It's interesting that he's done more actual work than most of us. I would imagine he spends most of his time working on the OS rather than interacting with people. Kind of puts into perspective how productive we could be... And also how useless some forms of productivity are.
has he? making a booting from metal OS is a semester long undergraduate project, and this person has been working on it for way longer than that. in a semester, university programs expect you to write a kernel that boots to a shell with virtual memory management and multi-tasking. templeos doesn't even have virtual memory management.
About Machievelli: The Prince was (proably) a sarcastic piece[0], denoting the things he saw politicians doing and he thought should not be done. It's a shame that he's remembered as though it was an instruction manual.