with low-level anything. It's painful.

Edit: Prerequisite: to feel just how painful it is, you must understand the topic being discussed.

> to feel just how painful it is, you must understand the topic being discussed.

Of course I do, which is why your comments are so laughable.

LoseThos is a self-admitted schizophrenic who frequently posts racist and religious rants that are extremely diverged from reality. This has nothing to do with low level details of anything, and much more to do with the fact that LoseThos is genuinely mentally ill, yet also wrote a strange, beautiful, functional system.

A video of TempleOS (formerly known as losethos):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0MsDl39UL0

That's really weird stuff.

You read some threads on HN about low-level details and they annoyed you, and so now you get to imply that I "just learned js/ruby yesterday and [am] afraid of low level details" because I used the words "OS" and "mentally ill" in the same sentence, context notwithstanding? Knowing what you know now and rereading my comment and your reply, can I expect better of you in the future? Perhaps a bit of due diligence and more charitable interpretations of other people's comments is in order...

My original comment wasn't necessarily directed at you specifically, it was a sort of open question based on having seen threads here discussing mental illness and writing an OS.

That said, it's not so much of a stretch to take a literal read of this:

> I get that he's mentally ill (I read up on his OS the other day)

... and conclude that there may be a link between OS and mental illness in the author's mind. I did find it a puzzling juxtaposition.

Puzzling enough to spend 5 minutes checking out what I was talking about first?

edit: grammar

To be frank, the juxtaposition is still odd.

Turn on showdead and check his comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=losethos

Downvotes continue. I have seen this story before. For a self-styled "hacker" community this place values orthodoxy an awful lot. And passive aggressiveness to boot. I think it must come from an excess of javascript and VC bullshit. ducks

Also they are unable to tell when I am joking or exaggerating.

Maybe someone can put together some sort of losethos filter bot to automate the hoisting.

I'm not sure there's enough substance buried in the racist drivel to be worth bothering in this case. More than a few of us here are old enough to have spent afternoons typing in BASIC programs with lots of DATA sections from the back pages of computer magazines.

I'm struggling to understand how an anecdote about that brings much that is 'relevant' or 'salient' to a discussion of truly oddball languages like BANCStar.

It's also interesting that whenever the subject of losethos is brought up, the discussions take a strangely reliable turn. Someone (or several someones) makes a comment that includes the words "mental illness", racist/racism, religous/religion, medication.

I've read most of this persons posts and have played with his operating system a little. I feel so sorry for them that their brilliant mind is caught up in noise. There's an enormous amount of insight in his posts.

Smart American kids my age had C64s and Apple IIs. We all entered 6502 machine code into DATA statements in BASIC programs.

Yeah, but (similarly to the 'environment' that is the subject of the post) those DATA statements contained the output of some sort of tool. Nobody wrote machine code this way.

> Nobody wrote machine code this way.

I'd be careful about that claim.

It was not that unusual to "hand assemble" programs, as it was not that unusual to remember the codes. The 6502 has less than 60 documented opcodes (and quite a few undocumented ones with various weird but in some cases somewhat usable behaviour) and only a few addressing modes, and all opcodes are single byte, so knowing most or even all of them doesn't take that much exposure.

Some of those values are so ingrained that I still remember the decimal values, despite the fact that the moment I started using tools to work with assembly on the C64, it was all hex

e.g. 169 decimal is "load accumulator immediate" (LDA #[8 bit operand) on the 6502. (or A9 in hex)

It was not that unusual to "hand assemble" programs, as it was not that unusual to remember the codes.

Yeah, I grew up with 6502s, too.

You'll think I'm weaseling out here, but "hand assembly" isn't what I was talking about.

I feel the original comment implies that some people, intending to write significant machine code, sat down with BASIC and started typing in DATA statements. And I don't think that happened to any significant degree.

As in the case of the "programming environment" under discussion, machine language routines force-fed into BASIC DATA statements were the output of another tool or process -- whether assembled by hand or by machine -- and were an intermediate form that was never intended to be editable.

> Nobody wrote machine code this way.

Not true. I personally did in Z80.

I hand-assembled machine code for the 6502 for a couple of years in my youth.

I was 12, couldn't afford an assembler, and my school wouldn't pay for one. I wasn't exactly writing VisiCalc, so a notebook and a pencil were plenty good enough.

Chiming in with the others - I did. I didn't do a lot with it, but I did. Didn't even know what an assembler was - I just though everyone did it by hand.

I'd read some code that showed JMP $5000 and LDY 32 and figured people just knew that JMP was a particular byte, and LDY was a different one, and you just did it. While it did seem cumbersome, I didn't have much else to compare it to.

I wrote some small screen animation utilities (ASCII screencast recorders, essentially) and later some C128 'enhanced graphic mode' stuff, moving a pointer with a mouse. I think by that point I'd learned the C128 had a small assembler tool built in, so that made things easier.

actually I wrote 6502 and Z80 with opcodes

also if you look up for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIM-1 you will see how I entered code, all with calculating jumps and branches in head. It is actually fun exercise

I can't express how startled I was when one lone teacher (thanks, Professor Nutt!) taught me how simple an assembler was to write, that the inner workings of a CPU can be understood by mortals, and bootstrapping a monitor and language interpreter atop bare metal is a thing you can do.

You've been contradicted a number of times now so sorry to pile on but here's a nice webpage about a classic videogame (in the UK in the 80s, at least) with an example halfway down the page of (literally) hand-written/assembled code: http://sandywhite.co.uk/fun/ants/

It's sort of misleading to present this without the racist drivel that surrounds it.

Why is it misleading, when the racist drivel that surrounds it is clearly mostly or entirely a manifestation of his illness? (if you've followed his history, you'll have seen him much more lucid, and the religious and racist rants is something that has come as he's deteriorated)

Did you read the original? In context it really does mean something different than it sounds like it means here.

Yes, I did read the original, and while it has some fairly disgusting content, I have also read a lot of what he has written and seen his deterioration to the point where I feel more sympathy than disgust despite what he writes.

I understand that it is hard for some people to accept any part of what he's writing when he's expressing himself like that, though.

He's one of a few reasons why I keep showdead on, as while I fully understand why he's banned and wouldn't advocate undoing that, I also feel he should not be fully ignored.

Oh yes, beeen there, did this. But at some point I wanted to build my own programs and wrote a real assembler in BASIC, because writing Z80 opcodes in DATA statements wasn't an easy to write programs, and even less to debug :)

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