Complete index

0. Rabbit Hole (in Part I)
1. Attempt at biography (in Part I)
2. Utilitarianism (in Part I)
3. Standing on the shoulders of giants: side effects (in Part II)
4. Complex vs. simple
5. Weird and brutally honest
6. Creating as medicine
7. “Too weird to live, and too rare to die”
8. Important resources

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Complex vs. simple

TempleOS consists of 100,000 lines of code that take up only 1.4 MB.

All comparisons are odious and there are thousands of caveats or asterisks to take into account, but only to visualize the meaning of these numbers:

• Windows code is estimated to be around 50 million lines of code.
• If we clone the Swift repository locally and run this command git ls-files | xargs cat | wc -l (source), it yields 4,642,904 lines to date.
• If I use the same command on Fitterfly, an incomplete side project consisting of an iOS app with about ten screens, it hovers around 10,000 lines of code (about ten percent of the TempleOS total).

YouTube was one of Terry’s favorite means of communication with the outside world. He amused himself with his own video games, played music on his virtual piano, philosophized.

In one of them, he devotes thirty-nine seconds to simplicity:

An idiot admires complexity. A genius admires simplicity. A physicist tries to make it simple. An idiot… anything the more complicated is, the more he will admire it. If you make something so cluster fucking he can’t understand it, he’s gonna think you’re a God, because you made it so complicated nobody can understand it. That’s other, right? Journals and academic journals… they… they… try to make it so complicated people think you’re a genius.

This is, without a doubt, what is called a “hot take”. Quite common in his statements in front of the camera. In the same vein, there is a famous principle that we developers often repeat:

KISS: Keep it simple, stupid!

Applicable to the SDK developer sub-branch: a co-worker, a potential user of our piece of software should not be impressed by our implementation by the amount of complex structures and cryptic terms we use, but by how wonderful it is to achieve a very complex functionality by writing a few understandable, simple lines of code. The design of public APIs in a software package is an art in itself. How do you manage to hide the difficult to understand in an interface that is clear, concise and yet customizable? Like the tip of an iceberg that does not let you see the huge mass of ice that continues it.

A clear example is Stripe, and its famous seven lines of code to integrate a payment processor into any website.

Unpopular and brutally honest

His first appearances on the web were chaotic: posts with zero responses, he was labeled as a spammer in portals like Hacker News, several of his publications were deleted by moderators. Indifference, skepticism, disgust or insults were the common currency.

The guy kept talking. Weird, controversial, incomprehensible, the guy decided to keep doing it.

And, eventually, he achieved some recognition.

The web, today, is not like it was several years ago. Spending a few minutes on Instagram, TikTok or Twitter is enough to get the point across: it seems like all the time someone is trying to sell you something. Likewise, it seems that all the time those who speak or write or post issue messages with special consideration to what the listener wants to hear, to what the algorithm decides to prioritize or viralize. It is a constant cacophony of words, videos and images oriented to increase metrics in this new media.

Experiencing Terry’s brutal honesty makes us miss a bit those old days of the internet. A schizophrenic with an immutable leitmotiv, speaking his mind openly, naturally, transparently, without double meanings or hidden intentions (”I have a set of values but if you don’t like them, I have others”).

As a comment on the internet says:

It’s a random guy who wrote words and programs. He wrote them because he had something to say, not because he was expecting people to listen. People will listen, probably, if what you’re saying is powerful/important enough. Or not. Clients are not always right, and there are proofs of that in history. But it’s important to keep talking, if your words are better than the silence. And at least for me, Terry’s words are better than silence.

Customers are not always right, and there are proofs of that in history: who would think that a novel like The Name of the Rose, a long, complex and academic crime story in a 14th century abbey, riddled with fragments in Latin, an almost dead language only understood by the elites, would become a worldwide best-seller? A publisher would never recommend a similar plot and style to achieve commercial success.

Marketing studies and demand metrics are dwarfed in the face of a sufficiently strong message, in which the sender cannot avoid its transmission, as if it burns as long as it is not externalized.

Creating as medicine

At the beginning of the last century, Picasso found problems in the art of the moment. The creations of his colleagues were very western, adulterated by the influence of knowledge, culture and the constant self-reference of our civilization. He needed to go a little further back, or to the side, to unravel the knot of artistic complexity to get to the essential, to the core of any expression.

That is how he began to look for creativity and innovation outside the galleries. Tribal or indigenous art, popular art, children’s drawings paraded under his magnifying glass. In all of them, spontaneity was evident, accompanied by the absence of filters typical of conventional academicism. Pablo went so far as to say, about children:

“All children are born artists. The problem is how to continue being artists when they grow up”.

Going deeper into the direction, he advanced into a more controversial category: what relationship exists, if any, between art and mental illness? Hand in hand with the evolution of psychiatry, the analysis of productions of schizophrenics or psychotics became an area of interest to try to better understand the mysteries of the human mind.

An example is the case of Adolf Wölfli. A difficult childhood, orphan, victim of sexual abuse, psychosis and hallucinations, he spent much of his life in a psychiatric hospital. At some point during his stay, it seems that he began to draw. His psychiatrist urged him to continue doing so and so, today, his creations are considered part of what is known as “marginal art” or “art brut”.

If we extend the definition of art outside the conventional categories such as painting, literature, music, etc., we could consider Terry a faithful representative of this trend in the field of computing. All the bits that make up TempleOS, in addition to the monologues of its creator in his live demos, have strong expressive characteristics, particularly in the religious field: by entering the operating system terminal, one can generate pseudo-random phrases that simulate a communication with God, commonly called “tongues”.

Perhaps TempleOS acted as a channel, not only from God to the rest of mortals through his messenger, but also as a way of making a tormented reality more bearable.

“Too weird to live, and too rare to die”

In Submission, my first read by French novelist Michel Houellebecq, a hypothetical future is narrated in which Islam gains political power in France. Suddenly Jews turn to Israel, the wearing of burqas increases… The protagonist, a university professor jaded with his life, has a dialogue with one of those responsible for the mutation at the Sorbonne, where professors who adhere to the religion begin to enjoy excellent salaries and gain access to polygamy. His interlocutor mentions the “typing monkey argument” to justify the existence of a higher being:

Yes, the universe is very beautiful; and, above all, its gigantism is astonishing. Hundreds of thousands of galaxies, each composed of hundreds of thousands of stars, some of which are millions of light years away, hundreds of billions of kilometers. And, at the scale of a million light years, an order begins to form: the galactic clumps are distributed until they form a labyrinthine graph. Expose these scientific facts to a hundred people chosen at random on the street: how many will have the courage to maintain that all this has been created by chance? All the more so since the universe is relatively young, fifteen million years at the most. It is the famous argument of the typing monkey: how long would it take a chimpanzee, randomly typing on a machine keyboard, to rewrite Shakespeare’s play? How long would it take a blind chance to reconstruct the universe? Surely more than fifteen million years…!

Similar musing to one Terry had as he watched his pet bird stare intently at his computer monitor:

Who am I talking to? I don’t know. What’s reality? I don’t know. You just have to us when my bird was looking at my computer monitor I thought whoa that bird has no idea what he’s looking at and yet what does the bird do? Does he panic? No, he can’t really panic, he just does the best he can is he able to live in a world where he’s so ignorant? Well… he doesn’t really have a choice, yeah, he can kind of live it’s not it’s usually usually usually the birds okay even though he doesn’t understand the world and he can kind of learn what’s safe and what’s dangerous so uh that’s where I’ve been living I think if I had to guess I think I’m in a mental program they I have had a fake internet and I’ve been struggling to tell them it’s God but they don’t listen you’re that bird looking at the monitor and you’re thinking to yourself I can figure this out and you know maybe you have some bird ideas that are maybe that’s the best you can do.

Islamism, Judaism, Catholicism (TempleOS), Buddhism… all variants that try to explain, in some not strictly rational way, the why of all this. To give an answer to the immense confusion that surrounds us from the first minute of existence of every human being, as if we were a bird watching the screen of a schizophrenic programmer while he creates an operating system to communicate with God. And to offer, although from the atheist point of view it is no more than a consolation prize, the possibility of a certain transcendence beyond the short life we have as individuals.

Terry explains the distinction between “mortals and immortals,” as he sees it:

…it was a weird day when i realized that when i was young there was a huge chasm separating mortals from immortals and people like led zeppelin that made songs they were immortals and in one day i realized holy fuck i can make a song i was like wow that is the weirdest thing my whole life there was like the immortals are the ones who make the music and the mortals are the ones who listen like holy fuck i was like wow if i just play some notes i make a song and that’s all it is you just act like a monkey not that’s not entirely true i’ve gotten better at um anyway but it was a weird day it was a weird day when the chasm between the immortals and the mortals…

What is the decisive factor in the division between mortals and immortals, then? The act of creating. The act of bringing to life something that was previously just a collection of scattered ideas. As an all-powerful being (let’s call him God) supposedly does with this reality, his creation (or one of them).

Terry’s turbulent mind created endlessly. Not only in the closed environment of his own operating system, but also in the brainy reflections that we can see in the lost archives of the Internet. Creations that represent the antithesis of the repetition ad aeternum of much of the industry: software that is not governed by utility, of high religious content, that breaks with a thousand and one of the good practices that we learn in manuals, but that at the same time invites reflection, that breaks down reductionisms, categorizations, classifications, framings.

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Having spent the last chapter of his life as a homeless, traveling through random cities throughout the United States, is a significant fact. There are explanations, conjectures, attempts to order this wonderful, interesting and mysterious reality in which we are immersed, but everything seems to indicate that certainty will not be given to us. At least not in life.

Terry deleted all his videos from his official YouTube channel. In 2018, in Dallas, Oregon, he stopped at a library (The Dalles Wasco Country Library), where he used a computer for who knows what. He felt watched, typical weirdo. He got out, sat on a bench at the entrance, pulled out his cell phone and filmed the last and only video present on his channel. He praised the library. He called himself an impure person. He mentioned a castle in the vicinity of the site. He called himself a king. His last words in front of the camera were:

Maybe I’m just a bizarre little person who walks back and forth.

Minutes later, he was run over by a train just meters from the site.

I read the comments on the video… one follower said:

«Maybe I’m just a bizarre little person who walks back and forth.»

Aren’t we all?

RIP Terry

Aren’t we all?

Important Resources

• TempleOS | Down the Rabbit Hole: great work by Fredrik Knudsen. His channel consists of a series of documentaries about strange cases in the internet world, and Terry’s story fits perfectly. The perspective is approached from the programmer’s appearance as a forumist on Reddit and HackerNews, promoting preliminary versions of his creation in a strange language, which draws attention to the rest of the users. Abundant evidence: comments, videos, testimonials, anecdotes.
• The Digital Human - Devotion: BBC podcast. It takes as a starting point the tragic death of Terry in The Dalles, Oregon. From the repercussion of the report of his death (at the beginning, a homeless that after the infinite calls of his fans became a human with name, surname and a strange and beautiful story behind), attempts to analyze both the creator and the created from several prisms begin: technical, artistic, religious, psychological.
• The Internet Archive: an exhaustive collection of almost all the bits that Terry produced in the digital world: YouTube videos that are no longer available, documents with his appearances on forums, written reflections, tutorials, TempleOS ISO images… A puzzle of information.