Everybody should turn on showdead in the settings and check out losethos' comments here. Psychopathy is really interesting and fascinating, but so is schizophrenia.
It boggles my mind how anyone can write such nonsensical rambling comments while at the same time coding a 64 bit operating system from scratch.
Let's all prattle on about the guy as if he isn't an active member of this forum. The man can read you know, most developers can. I'm not trying to censor discussion but it just seems a little odd to publicly deconstruct this guy in every mental health thread like he's some type of lab specimen. It is indeed possible to read comments while hellbanned.
The relationship between this community and losethos seems very strange to me. Perhaps because this is the first community i've been involved in where hellbanning was a feature. Any other site would have banned him outright for his own good but the hellban encourages him to continue posting. The result is almost as if he's treated like a mascot, or some brilliant but obstinate child being actively ignored at the adults table.
We know he's there, he surely knows he's hellbanned, and he knows we know he's there. He's both the best and worst argument about hellbanning as an effective form of moderation.
You can actually see his condition gradually getting worse over months and years. I wonder if he would have turned out differently had we embraced him - and helped him?
After the hellban several years ago all his submissions were automatically killed instantly after posting. So you can't blame the community for not responding, the system made it impossible to respond/upvote at all.
This is one of the reasons why hellbanning is such a bad idea, leaving the poster to believe that everybody is actively ignoring him instead of just not being able to see him/interact with him.
Making regular healthy people waste a lot of their time posting content and feeling totally ignored is bad enough, subjecting people with mental health issues to that is even more unethical.
Ah, damn, the fact that that post is dead is very sad. I know it's years old, but, losethos, do you still need advice? (I'll probably see your reply, as I have showdead on). We could probably get a thread going, if so.
In the past he has made reference to doctors and his parents. The impression that I get is that he is getting more help right now than HN can give him.
Is it our responsibility to help people who have down syndrome from hurting themselves? Is it our responsibility to help people with physical handicap? Is it our responsibility to help people suffering from depression?
I'm offended by the thought and the idea that we should just ignore our ill. What if the person suffering from the mental illness was your brother or sister? Think about if it was you, and no-one reached out to you - how would you feel?
"Responsibility" is one of those words that makes it really hard for people to talk to each other.
If a person does not go out of their way to do the things you listed, I do not consider that a moral failing on their part. Especially if the cost to them is more than the benefit to the other person.
If you keep jumping on bullets, sooner or later you run out of flesh.
I find it sad rather than fascinating, wish I could hug the guy. I know this isn't the time or the place, and that I could probably not help anyway. But still, every time I see a post of him with that greyed out font saying "move along, nothing to see here" gets me right in the feels. When some sports star or programmer with family dies from stupid or natural causes or commits suicide, we are upset. When someone is obviously unhappy and unable to successfully interact with others, we are annoyed, instead of being happy they're at least still alive.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to ramble. I have no criticism or suggestions to offer, just vague frustration and helplessness. But it does frustrate me, it's something that's been on my mind a lot of times, so thanks for the opportunity to say it, FWIW.
I think people are taking this the wrong way. A psychopath is not someone who is suffering a heavy mental disability who you should hug and comfort. Whether the personality type is a disorder or an innate talent/ability is up for debate.
A psychopath is a cold calculating personality type unburdened by empathy and certain emotions. These types of people are generally portrayed as super human by hollywood. Classic example: James Bond.
I'm not talking about psychopaths, I'm talking about the author of TempleOS and his posts here. And frankly, it was mostly a figure of speech. I wish the guy health and happiness, is all.
> Whether the personality type is a disorder or an innate talent/ability is up for debate.
Well, if it's the inability to feel empathy, remorse, and other things, shouldn't that be obvious? For me it's not a special talent of a dead person that they don't have to eat, or of Eliza that it's not really sentient. That lack in one area can lead to overcompensation in other areas still doesn't make it a special talent, it's just the expected result of practice. Everybody can be cold or calculating - to my understanding the the difference between that and a psychopath is the ability to NOT be cold and calculating. If being calculating is all that's on your palette, you get real good at it. This is my non-educated guess, anyway.
At any rate, you misread my comment, read it again, taking the post it's in reply to into account :)
It is (ironically, considering the topic at hand) one of the worst phychopathic tendencies of society. We care the most about the people who need care the least (celebrities), but we dislike the "annoying liabilities" who really needs care.
When people stop providing value and start requiring value instead, their perceived societal value drops dramatically. In a way it's completely logical, but it's also really heartless.
Thing is, in their mind, they're not rambling. They believe they are saying something intelligible. They have thoughts, sometimes mixed up, and feelings, and try to express them - but something in the delivery smashes it to bits. So the interesting thing to me is how you can read these ramblings and actually extract feelings and intentions from them, even though they make no sense. Usually it's very sad and lonely.
There is a fascinating internal logic underneath it all.
I had a schizophrenic guy send me regular e-mails for about two months. For reasons still unknown to me, he decided that I was the one person in the world that he could trust.
The first e-mail was very short and looked like spam. It was a brief note about how the death of some professional wrestler wasn't an accident. Then they got longer and longer, and finally he started writing his messages out by hand, scanning them, and e-mailing me the scans.
This revealed something really interesting. He was scanning these things at work. He had what appeared to be a regular 9-5 office job at a large company, and he managed to keep a lid on things enough to hold down that job while writing pages and pages of paranoia to me and scanning them on the office multifunction machine.
The most interesting/amusing/sad part of all of this was a single handwritten page sent a day or two after one of the multi-page manifestos. It said, paraphrased, "I screwed up when I sent you that last e-mail. After I scanned the note, I tore it up as I always do, but this time I wore my glasses. I believe they read it." Evidently, this fellow believed he was under such pervasive surveillance that they (whoever they were) could see things through his own glasses. The elaborate procedures he went through to send me notes were apparently worked out to circumvent this stuff, but they required good operational discipline which he couldn't always handle. Or something like that! It clearly made perfect sense to him.
After a couple of months, I tracked the guy down with the help of some friends and got in touch with the local police so they could check on the guy, as he was clearly getting worse and I didn't think he'd be safe. I didn't hear anything after that until a couple of months later when a brief e-mail arrived from a relative that basically said, "Sorry about him hassling you, he's back on his meds now."
So, a happy ending, I guess. And certainly one of the most interesting things that's happened to me online.
What the fuck? Maybe this is too much of an immediate response for me, but why the fuck would you contact the police? Do the police seem like they take care of people like him well? Shit I feel bad for him, the one guy he thought he could trust just snitched on him, even if he was crazy. Must have been hell to undergo that. Maybe you should have posted to a forum about how to help him first, as opposed to helping? Now the police thinks he is harassing random people and has a legal trail just in case they want to discriminate against him.
The police conduct welfare checks on people who may need help. Despite the internet's fascination with police abuse, they can be quite helpful to people.
And maybe you shouldn't be so offhandedly judgmental. I actually called a suicide hotline in the area first (the only mental health service I could come up with) and, after I convinced them that I wasn't suicidal, it was their suggestion to contact the police.
But yes, I guess it was terrible that this poor guy got help and got his life back on track.
I was involved in this incident, as one of the friends who helped track him down. I believe contacting the police was a good move because his letters indicated that he was a danger to himself and to others.
Do you think schizophrenics know of their condition, or are they clueless that there's something biologically wrong with them?
To me, that seems to be the hallmark difference between hypomania and "real" mania, and what makes the latter more dangerous and scary-- the loss of insight into the condition, or that there even is anything amiss.
I had an accident on vacation once and was hospitalized. As a result, for a short period of time, whenever I would get drunk I would experience 'word salad' - some words I was trying to say would get changed into some other word when they came out of my mouth. But I had no idea it was happening - I heard myself saying one word, but my mouth emanated a completely different word. I only became aware of it when someone told me about it when I was sober. All my other faculties were totally fine, it was just the words got mixed up.
It hasn't reoccurred, but i'm now very aware that what I experience as reality is completely subjective to how my brain is functioning. Anything I experience right now could be a different version of reality. But at the same time, now that i'm aware it has happened, I can keep that in mind and consider it in the future. I have to believe that different forms of mental illness allow for the same kind of self-awareness, but it depends entirely on what parts of their brain are functioning (like if they can control their emotions and think clearly, which is hard enough for "sane" individuals already)
The clinical term for this is "anosognosia", which describes a specific physical, neurological inability to be aware of their illness. They literally have damage in their brain which prevents self-awareness. Something like 50% of cases of schizophrenia have some degree of anosognosia as well.
This is a big part of why schizophrenia is so hard to treat. With other disorders like OCD, patients generally do know they are unwell and are willing to accept treatment to improve it. With schizophrenia, patients are often rigidly convinced they are already healthy and refuse to be treated. They are incapable of understanding that they have an illness.
It differs from person to person. I've met people who know that they suffer from schizophrenia, some who are unaware, but know hearing voices is abnormal, and some who has no idea.
There's a big difference between the three. The first, the ones who know and care about it - you probably won't even notice he/she is suffering from it, unless they tell you. The others.. yeah.
Source: used to be a med student and a trained hospital sitter.
> It boggles my mind how anyone can write such nonsensical rambling comments while at the same time coding a 64 bit operating system from scratch.
Comments like this show exactly how poorly our culture handles mental illness. Imagine if someone had said, "It boggles my mind how anyone can be deaf while at the same time coding a 64 bit operating system from scratch."
He isn't stupid, he's schizophrenic. Aside from his disease, all of his other faculties are as fine as yours and mine.
That's not a fair example at all since hearing doesn't have an obvious relevance to coding, it's a mostly mental/visual activity (+ the physical activity of typing the code).
Schizoprenia on the other hand impacts the exact same faculty that is the most important one for programming, the brain. I don't think it's ignorant to be fascinated over how his illness so severly impacts his though processes while writing (and living), but apparently not while coding.
I've actually kept up with most of his comments throughout the years. I think he has a handful of other usernames. I know there is TempleOS. If you read between the lines of the crazy/racism/religion, rarely, he has very interesting points.
I've actually spotted him on other sites, usually commenting with a Facebook account. He actually gets some interest, some responses, some upvote-equivalents to his answers on other sites.
This is especially true when he is in racist mode, unfortunately.
You've noticed that too? Completely lexical followed by
C:\AMBIATE\INTRODUCTIO~1.TXT
This__-you__are__ will believe _- you __that_this_then_ if and only if _generated_text from _some_thing.
I watched a video demo of the OS, in which he shows how he generates the text. In all likelihood the parent I responded to was referring to parts of the comments that do not appear to be generated, just troubling.
IANA(Psychologist) but I always thought it might have something to do with memory consolidation, that normally happens during sleep, running wild. You can see some themes in the writing, and some semblance of recent news stories. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/beautiful-minds/200903/a...
It boggles my mind how anyone can write such nonsensical rambling comments while at the same time coding a 64 bit operating system from scratch.
Like many other mental disorders, schizophrenics alternate between total detachment and relative sanity. Also, many schizophrenics maintain their full intellectual horsepower even when affected.
Schizophrenics can also go into remission late in life (after 50) and reach a point where, at least with medication, they're relatively unaffected. Spontaneous remission isn't common with SZ but it does happen.
It boggles my mind how anyone can write such nonsensical rambling comments while at the same time coding a 64 bit operating system from scratch.