As far as I can tell, Terry Davis has been given multiple chances to get well. He chooses to be sick.<p>It's tragic, but you can only lead a horse to water, you can't make it drink. I've been on the side of trying to help a family member get better. It's impossible to help someone who doesn't want help. And it's one of the hardest things in the world to give up on someone who doesn't want help. You question your decision for the rest of your life. And sometimes you go back, and get reminded almost immediately you did make the right decision.<p>Also as far as I can tell, the only reason most people care about anything involving him is because of some stories about him being a "heroic" programmer. Not that they've had any realistic confirmation of that experience, because they almost certainly haven't tried any of his software. So there seems to be this perverse, backwards reasoning that "Terry says terrible things, but it's ok, he's sick, but he chose to be this way, but it's ok, he wrote his own OS".<p>It's terrible that anyone should have to live this way, even the worst people in the world. But I'm not terribly convinced that the concern I see expressed is anything other than asshole programmer worship. Take away, "he wrote his own OS", and I just have a really hard time imagining very many people giving two shakes.
TempleOS has no process isolation, so it's completely unaffected by Spectre and Meltdown. I'm starting to think there's a lot of wisdom in its design. Complexity of modern computer systems keeps increasing but the value I get from that complexity isn't increasing nearly as fast. Spectre and Meltdown are just recent examples of some of the cost of that complexity. Do we really need an OS too complex for any one person to completely understand?
The amount of dedication Terry shows for his project is beyond what you see anywhere else in the software dev space.<p>For anyone who hasn't, I recommend to watch his videos on TempleOS (there are a lot of hymn videos or ranting videos, you can ignore those), they are a genuinely interesting perspective into OS Development.
I know he's perhaps not mentally stable, but after all. He has problems and he does some amazing things.<p>Perhaps consider donating on top of his page: <a href="http://www.templeos.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.templeos.org/</a> ( paypal).
It's actually quite worse than that. Terry is kind of going through a "teenager" phase it appears.<p>Apparently he left his parents house and started living in his car and his family went to visit him unannounced. There was some kind of altercation (probably his family trying to physically get him back) and the authorities were called because of a disturbance and he was charged with "Battery" in Las Vegas. He plead guilty to some minor charges. During the same time he's been seen with what some are describing a hooker.<p>Unfortunately he also has an ongoing fascination with some famous YouTuber and predators/trolls are taking advantage of him by posing as her to get him to send naked photos =(<p>The Terry Davis story gets crazier every day and I have a lot of sympathy for him. It upsets me to see the some areas of the Internet exploit him for the whole "CIA" thing.<p>EDIT - A new development he was arrested in Arizona on the 27th of December for property damage? Get well soon, Terry.
He has a donate button on his homepage. I wonder if that brings in something? Anybody here who ever used a donate button on their website and can tell something about it?<p>How does one even receive 'donations'? Is that like getting paid? Do they have to create an invoice for tax reasons? How is it taxed?<p>It would be nice if there was a number, how much is donated per month. I can imagine donating something. Depending on how much cash flow there already is.
I wish there was a cure for his and his family's suffering. Irrespective of him being a genius, he deserves to receive the medical attention he needs.
Putting aside all the "mental illness/nutjob" talks that everyone likes to focus on so much, I would just <i>wish</i> that someone somehow would be able to connect with him and channel his genius (it is clear that he is quite good at what he does) into some project with a proper objective and guidance.<p>Bram Cohen has Asperger's and he could create BitTorrent which is widely used. I wonder if Terry Davis would create some game changer stuff as well if he had better support....<p>It is a sad situation.
I've read through a lot of Terry's posts on 8chan and his rants that got him banned from a few websites. He's totally fucked but a genius. I've tried TempleOS. It made my brain hurt to look at it and it really wasn't intuitive in any way at all. I like the concept of the OS, a full OS where everything is in the same memory space. But, it's way too annoying to really play with anything in TempleOS.
Does anyone have info about his current status? He has not updated his site since Dec 15.<p>As far as the van thing goes, he wasn't really homeless. He went to his parents house frequently and he could live there but chooses to live mostly in his van because he likes it.
Here is he sitting in his truck and working on his computer:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBGgi5Lqn0U" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBGgi5Lqn0U</a>
When I googled I found more details here: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Drama/comments/7218gh/templeos_creator_is_now_homeless/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/Drama/comments/7218gh/templeos_crea...</a><p>> Despite the mean spirited attention he gets, he does have a following of people who seem to genuinly feel for him, and want to do nice things for him. One thing his followers did which at least seemed well intentioned was buying him a drum set. Terry likes to use drum sticks, but didn't have a set, so a gofundme was set up and he was bought some drums.<p>> But shortly after receiving the drum set, Terry vanished off the interenet for a couple weeks. Eventually, this note was posted on his website:<p>>> I got kicked-out of my parent's house. I got in a fight with my Dad, went to jail then mental hospital.<p>>> I'm adapting to being homeless. Hope to get a car to live in but no loan yet.<p>> At some point after posting this note, he was able to get a van, which he's now living in.
Depending on "truck" it can be pretty alright.<p>See : <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UeVsHmKAFA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UeVsHmKAFA</a> (EV mod of VW kombi)<p>Make a kickstarter to fund his future green life.<p>ps: for some weird reason I expected him to look like anderson cooper..