TempleOS: – God, the Random Number Generator

https://christine.website/blog/templeos-2-god-the-rng-2019-05-30

by boyter • 7 years ago

99 15 7 years ago

grawprog2• 7 years ago

I'm not sure why or if it's just me but the run button in the example given in the article here: https://christine.website/static/blog/tos_2/wasm_exec.html Seems to be greyed out and unclickable on mobile. I tried chrome and another browser based on gecko and the same thing occurred both times.

fastball• 7 years ago

Works fine for me on iOS Safari / Chrome.

grawprog2• 7 years ago

I'm on android. In chrome the button's just unclickable in the other browser it automatically selects the text box and opens the keyboard instead. Even zoomed in directly onto the button.

artificial• 7 years ago

Is bolting on a TCP/IP stack really annoying?

microcolonel• 7 years ago

It's more unwise than annoying.

brighter2morrow2• 7 years ago

The early paragraphs of this article are a huge distraction from the rest of the article. So the article is supposed to be about someone porting a random number generator to webassembly, but inexplicably pontificates (without sources or references) that Terry Davis believed in some 4-sided Trinity of God, and that Evangelical Christians are like Terry, and how Evangelical Christians think insanity is normal (all without sources). Making a bunch of unfounded hot-button religious statements is a sure fire way to distract people from what could be interesting about a random number generator written in web assembly.

azhenley• 7 years ago

I started reading the article hoping it would be about a clever alternative implementation for random number generators, but closed the tab after reading the first two paragraphs.

devoply• 7 years ago

Post about random number generators, meh, post about TempleOS while stirring the pot... Top HN. But yeah, historically mental illness was closely linked to divine inspiration. Before modern times it is very likely Terry would have been some sort of oracle in a temple. To a schizophrenic benign things start having meaning and they focus on those things and build a whole narrative around them, in this case a whole technology is built around it. How is that not different from any religion. A whole system of meaning and narrative is built around things that to an outsider seem silly or insane and yet they utilize some common ideas that have a lot of resonance to all of humanity.

Schizophrenia is a spectrum disorder, (meaning there are high functioning schizophrenics that can go about routinely in their lives), of unknown origin, maybe it's a way for some sort of virus or bacteria to control all of human society. Maybe it's a normal part of human behavior and society and has been for a long time.

fwip• 7 years ago

It's part of an ongoing series about TempleOS. TempleOS is the point of the article, not "porting a random number generator."

I don't think that starting with the King James Bible is a particularly useful approach for random number generation in WASM.

pvg• 7 years ago

It's an article about TempleOS and the author is (briefly) trying to put TempleOS's use of randomness in context. Perhaps the interpretation is too superficial or inaccurate for your tastes and standards but it's not really 'inexplicable' nor do you need 'sources' every time you write (or read!) a bit of introductory material.

psidex• 7 years ago

There's some more discussion about this on lobsters

https://lobste.rs/s/ztfqvk/templeos_2_god_random_number_gene...

brighter2morrow2• 7 years ago

I think Terry was more right than most of us would dare to admit. Playing with the thought of setting up a fund to build a statue in his honor!!

Not the kind of comment I was expecting to find there. I was told lobsters was "a more serious alternative to HN".

harry8• 7 years ago

Look through the comments when this is more or less done. Decide if the quality of coments warrants having temple os on the front page yet again. (How many times now?) Everything sensible has been said, repeating that signal just gets lost in the noise. Noise at best...

snazz• 7 years ago

This is certainly a well-known phenomenon, both on here and other similar websites. However, the subject matter is genuinely interesting (there’s a lot to be learned from the design of TempleOS and HolyC) and the linked blog post adds new content to the discussion instead of simply rehashing the argument. She does a great job of avoiding most of the controversy in both of the posts in the series, which can’t always be said for many of the other articles on this topic. The first couple of paragraphs probably weren’t necessary, but they did provide context for people who were unaware.

I find it deeply unfortunate that we can’t have a good discussion on the interesting technical aspects of Terry’s project as opposed to the man himself, especially since the post is about one particular technical feature.

sas41• 7 years ago

Here is a great video on TempleOS and Terry Davis himself. It talks about the development of the OS, it's history and his life in a chronological order.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCgoxQCf5Jg

TempleOS: – God, the Random Number Generator

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