this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2025
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I think Terry A Davis would have found god in chat GPT and could have figured out the API calls on TempleOS
Hard to say. I feel like it's about as likely he would have found LLMs to be an overcomplicated false prophet or false god.
This was a man whose operating system turned a PC into something not unlike an advanced Commodore 64, after all. He liked the simplicity and lack of layers the older computers provided. LLMs are literally layers upon layers of obfuscation and pseudo-neural wiring. That's not simple or beautiful.
It might all boil down to whether the inherent randomness of an LLM could be (made to be) sufficiently influenced by a higher power or not. He often treated random number outcomes as the influence of God, and it's hard to say how seriously he took that on any given day.
I'd imagine it's a fool's errand to try and find threads of logic and consistency in the profoundly schizophrenic.
What Terry enjoyed about computers has been echoed among lots of old heads in the unix world. On the tech front, he was solid.
It's the um, finding god in the code part...
The issue is not lack of logic and consistency, the trouble is a completely different reference frame.
Let me put it, to grossly simplify, in this way: Imagine you'd be dreaming while awake, no way to stop it, and would have to integrate all that craziness in real time. It's not that dreams make no sense -- they all have their rhyme and reason -- it's that they're talking a completely different language.
You might be hearing, out of nowhere, a cello note off to the side, move your gaze there, notice "that's my trashcan that makes no sense", and then be lost, and panic, lose faith in your senses, and that way lies psychosis. More productively, you say "ok mind which thought with as of yet unformed discernible meaning was it that you wanted me to pay attention to", look for the place the thought came from (as schizo, you can tell with your kinaesthetic sense), consider it for a while, still being oblivious of the meaning, and then go on with your life.
We're weird.
Oh, back to randomness: It can get you out of a rut and I do suppose that's how Terry used it, aware of it or not, and framing it however he did. Could also be using it to self-soothe, as in, distracting from a negative spiral. There's worse habits.
God, with almost 100% certainty, means "the genome and how it's speaking to me through my instincts" in his dialect. Because that's what it always means, what it always meant, for everyone, it meant that when it was the ancestors, it meant that when it became more detailed and became gods, it meant that when people realised all the gods are actually one thing, the theologists are just confused AF because politics and physics and cabbage-heads got into the mix. And so much for my schizo rant. Don't discount what I say because I'm crazy, the reason you consider me crazy is because it's true.