Hello everyone, today I'll talk about Alternator, which is an open source implementation of the DynamoDB API, manufactured at CillaDB, where I currently work. I'm a software engineer at CillaDB and lately also maintainer of our REST driver. I also worked on the Alternator project. Before I talk about Alternator itself, I'll mention CillaDB, the database on top of which Alternator is built. CillaDB is an open source, no SQL database focused on maximizing the performance and fully utilizing the underlying hardware. Its original goal was to provide full compatibility with Cassandra API, which is already long done. An important difference between CillaDB and Cassandra is that we're built on top of a high performance async C++ framework, C-Star, also implemented by our company. The framework is also open sourced under a permissive license and you're welcome to browse it and use it. A CillaDB cluster, similarly to Cassandra, acts as a kind of distributed hash table. Each server in the cluster is responsible for part of the data, which is also replicated and so on. Now, Alternator, what is it? It is CillaDB, but with another API that it supports and it happens to be compatible with DynamoDB. It is not a separate Sidecar proxy program that you launch and it translates queries. No, you just run CillaDB and configure it properly so that it listens on a specific port which understands DynamoDB API, that's it. Alternator is only one of the front ends that CillaDB supports, which means that the whole storage layer remains the same. In particular, if you already know Cilla from DevOps perspective, you'll be familiar with all the tools. Monitoring based on Grafana and Prometheus works. You can use the same mechanisms for backups, repairs, and so on. So how does Alternator differ from DynamoDB? Ideally, we want it to be fully compatible, however, there are still some things we don't support. On the other hand, we also provide a couple of extra capabilities. First of all, CillaDB is just an application which you can download or even compile for yourself and run it even locally. It also means that we usually expect a dedicated installation, not a multi-tenant giant which DynamoDB is. Thus, we also don't implement all of the capabilities like throughput limits yet or charging per byte because the server can simply run standalone, not only as a service. We keep an up-to-date compatibility list online. You're hereby encouraged to take a look. I will go briefly through the list. We do support authentication, but it's currently tied to SQL authentication, the native one, so it's not really user-friendly, but it works. There's no access control list support yet. Our global secondary indexes work just fine, but due to CillaDB's underlying implementation of materialized views and how we store data internally, we cannot make them as dynamic as in DynamoDB. In particular, we need to create an index upfront when creating the table. It cannot be added to a table later. All of our tables are global in DynamoDB terms. One cannot make a table local to a data center. TTL, Time to Live, is still work in progress, but it's already available in experimental mode. And we don't yet fully implement full-fledged multi-item transactions. We have conditional updates based on component swap, so conditions like if exists or if some value equals to some other value works. We also don't have the same observability routines. Alternator uses the same metrics system as CillaDB, which is based on Grafana. We also expose a way of reading extra metrics, for instance, how many reads were performed lately via an extension of the DynamoDB API. You read from a synthetic table with a special name and it returns rows which correspond to metrics kept internally by CillaDB. All these metrics, as you can see, are extremely useful when looking for bottlenecks and overload issues in your database cluster. That sums up my life in talk. Alternator is an open source DynamoDB compatible API that runs on top of CillaDB, a super high-performance database. You can deploy it locally or on Google Cloud, Azure, or any other vendor, which is quite cool. Various tools from CillaDB ecosystem, like tracing and monitoring, but also backups and many, many more things can be used along with Alternator that simply work. You're welcome to play with it and see if it's worth switching from the original DynamoDB. Thanks everyone, that's it. Please reach out to me if you have any questions or would like to contribute to the project since it's open source. Thanks.


Welcome to the homelab show episode 122 why the fundamentals are important with special guest Veronica explains She's gonna explain to us. Why the fundamentals are important Hello, I'm glad to be here. It's so great. So glad to have you back on the show again. It's been Actually, I'm not gonna say how much how long I think it's been because my sense of time lately. It's just so Yeah, we're excited we do not have an ad read for today, but good. Thank you for people who reached out to us I've just been bad about getting back to those people who want to sponsor the show So we will we will get that sorted out soon It's so hard to get back to some some it sounds easy, but at the same time, it's like editing video producing video The website this that and the other thing it all adds up Our business manager someone to do the business behind the scenes the things we don't want to do I'm an inbox zero person so anyone that emails me gets a response can't promise when But they will that's how I that's how I say, but yeah anyway, we're not here to talk about like our email procrastination issues for here to talk about homelab stuff so Veronica We're gonna talk about why the fundamentals are important and I kind of feel like of camera when we're complaining about Small little problems in OBS that seem uninconsequential. That's not quite the same thing as we're talking about But it's an example of a small thing is a big thing and Yeah, and the homelab, it's I get the bases covered Absolutely, I want to comment on something I think one of the reasons you think a lot about the fundamentals is the same reason me and J do We all like a lot of the retro tech stuff. Oh, yeah, it makes you think differently about the computers I think about my terrace 80 the fact that I had to peek and poke memory registers to push the limit to the hardware To get the thing you want so you get these different level building blocks Kind of coming from that space to think about the modern Systems that we have now which are substantially more complicated, but the fundamental systems work in a very similar way. Yeah, it's it's amazing How having experience with vintage technology, you know stuff that? That didn't abstract away the insides of the computer quite literally How that can influence How you approach any sort of modern device, you know, it's I I don't want to say that modern computers feel like consumable peripherals in a different way, but I think there's a similar vibe to it like you start to look at what you use every day as Components to be manipulated instead of just you know like a magic rectangle and That that makes such a big difference in terms of how you approach your stuff But then also how you approach your data and how you approach your every day needs with Computers here in in the roaring 2k20s. So it's exciting. It really is. I love I just love classic computing I feel like it It kind of scratches a niche that isn't scratched now I think this is exactly what you were already saying just just maybe I'm saying it a different way It's just you have all of this technology that came before and you have what's not what we have now and like you were saying It's kind of like a product. That's one cohesive whole But we don't we may not necessarily want it to be one cohesive whole So they sell you a computer with the operating system built in obviously nobody wants to turn on a computer and not have it work And they QA the operating system to work with the hardware and work with this work with that And they produce a product that as far as they know does everything on the box and then we get it We stripped the operating system out We put a different operating system on it and maybe we'll change the Wi-Fi card and you know Here they are trying to sell us a one product and we're trying to it's almost like the mentality didn't change But the hardware did is that do you agree with that? You know the I mean the hardware evolved the hardware has continued. It is it has become more complex. I think It's it's it's definitely harder, you know, for example, you know, we're talked about peaking and poking If you don't know you're changing memory registers on Like in ancient RAM Basically by using basic commands in order to set different different variables And we obviously don't have that need anymore because we have so many more powerful tools that abstract that away That's very different than it used to be But Understanding where we came from can be a really big benefit toward understanding how to manipulate even a server where you know Understanding how this application you're looking in the logs and you start to see that, you know You're having memory issues or something like that Having that experience with it when you only have 64k a ram or 5k a ram Can help you in troubleshooting Situations where you have 128 gigabytes of RAM Yeah, and I do and I feel so spoiled. I don't even know I could use it for but I remember when I had like 64 megabytes of RAM and I bought this game pad and I couldn't use it because it required 15 megabytes of RAM So it's either use the game pad or the game but not both So I had to then why I upgraded to 128 megabytes. I thought oh my gosh I could have my game pad and my game at the same time I mean no one's ever needed more than 128 megabytes of RAM It's a it's a myth that you really need more than that you can get everything done like You know I'm playing you know game I'm playing PS5 games and it was I have like eight gigs of RAM or something I mean this thing's got 16. This is a 486 here and it's got 16 megabytes of RAM and That's enough I'm able to get I like I could write scripts on this thing. I could do Very basic HTTP only web surfing on this thing there's a lot you can do with a little bit of information or with a little bit of power and It's so I think it's so helpful for home labbers to see how this stuff works in configuring and building out your modern-day systems because so much of home labbing is doing more with less and Getting a feel for how you can work with very constrained resources Can really help give you perspective on what you need and what you don't need in the modern day I agree. I used to develop games for fun Not something that I'd never developed anything that anyone we want to play on purpose But it was fun to you know just write some code in my mentality back then was to find the slowest piece of crap computer I could possibly find that barely runs and get their game running reasonable on that old piece of hardware and then it's like Conceivably fine on anything after that point because it was a run absolutely nothing older But to your point though the fundamentals are important and this is a funny story I don't know if I told this on the home lab show before But I had a game that I wrote I was you know pretty proud of it I sent it to some friends for me it worked fine I sent it to them and then everyone who played it when they resumed a save file They resumed their save game in a random level every time Now when I get the game on my system, I cannot reproduce this 100% of the time I always resume a save game properly and I You know pass the code around and everyone says yeah It should do exactly that that we don't see a problem I spent two months trying to figure out why I had this bug and then eventually it just had a random idea How about I just use memtest 86 on my computer and see if my memory is bad and sure enough The RAM was beyond terrible. I was having no errors on the operating system And it's weird that the game would work fine for me And the only reason why I could think that would be the case is It's correct as compiled in my RAM, but I am it's not quite the same thing Absolutely troubleshooting for two months an issue that wasn't even the code because sometimes We don't even look at the hardware like like do we ever look look at the case to see if a capacitor is blowing anymore? I mean, I didn't and I wasted a whole day trying to fix something Yes, if you want to learn how to like fix problems in a bash script a really great language for Introducing yourself to some of these concepts is basic and that's I I still maintain if you can build some very Simple tools in in basic that's going to give you fundamentals that you can use for bash scripting or Python or Other other languages later on and and I still I'm so sad that we don't have more Basic being taught, you know to a certain extent basic has been completely subsumed by Python Python Exactly and Python's a great language. Don't get me wrong. I think Python is a much more fun language to actually build in every day But I think a difference with basic is that so much of basic is built around manipulating the hardware and Python abstracts this layer from you, you know for the most part and I think that we lost something collectively When we moved away from a language that for the most part required you to manipulate directly how your system like the physical hardware and That took away from so many learners so many students the ability to understand really what's going on in this thing and I I wish we had a language that could replicate that Because right now I just don't see it. I think basic was the last time we really had that Well, and one of my complaints has been I'll it just drives me a little bit nuts and maybe you as well The amount of frameworks that people attach to things today because I look at still in and Steve Gibson being one of the outliers out They're still producing stuff with assembly language, you know, right? Like wait a minute How was this thing so useful but is still measured in kilobytes and It's interesting because you see some of these apps. You're like, wait a minute. Why is this app nine gigs? What does it do? It's a printer driver. It's like what is what did they add into this thing? But yeah, you're right though There's there's an instruction layer removed and it's trying to remove from the hardware And I guess they're trying to get more people in the programming seems like that But I agree with you understanding the fundamentals thinking about the hardware You can roll back all the way to like John Carmack and doom and all those people writing that they really thought a lot about the Hardware to absolutely optimize and get the most out of it and I don't see that as much especially in the games right now You go back. I love the stories from the Atari days the Nintendo days Especially when you know, you've got these developers who've really talked about how they made the game and all the tricks They had to use to make it all work right down to like this is how we trick the hardware into allowing this sprite to show Somewhere else on the screen, you know things like that. I I've always found was really interesting because now they're like, I don't know Just include 20 different large libraries. What are you doing? I'm drawing a cloud with 20 libraries. It works now Yeah, just have them download all that It's strange because I mean technically in Veronica correct me if I'm wrong I'm sure you know more than this than I do, but I pretty sure I read that games like Mario 3 back then with the amount of memory and everything and I think even the original Kirby were impossible on the NES And I know we're not necessarily talking about games was kind of the same thing where memory can strain and they're writing You know language for that But they still had to work around the hardware and then PC games Nowadays people are complaining if the game doesn't run in Linux and I'm just glad I don't have to adjust a you know Like a like a pin on a sound card or something to get it to work with the game The last video on my channel actually talked about this a little bit because I was talking about how to copy Game cartridges. I happen to have a game gear cartridge right here. I was talking about how to copy them onto your modern computer and I went into how those game cartridges Often included additional pieces of hardware which made things that would have otherwise been impossible on those consoles possible and that was that was such an important part of computing in that That space constrained and that hardware constrained era This is why systems like the Atari, which is a 1977 system were able to keep making games for ten years because Slowly but surely more and more hardware was being packed under those cartridges and That for them that that really did help things along That's also where the change over into optical media and other types of games made a difference It was because the underlying hardware was getting good enough to where it could consistently Outperform what you could jam into a cartridge That's it does, you know any sort of vintage programming does give you a really good Baseline for how all this stuff connects and I think these are really good fundamentals to learn In I don't know if you've seen this video, but it blew my mind and it's wonderful It's easy to find maybe I should add to the show notes But type in making a CPU in Excel and someone built a CPU using Excel And I really really like about it and I shared it a few times with people going This will understand how registers and everything work in a CPU This is a series of different really basic fundamentals and by the way, yes They're all being done in Excel, which I thought was absolutely just a it was all those thought experiments someone had that turned into I think videos got like a million views. It's super But it's a good teaching moment where you start thinking about these this is how CPUs work These are how the data moves through these and these are good building blocks And you know, I don't forget way out topic on this Do you have some things besides basic? What what are some other fundamentals that we want to make sure we impart upon all the homelab users that are listening to us? Well getting beyond vintage computing, which is one of my favorite topics, obviously You know talking about more modern stuff.  Yeah, I love cockpit or Houston is another which is very clever Houston cockpit Rockets taking off. It's great but the idea of You know, these are great tools and and as a system administrator, I've certainly appreciated them But when something goes wrong, you're going into bash you're going into the shell and specifically a lot of the time our Bodge fixes, which will keep something afloat until there's some sort of Update from upstream or you know something like that a lot of the time We're having to monitor and manage that stuff in bash And I think that translates just as easily to the homelabber Who might need to build out scripts in order to manage their stack and monitor their stack? Even if your other monitoring is failing even if your other management software is failing You've still got to be able to go back and do that and I think that bash is super important I love bash cookbooks. There's all kinds of I think no starch has a Bash cookbook. That's pretty good. I don't remember what it's called. I don't think I have it on my on my on my shelf up there it might be downstairs, but there there are so many great Books to help you get started that you can pick up for not too much and you know You can get started with just figuring out some of those fundamentals right there and just try stuff on your own So the interesting thing about bash is that it seems like it's one of those Technologies that you always have to know even if you don't use it because there's so many people that'll switch to ZSH or whatever Their favorite shell is but then they'll find themselves eventually on a machine that they haven't installed ZSH on that doesn't default to it So that they install it so they're using bash or they're not allowed to install that at work So if you use bash, it kind of seems like Some things that we replace are really hard to be a 100% replacement. Even if we have a favorite text editor You know them or nano or whatever it is might not be installed by default Whatever is going to be there most likely so I feel like bash is just one of those that is like you said It's it's for me in my opinion. It's not controversial. It's just true You have to know it because you're gonna be on it. You're gonna be using it And I mean you can you can live in the terminal if you want to live in the terminal I live in the terminal a lot of the time. I do I do a lot like my you know, I watch your channels I'm watching you from an RSS feed From my terminal, you know, it might open it up in YouTube But I'm seeing I you know, I don't trust the YouTube algorithm to actually tell me when you have a new video When I when I actually figure this stuff out It's it's usually through the terminal because the terminal is just bog standard and I Something happens to my computer. I can reset everything and it's simple terminal stuff And yeah, there's gooey ways to do this and yeah, there's cloud-based ways to do it but all of that adds additional abstraction away from the parts that I like to tinker with and In my mind, that's kind of the ethos of the homelabber is that ability to tinker with and play with and manipulate these tools and You've really got to have that terminal background that command line Interface down So question here what RSS reader in the terminal is your favorite? Okay, right now. I'm using news boat. I've always loved news boat I I don't sink I I'm trying to figure out a way to sink news boat against like next cloud And right now I'm doing that manually with just next cloud itself and and configuring it that way but I would like to be able to potentially carry my news boat Reads to my phone and that's something I haven't figured out just yet. So I'm still using fresh RSS because the web UI works so I can be wherever with it. Oh, absolutely I I'm such a sucker for anything I find in the terminal. I love terminal ui's they are Like that's always your thing I I do not look I do not look forward to a world where maybe those are not as popular And I know I'm already in a world where those aren't as popular as the brain one But I feel like will the next generation keep developing these that's my hope Yeah Well, I mean I feel like the computer science layer is being lost in time and in some way Even though that is I'm not saying that that's a overlap of every home laver But I have to imagine there's a certain subset of people to have a home lab Because for them it's the most Current modern way to get that same feeling where you have control of your hardware You can swap in and out different things whereas, you know, like we're saying earlier These things are being sold as just a one cohesive product And you know, we're the people that want to you know, micromanage everything But in the past we always had to micromanage things because we had to change a jumper on a sound card Or this or whatever to get a game to work or put your paging file on a different Hard drive so you can get some better io on your spinning rust or something You know we dealt with all this but I just had a nightmare when you said that The good thing that that the kids don't have to deal with this stuff because they could just Do what they got to do and get it done faster But there's still that layer of how does this work? And how did we get here that I don't want to see go away because I feel like that's very important at the same time though on my 64 gigabytes of ram Very nice computer that i'm using right now to to to participate in this stream The other day I had an issue where I was trying to render a video And was running into some ram bugs And the quickest salute and I had to go buy new ram and I couldn't get to the store But the quickest solution to resolving the render bug was bust out my terminal and set up a swap file and just work off of the swap file I I rerouted the the the The process to the swap file Opened up the the application again started the render and it worked just fine and that's the kind of thing that You know, you you'd think that we've gotten beyond but we haven't gotten beyond anybody who's participating like I You know, I wouldn't necessarily have to be a system administrator to have benefited from that I just have to be somebody editing a video and That that could be your your graphic designers or you know, anything anything else like that I knew how to fix it And that was great But having that understanding isn't something that just benefits the nerds it benefits a lot of people who just use computers and I would love to see more of this talked and explained and I think that home lapping is a way to get this experience In the real world practically Well, and it it also serves as like it did for me this morning I had I had I learned I can break xcp and g in a way that the developers go that shouldn't have worked so And so I I told them I have my lab set up so I tore part of it down and rebuilt it I'm like nope. It does exactly this or like it shouldn't do that Um, so now there's a new pinned comment on a video I've released recently But it's it's such a good test bed because this is an enterprise level product that you know use use out there But it's completely accessible in the home lab. It's fully open source. That's why I've been doing a lot of videos about xcp Um, but you know the home lab and they'll need to go through all these little processes and everything else have I'm viewing on like these really cheap Four core mini pcs because it's not about performance. It's about reproducibility of a problem So we can look at it walk through the code look through the database and go For some reason it thinks secure boot is on was the end of it But it doesn't produce the certificates for secure boot But it says it's on that bug was not supposed to exist that was supposed to be fixed It goes to an automagical process to set up a secure boot certificates But turned out it wasn't actually copying the search order supposed to go but left the flag on so absolutely Yeah, it was little weird things. This is where a home lab You know, I'm working with the you know, the developers everything else got my lab set up It's sitting there behind me and just a couple mini pcs tied together and it's it's fun because you can really Get into the nitty-gritty like he said of sorting something out. That was really esoteric and not doing this in production on fridays right exactly Well, then you get you get the extra benefit of When you understand these fundamentals if you like let's let's as an example of another fundamental git Let's just use git as the example understanding how git works in a way that lets you peruse the branches Or create your own fork to get some work done. Not only can help you resolve a problem directly without having to Work through the upstream or work through the the creators of the tool But then allows you the potential to be able to help contribute back and anybody who's a home lab or understanding git without needing a Um gooey too. I mean there are great gooey tools but There's always going to be some goofy thing, you know that you can't easily achieve in the in in the gooey tool and being able to get that stuff done is Extremely helpful in a home lab. It's always been helpful to me just in terms of Identifying which version of this particular like which version of next cloud introduced this piece of software Let me peruse the git and let's see if I can figure this out and then let's see if I can Push a change to my server on my home lab To see if I can fix this to then see if oh, I fixed it Well, here's a bit of information for anybody else who's going to be running into this problem And that's how we contribute to better home labs for everybody Yeah, the collaboration in the community is absolutely Huge right now Wendell brought up last week and I thought this is a really good point And it kind of ties into everyone's like oh, isn't ai going to just solve this for us And a is going to be this, you know, we don't need to teach people to code and I seen someone through that in the comments Not at all The the goal of the nvidia cdo is to make these stock go up into the right Our goal is to actually educate people because we just want to see a better community And what Wendell brought up was really a good point where Because the one thing the one absolute thing that we have learned from the ai stuff is it's it's a regurgitation machine And it can regurgitate garbage in an unbelievably fast manner Oh, it's great at garbage. Yeah, and google can slurp up that garbage and bubble it up to the top So it's not the end of search because you don't need to use search It's the end of search because now they can feel a little garbage, but we know now now we seek the opportunity that tom Jay and Veronica can be these watering holes of real content that tells you things where you understand Oh, we're the we want to help build the community. So we have a purpose so you can start just ignoring the search and going towards some of those Validated watering holes of information that we have some of the reasons I I've talked heavily about why I host my own forums Why level uh level one tech's host their forums is because I don't want to put my data in some proprietary Discord server somewhere where it's locked away and maybe discord Well, we're just waiting for the day discord announces. It's all going to some ai all the stuff in the discord And we're gonna lock you out of it because we can and you've built on our platform. Yeah I you know, I I like discord just fine as a chat app You know like it's it's it's great as a way to just chat with people but as a knowledge store It's pretty lousy And I think that people you know, especially open source projects migrating to discord for their support We lose something by not having that stuff in a forum or in a public space Um one project that has done a really good job of keeping the stuff public is is the crawltra book project Which is actually my next video is going to be about it's it's about getting uh core boot running on Chromebooks and they have a yeah it like native um vanilla core boot because chromebooks use core boot but in a different way and Long story short they have an excellent forum and docs page. That's all open source that and I I if they have a discord They don't surface it and they they usually say we want to talk on forums We want this stuff to be public because we want search to find it and we want people to discover it Which I think is a really smart way for People to do open source, but that's also how we used to do open source And we kind of became used to useful Chat apps becoming a place. We don't really have to get out of And I feel like we've lost something with that IRC for the win. I love IRC No, I do too It's like I don't I haven't used it so long, but I kind of want to just because You know, I can't go back as well because I'm not The number spin up an IRC server The spam on discord. It was never this bad an IRC Yeah Well and with IRC, you know, I have the benefit of being able to get this thing on it That one and it works great in terminal Yeah, exactly because discords rather large for a chat app if you I use it only in a web browser But even then it does consume some amount of RAM in the but red browser But if you load it as an application one, I don't trust it. I don't need it on my computer But I'm like it's kind of big It's huge. Yeah, I I don't I I don't use discord I don't use any social media on my phone, but I don't use discord on my phone and I don't have I don't use discord on the computer itself. I only ever use it in the the browser and it's It like it's fine as a chat app But like it's doing an awful lot of RAM for a chat app and you know, I I but I know that the people behind it. I'm not picking on them, but they're not necessarily optimizing it for productivity they're optimizing it for eyeballs and I my fear with with discord is what happens when the money become, you know, you talk about stock going up and up and up Yeah, what what happens when there are opportunities for them to Take advantage of our data with that. That's that's always my concern with they will stuff like this credit Yeah, reddit reddit's ongoing deal with sell data. It's not just a one-time deal to train data They have an ongoing agreement to have all their data sold to AI now I I don't I'm not the one that could don't segue us too much because You know, it's an interesting topic to think about but um It's anytime you lock yourself up in any of these apps that you don't control the platform itself The platform will eventually do what the platform does and absolutely more so if it's vc backed You know if it's either venture capital backed or if it's help be holding to the stock market because it always has to go up into the right That's that's their goal all the time Yep, that's how it works. Yep. Nope. I I I love irc. I mean irc has it's it's flaws and its strengths But with irc, you know what you're getting which is which is chat You're getting the it it's not pretending to also be a bbs And it's not pretending to be a document storage and That I I feel like it makes home labbing harder. It makes running your own services and self hosting harder To hide a lot of these great tools and the documentation for them behind a social media website and I like I love the idea of Forums making a comeback self hosting your own forums making a comeback And documentation making a comeback, you know, like I remember the days of spiral bound notebooks For your programming languages and I want to come back to that That to me seems like a great way to you know, I saw in the chat somebody talking about kids learning this stuff Kids like reading if you give them books You know, you mentioned that I I have this overwhelming urge to pop open my Commodore 64 box Or your take it somewhere else either cut my internet off or take it somewhere else or there's no internet and just Nothing but electricity in a monitor and that book that it comes with That teaches you how to program and just like have a weekend Off the internet just that book that Commodore 64 lots of pizza and soda and just have a lot of fun just like people used to do because You know, that it's so cool to go back and see how they did it But but a lot of people don't realize this Your computer came with a book that told you how to program for that computer Like it wasn't just a computer with applications you run Like we have now you've got a book in the box that tells you how to make your own software Specifically for that computer. So if you wanted to become a developer you have what you need right there already And I don't other than a raspberry pi. I think that's the closest we have to a computer like that now Well, and even the raspberry pi so much of you know, I noticed this recently You know, I I bought a raspberry pi one, you know, the first one that came out And it seemed like there was a lot of documentation and there was a lot of information about how to you know hardware hack the thing um nowadays You when you go to raspberry pi you're seeing video You're seeing it's it's it's made I mean, I'm not saying video is not accessible. I obviously make videos on the internet. So I I like video But there's something that's lost by abstracting away Some of this information into hey watch the video till the end to learn this, you know, like We need Really great documentation and the raspberry pi documentation is there. You just have to go digging for it to find it, but um, I like I love the idea of Equipment and tools and and stuff that you can just Sit down no internet and manipulate And that's a really great way to get into a zen with it because I I've said this before I'm going to say it again Home labbing is like a garden. It's like having a garden. It's something you tend to it's something It's meditative when you do it, right? It's it's a process We need a little bit more like jeff geerling. He he does a good job with all those videos of having accompanied write-ups of them Yes. Oh, I've been I've I've got that on my I've been working on that Yeah, I mean I channel my inner jeff geerling when I do some videos. I just updated some Uh documentation for gray log. I can't fix the video the video was correct at the time of release There's a change that was made but I did tell people I have all the documentation late So I just went and updated the documentation to add a parameter that you know that is now required with the latest version And you know, so the documentation if you follow my rules where we're following my video It says download from my github. It's that answer is still correct So I think that having the right mix is an important aspect of it to where The things that might be dynamic because videos are points in time. They don't right You know, you know people like oh, it's an opportunity to create another video. I'm like, yeah I don't have time for this and I hate to have a bunch of people downloading something that doesn't work So you have to have some separation on there. It's very important. Yeah. No, I love I love written document I mean, I love videos. I watch videos. I make videos So, you know, I'm obviously in the ecosystem of videos and I appreciate it But I don't think you can be a good documentation page and especially if you can make that documentation page also something offline That that's huge and a lot of really great projects have done a good job of oh, there's an e-pub version of this book Or of this Dot or you know, we we wrote a our docs page has a pdf offline Downloader you can just get the entire thing on a pdf and stick it on your e-reader And away you go. I I love those offline moments where you just get to hit the thing and see what happens And one of the reasons I still like github is it's easily publicly accessible You can just get clone my documentation. You didn't have copies of any of the things I put in there Uh, as a matter of fact, you could easily script this to auto update and let you know when there's a notification for a change in The docs, I think these are good ways to handle it I do like the other solutions like you said e-pub pdf auto download some way So in case that information goes away, I have an easy way to mirror it locally Right, exactly. No, it's very important. And and it also, I mean, that's another thing you can self host is you know, all of the documentation for the projects that you're working on and that is a valid thing to you know having a In a share somewhere on on your network. I know I have one I have an entire share devoted to documentation for projects that I use in this thing And I mean, I use it Periodically, but if something ever happened to me somebody else could use it and that would be useful Yeah, documentation is amazing and note taking is something we've got into quite a bit on the spot cast so far So I yeah, I have been using vim wiki for my note taking for the last Maybe three years and All against just a vim wiki. Yeah vim wiki and it like you talk about command line interfaces Vim wiki has changed my life in a very positive way because it has a diary feature And the idea of being able to hit a couple of commands start a diary post with Here's the problem that I just found and here's how I fixed it And then this becomes something that's greppable Searchable you can figure stuff out at like that Without even touching my mouse I can create an entire post for myself for the future an entire wiki article about how I solved a problem That's magic. That's that's the best thing ever So highly recommended it especially for anybody who is a vim user already And likes to stay in vim mode for their day-to-day tasks. It's a great tool Well, the nice thing is portability. You don't have to worry about as time moves on text files Text files I created 20 years ago are still is relevant today. I do some things in markdown But I don't think I've wandered far off the beaten path right markdown to easy simple I see so many people try to use more complicated apps that don't have easy ways to get the data out And that's good until that app has a problem or especially if it's proprietary If it reaches an end of life or is no longer supported It doesn't have an easy export method to get it back over to the next format or using text to markdown There's no next format. That is the format. Yeah, exactly. It's there It's it's I can take a markdown file and I can load it in ms. DOS and it's going to be fine It'll it'll work. Yeah, I haven't used DOS for so long. I mean there's some DOS games. I really want to play it's been a while That's uh, I've become so much better.  There are some great DOS box tools that'll get you there um I use DOS for all kinds of goofy troubleshooting or fun stuff just with ancient computers But when I was doing cobalt work Fair amount of the documentation was written in Some sort of format that would only load on DOS and so there were plenty of times I was loading up a vm with free DOS And actually installing applications Just to load the Like compiler troubleshooter for so-and-so cobal And see if I can get into the man page or their equivalent of the man page that way Just to understand why somebody wrote code a certain way And I mean that's more of a professional thing than a homelabber thing But you know understanding the fundamentals enough to be able to quick spin up a vm on my laptop and do that I mean that's that's super important I'm sure there's a lot of developers that are homelabbers too. So I think it might be surprising just how Dr. Ellie that actually is so yeah Not a cool stuff. It's definitely a thing. Well, my conversation this morning was helping someone with their homelab. They develop Not publicly traded but a billion dollar company. They wanted to have developers and uh, you know, I'm just DMing with them earlier today I mean, absolutely the crossover is incredible between these Uh, everyone even if even if you're a developer for a very very large company for big important products You probably still have a homelab, right? Yep, absolutely. No, and you know, it's it's so important to be able to understand The like the background tools like you know getting back to cockpit I mean cockpit or houston is is putting out Great information in a digestible way, but it's still using your logs. It's still using your information It's still using system d. It's still using the the background tools And when something goes wrong in cockpit and it does, you know, stuff happens There's a there's something gets out of sync or like the other day my Like my zfs didn't come back online after a kernel update and cockpit I like I went into it to see will cockpit tell me what happened. No, it's just like no can't There's there's you don't you don't have zfs and it's like yeah, I do so You know, I was able to bop into the terminal and get it fixed up right away because I understand the fundamentals And I can imagine if I didn't understand that stuff It would have taken me Hours of searching maybe to find it and I probably did those hours of searching over the course of years In learning the fundamentals rather than just sticking with the gooey and trying to figure out how to do it from the gooey I I think especially if you're using a home lab It's just makes so much sense to learn the tools behind the graphics To get into the terminal and get dirty with it just to understand what's really happening I will say too one of the reasons I like Cockpit is it doesn't mingle the underlying Config's it's reading from them I just seen someone a comment show webman and I won't lie I when the earlier days, I mean webman's around forever and I remember webman's been around a while Yeah, I would do it and I don't know where what the status of webman today is but the the mangled config files That would occur from webman back in the day. I don't know where they're at today on that But it certainly made it harder because when someone who was smarter than me would look at some of the configs of things I'd set up they're like Time you should just learn the config file here because This mess that this I'm going to start over So I learned at that point like oh, this isn't good And I now mostly I quit using for I can remember last time I used webman outside of a demo to show that it exists But yeah, I now you kind of learn that because now I understand the fundamentals better Not to mention when you put them together with good structure in your config files with some note system Maybe why you set something it gives you a better understanding of hey this setting I did change because of this or this setting I did because of this So right a good way like you said kind of that fundamental learning and understanding better Well and especially if you're going to be homelabbing because you're building your way up to a career You're not going to be able to stick in the gooey forever There there's going to be points in which you need to Embrace your inner terminal nerd you've got to get in there even if you're not in there every day even if You this is just a thing you do occasionally even if all you're doing is managing websites, you know and and you like What's one of the like c-panel or plusk or you know these kind of web developer oriented tools I can't tell you how many times I've had somebody call me For a consulting gig back when I was doing consulting because their their plusk server Was offline and they didn't know understand why and it's You know like and I'm not picking on plusk. I think they make a fine product But you have to understand how to use the terminal in order to administer and troubleshoot it And they'll say that they'll say hey you shouldn't install this if you don't know At least a bit behind the curtain and So many people I think get into a trap and it's like if you just learn those fundamentals It's going to save you the hundreds of dollars in consultant time to get your 20 websites back up and That's I mean that's time spent but it's money saved in the long run. So big fan So Reason why the fundamentals are important because you have to like the thing you have to understand those things and I don't trust guis. I mean they crash. I mean Just the window managers may be a little more But you know the terminals failed me a lot less often So so question here for those of you that don't follow her channel and may not know this Veronica's got history in cobalt programming. Would you say cobalt is a good recommended fundamental right next to basic? No, people. Okay. No one's I mean it's not a big career I know but Cobal is a cobalt is a great career language to have in your back pocket. That's that's what I will always tell people Legacy systems is a lot more than just understanding cobalt because so much of it has to do with understanding hardware And because so much of it runs on hardware It's it's not a very often abstracted language away from the underlying systems So like my understanding of cobalt was also tied to you know goofy things like understanding how Invoice printers like line printers worked and and things like that. It's it's definitely a It's a niche and it's a big niche and There's certainly work in it. I am a little worried about AI Not replacing cobalt, but the companies who've been still working with cobalt Deciding now is the time to jump to something that says oh, we'll use AI to make it better I'm I'm a little concerned about job prospects Unless your goal is to work in government or your goal is to work in the public sector I think there's still going to be a lot of that and financial institutions are going to be running cobalt probably for another 400 years but That's a very specific niche without a lot of Uh There's more competition there than there is in the public sector So if if you want to work in the public sector cobalt is a great language to have in your back pocket for everybody else I'm going to recommend something else. Yeah I just wanted to bring a cobalt question in it Completely obsolete business oriented language Except except it's not they're still using it. They're still building it and the companies that are using cobalt They've got some good reasons for it. It's not I I don't think it's laziness or like inertia That keeps people on cobalt. I do think there are some practical considerations at play with how the business use is That said It is diminishing as time goes on and especially if you want the uh flexibility Of being able to work on multiple projects cobalt is not the language. I'm going to recommend you you consult in There there are a lot of better languages that I would think people would you know, even learning rust and sea At this point might be a better fit if your goal is uh, the freedom to pick and choose your clientele if that makes sense There's a narrow focus on cobalt narrow client base Yes, it's very narrow client base and so much of legacy systems in cobalt is who you know And that's you can know the language and be be fluent in an expert in it And if you don't know people currently working in legacy systems, you might not get very far right So that's why I say it's a good language if you want to work in government because governments It's if you have that background you might Actually have a great career hanging out for the entire 40 years of your career sitting in cobalt There's no end in sight for it. There's no end in sight in government. So like if if your goal is to work in government It's a good language Yep, yeah, I was just Some of the syntax and oh my gosh. Yeah, it's it's its own thing It's it's very unlike anything else You've you've seen and it broke my brain a little bit on other languages too because like I forget what order variables go in And you know goofy little things like that periodically and it's You got to get used to looking at other languages after working in cobalt. So It's definitely a niche and it's definitely a fun niche But it's hard to get into and That's that's a reason I wouldn't necessarily recommend it if it's your first language It's a good one to have in your pocket though Hmm Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, I need to get some more programming done But and learn and you know maybe learn another language. I don't think it's going to be this one though Yeah, I wouldn't recommend. Um Rust is a lot of fun. I've been playing with rust recently. It's it's it's a good time I'm also though trying to learn assembly for the amiga so Hmm 68k assembly so Wow all kinds of fun That would be an amazing project. Maybe I should try that someday. Hmm It's it's a lot of fun. We we can talk offline about it. It's good. It's it's not a fundamental. I'm going to recommend to any of you I think it's right underneath my desire to develop for the atari jaguar, which is on my bucket. Oh Yeah, that could be I I don't remember what what processor what what they use for the atari jaguar I know the input processor was the motor roller the same as the sega genesis, but the Graphics chips were something else entirely. I can't remember though. I'm sure someone in the chat room probably. Yeah Had like at least three I forgot how many processors, but I know it had at least three I I know I I have some fun with 6502 The machine code or machine language for the 6502 that that's that's that's some fun Hmm Well, this has been great Do we have any more else or we think we covered all the basic topics we want to get coverage or anything else you want to add jay or veronica Hmm want to or have time to you have time to there we go. That's uh, We're coming up on that. Yeah There are some there are some really great terminal to you know I talked about news boat as a as a feed reader earlier but to to go back to that kind of gooey gooey less The tui tools to you know stick in the terminal news boat and mutt or neo mutt if depending on what fork you want to use They both have a very similar user interface on the in the terminal and I love using mutt for Managing email lists and so I have a separate email address just for email lists And the ability to be able to kind of go back and forth between my email lists entirely in the terminal stripped out the the images And see those threads and see who's responding and how they're working that has been an amazing productivity hack for me And then you can edit your emails directly in vim And reply and you never even have to take your hands off a home row. It's absolutely fantastic So new news boat has a very similar user interface to to mutt or neo mutt depending on where Depending on what fork you're using But I love that email client and if you're just dipping your toe in the water on a more terminal based lifestyle That's a good one to try and learn and figure out because they're it's pretty well documented you can search for how to do just about anything and They it's it's a lot of fun to get configured and figured out in in on your computer in in your terminal But it's been a while since I use mutt. So it brings Years that's what I used so yeah No, it's it's it's a ton of fun and it's it is a great tool to learn how to configure Your terminal and kind of get your toe in the water without something as daunting as say vim Vim is is it will break your brain your your brain will not be the same after vim Yeah, once once you've gone modal you don't go back Yeah, that makes sense. Wow I always I love the I love it when I come away from From an episode taking notes of things that I just need to look into So many cool things I want to get into Well, I'm very glad I could I could deliver that today and I hope I hope other people if they've got any questions or something You know, I shoot I'm on mastodon. I'm not on twitter or anything like that, but you can hit me up on mastodon And I love to link to Veronica's channel easy to find there. There's she's got cool swag She's got all the all the fun stuff and Links to the different socials such as mastodon. So yeah, the different social First she'll yeah, we won't get that in the prole. Yeah But it's fun. It's it's a good time. I I like mastodon and it's my speed Yeah, that's pretty fun. Yeah, there's less people, but there's the right people. That's how I look exactly Like I don't need numbers. I just need fun Yeah, I want I want people to engage with that I want to engage with not like I did someone post that That is irrelevant I mean, I I try other social media from time to time. I dip my toe in the water and it's like But but mastodon's always fun. So yeah I've enjoyed the community on mastodon. So I I'm out there as well. So Still for reasons I can't explain I can't justify. Well, does it still exist? I just keep my finger hovers and circles around the link button and go maybe later Maybe it's hard. It's hard when brands are there Like especially if you need to talk to talk with brands as part of your your your work or your channel That that's that's really hard to get rid of I think and so Yes, that's that's pretty much why I'm there. They I interact with a lot of brands. They retweet my stuff Which is often related to some of the videos that we do about the product. So there's there's this like Peace dragging me there, but I don't spend much time on there. Like I post I like I drop it and run like hey, here's a Have fun everyone.  I mean, it's all doom Yeah, it's scrolling. It's there's so how I use it is definitely different than how I use the other ones I can go in mass. I go look an interesting post. Yeah, I'm being intelligent that I want to read Exactly. It's it's it's it just feels it's slower, but like I like slow. It's fine. It's it's a good time with that I'm in there. You know, there's actually a masted on client in the terminal too Which shares the same type of tui interface as mutt. I think it's it's called toot So, yeah, I think it's called toot. So, um, I used it briefly I don't have it set up on this computer So I can't go into it to see if that's the one it is But I used to just use the web interface from asked it on but yeah, I mean it's it was a fun time I was able to you know Post messages from my terminal and not take my hands off a home row. It was great Well in all of us here We all have websites that are easy to find and link to where you can find us where we post things Absolutely. So that's one thing is I'm I'm big on that I tell anyone getting started in youtube like create a home base for yourself that you own your own Website that becomes the place you can send people to because I've I've You know over the years I've switched to saying that the end of my video is going and whatever socials you'll find me on You can find them at my website, you know, because that way it's an easier I don't know what the future holds. Uh, so Websites yeah website still is important for seo too. So, you know, like anybody who's doing anything professional In tech, I think it does make sense to have a website You know, if you rely on linkedin or you rely on your socials, you can get a lot done there but it's having your own website helps when people search for you and Assuming you want to be found because you're planning on going out for a career or something Having a website is still I You can't roll in today that yeah, I see people talk about like the end of websites.  Oh, I'm gonna quick write up how I did this thing And then I'm gonna hit a couple of commands in vim and I just pushed it out to my website Having the ability to do that and document your processes in a public space that allows them to not only be discoverable by others But by your potential future employers is definitely something I recommend and I have spent so much time working with You know kids in 16 17 and we're thinking about getting into this space on Here's what you should do to get yourself ready for that job market because you know, they they're you know They'll say oh, it's on discord. Well, good luck having somebody find it You know, good luck. Good luck telling the hiring department about something you did on discord No, you got to post that and and it does Use me to play when he plays games Or something like that But even if that thing that you did was hack minecraft that's still valuable to some potential like Employer if you're young and trying to get into this space Um, you know show what you know, even if what you know is hacking minecraft Even if what you know is css, you know, see I love css If you understand css document the crap out of what you know about css because somebody's gonna like that And if all you're doing is talking about it on linkedin or socials You're going to get that's not going to be accessible to the people who are going to hire you So yeah, hosting your own website still Cream of the crop in my mind Yep, absolutely All right, all the links to our sites I'll make sure they're in the description down below and thanks everyone for joining us. This has been great And uh, see you next time. All right. Bye everybody


Hello everybody, E here. Welcome back to another Retro Book Review. Today we're back on the Dean Coons train with The Voice of the Night, which oddly enough is always talked about as The Voice in the Night, but it's not. It's The Voice of the Night. You can see comments in YouTube videos, you can see even in some reviews. Everybody always thinks it's called The Voice in the Night, but it is The Voice of the Night. This is a story of two young boys, Colin and Ray, two of probably Coons' most memorable characters other than Odd Thomas, Christopher Snow, those people. What Coons does in this book is a rarity.  I know I harp on this a lot, but the characters feel real and believable. Growing up, I was more along the lines of Colin's character, and I had a friend that was more along the line of Roy's character. In fact, I used these two characters. I used the build for my debut novel, Bay's End. I used the build of this one and layman's traveling vampire show for basically the trio of kids. There's two boys and a girl. There's two boys in this one for the majority of the book, and then I think she's a little bit older. She's the target of one of the boys, and then the other boy ends up falling in love with her. And with the traveling vampire show, it's more two friends and their gal pal, but then one of them ends up falling for the girl and the other one is just the cussy one. So if you read my book, Bay's End, you will see. You can't help but to see the inspirations there. This one is more along the lines of the good seed, bad seed kind of deal. One of the boys is a good kid. One of the boys is a pure terror, and they form an unlikely friendship. It's another one of those, you know, a jock and nerd kind of deals, like the movie Lucas. It's one of my favorite movies. It's Charlie Sheen. Who is it? Who else is it? Charlie Sheen and who plays Lucas? Is it Corey Hame? It's Corey Hame, right? It's not Corey Feldman. Anyways, love that movie, and the girl's name in the movie. I can't remember, but I love that dynamic with there's a jock and there's a nerd and their friends. What I especially like about this one is that turns that relationship on its head and it ends up where the boys, you know, end up, you know, coming at each other at some point and no longer being friends.  The most brilliant scene I think in this book it happens in a junkyard. I'm not going to be doing a spoiler section at the end of this video, and the main reason for that is with these retro reviews, I try to go off the top of my dome. I don't really remember too much that happens in this book. It's one of those Coon's books that the plot is kind of, I know what happens at the beginning. I know it happens at the end. I remember the junkyard scene, which isn't the end. I think it's about the middle area of the book, but I remember those key moments. I don't really remember anything else. I do know that the character of Colin is reminded me so much of Mark Petrie from St. Om's Lot. He collected the old monster figures, the models that you have to put together yourself, collected the old monster comic books. That kind of thing is the same type of character. I'm pretty sure King's book came first this time. We'll discuss that more. What I mean by that is there's some stuff that I firmly believe that Coon's inspired King, and there's some stuff that I firmly believe that King inspired Coon's. Those two went back and forth for a while. They even blurbed each other's books, and then at some point in time, that stopped. I'm going to start doing some research pretty soon to figure out when that stopped. But anyways, back to this book. The relationship between the boys is fantastic up until the point where there's a split, and the one boy figures out that the other boy is, you know, just...  Not really wild either. It's one of those kids that might end up being a serial killer if they're allowed to get away with the stuff that they are doing when they're younger if they don't find help, or if they don't end up in some kind of care facility to where that they can, you know, try and take that animosity and direct it somewhere else. But Coon's really, really made me believe in these two characters, especially since I was more like one of the characters while I was growing up. I was pretty much the spitting emotional image of this one character. I am purposefully trying to keep the names out of this which one is which because I want you to be able to read the book. This is one that I highly recommend. It's on my top 10 Dean Coon's books. It's one I highly recommend. I need to go out. You need to get it. If you're going to read a Dean Coon's book, this is one of the books that I suggest that you read. But have you read The Voice in the Night? Let me know down there in the comments below.  But if you do dislike the book, let me know why you dislike the book. Go into detail. Don't just put, ah, there's book socks. Also, if you liked the book, tell me what you liked about it. Let's have a conversation down there in the doobly-doo. But until next time, I have been E, you have been U. This has been another Retro Book Review. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye! Oh yeah. And for you, OGs that actually watch the end of these videos and watch the entire video, I want to ask you guys if you were getting tired of the Dean Coon's reviews yet. Because I don't want this to turn into a Dean Coon's channel, but I'm also trying to get caught up. So if you'd like me to do something else for the next couple of weeks, let me know down there in the comments below. Bye!


is Professor Dan Broadney, who is the Professor in the Department of Philosophy and in the College at the University of Chicago. In addition, he's faculty in the McLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics as well as the Divinity School. He has published scholarship in political philosophy, bioethics, and the philosophy of religion. He's been recipient of many awards and fellowships including the 2014 Quantrol Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. Today, Dr. Broadney is going to talk about practical reason at the bedside. Thank you, Dan. This is somebody else's? Is this yours? That's mine. As always, it's wonderful to be here. Thank you, Mark, for inviting me. I have two disclosures to make the first. This is not a pediatrics talk, despite the name of the panel. And the second is I'm keenly aware that I and the next speaker stand between you and lunch. So I will try and keep this brief. So I'm not a physician. I'm a philosopher professor. And what I tend to do when just observing how clinical decisions get made is I try to ask myself, are there philosophical presuppositions embedded in the model that's being used? And my work in this area has generally taken the form of trying to assume those presuppositions, sometimes suggesting that they can be changed, sometimes just saying, look at what we're doing. Today is sort of the latter kind of talk. Today I want to talk about, first of all, can you hear me? Everything okay? Yes, yes. About the standard for decisional capacity. It seems to me designed to do two things. It's designed to determine when the patient has a threshold level of rationality such that she has the capacity to make a rational decision and also determine when the patient ought to be permitted to make a treatment decision. A quick preliminary remark. To have a capacity and to exercise that capacity well are not in the least bit the same. A baseball player might have the capacity to hit a home run and yet sometimes often not exercise that capacity well. To have the capacity to make a threshold rational decision is not the same as actually making a threshold rational decision. It's perfectly intelligible to say of a patient that he does have a threshold level capacity for rationality and yet here and now he's making perhaps a wildly irrational decision. Most of us have a threshold level capacity for rationality. I suspect all of us have made occasional rational decisions. I know I've made some wildly irrational decisions. It's precisely because we have the capacity to make a rational decision that it makes sense sometimes to criticize us for not exercising that capacity well. Now one might think that the standard for having threshold rational capacity, whatever we think that amounts to, ought to be the same as the standard for letting someone make a decision. One might think that if some patient, Jack, falls below threshold rational capacity, he ought not to be permitted to make the treatment decision, especially an important decision. Fact my claim today is that in practice these two things, a standard for rationality and a standard for permitting the patient to decide sometimes come apart and sometimes ought to come apart. I don't think I'll be saying anything dramatically new. The underlying point has been made by Gareth Owen as well as by Adrian Martin, no doubt by others. My contribution will be to put a bit of old wine into a slightly new bottle. I'm going to cast the point in terms of the distinction between theoretical and practical reason. I'll be arguing that the current decision capacity model is conceptually suspect, but I don't think in the end I'm going to urge any reform in that model. My students here at the University of Chicago sometimes wear a t-shirt that has the following slogan on it. That's all well and good in practice, but how does it work in theory? That's the epigraph for today's talk. So let's start with a look at the standard for decisional capacity. I know that there's a lot of debate about this. I hope there's going to be acceptance of something like the four criteria proposed in the famous paper by Berg Applebaum and Grisso. First, the ability to communicate a choice. Second, the ability to understand relevant information. Third, the ability to appreciate the nature of the situation and its likely consequences. And fourth, the ability to manipulate information rationally. So where does the possession of reason, where does being rational come into this? Well, criterion two involves understanding information. Criterion four involves manipulating information rationally, and so the patient must be able to grasp the essential information about her medical condition, and she must be able to make rational use of it to think about possible courses of action. And this is tied to criterion three, the ability to appreciate the nature of the medical situation. So in all of these, the patient's reason seems to be in play. However, what I want to point out is that with the possible exception of the idea of appreciating the nature of the medical situation, something I'll come back to soon, many philosophers, take Aristotle, would think that criteria two, three, and four, the criteria that focus on celebration, involve the exercise of theoretical reason, not of practical reason. Theoretical reason tells us how things are. Practical reason tells us what to do. Criteria two, three, and four seem to involve reasoning about the way things are, not about what to do. No doubt this is a simplification, and I'll eventually add a little complexity, but I want to reflect a bit on this simplified picture. One might easily read into it a particular philosophical view of the scope of our rational capacities, of the scope of reason itself. In fact, it seems to fit rather well with the view of reason that one finds in the work, say, of the great 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume. In his treatise of human nature, Hume famously declares, now quoting from Hume, it is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. Hume's claim here is that preferences and desires are not the sorts of things that are properly assessed in terms of being more or less rational. Preferences and desires, Hume thinks, are not candidates to be either rational or irrational. That I have desire D, Hume says, is no more rational or irrational than that I'm a certain height H. Each is merely a fact about me. Of course, Hume thinks that an action and desire can be an irrational action if it's also based on a false premise or an invalid inference. Suppose I want to slink my thirst. Here's a bottle of clear liquid. For anyone who took philosophy when I was, this is an absolutely standard example. I believe it's water, and so I desire to drink it. For Hume, the desire to drink in order to slink my thirst is neither rational nor irrational, but the desire to drink this clear liquid would be irrational if it turns out to be carbolic acid rather than water. To drink carbolic acid would be irrational as a means simply to slake my thirst. So Hume's claim is that as long as I understand all the facts, as well as all the cause-and-effect relationships, and then I make only valid inferences, that I have a desire to do any given thing cannot be either rational or irrational. It's simply a fact about me. Of course, Hume is not a moral skeptic. He does think that we can assess a desire along moral axes. The desire to help others is praiseworthy. The desire to harm others is blameworthy. But for Hume, neither desire counts as rational or irrational in itself. So the decisional capacity model looks to be humane. If the patient understands the medical facts and can make valid inferences from them, she's allowed to go with her preference, whatever that might be. The sheer rationality of her preference or desire as a preference or a desire is not in the picture. Now what I want to stress is that Hume's view about the scope of reason, about the relation of values to reason has not been the dominant picture, the dominant strain in the history of Western philosophical thought. Nor is it the dominant strain in current academic philosophical thought. Plato, going back to the ancients, thinks that a failure to know the nature of the good is a cognitive failure, a failure of reason. Some moderns, Kant comes to mind, might accept that a desire is not amenable to rational assessment. A little debate about that in the current literature, but that's the old view. But Kant would say that the decision to act upon a desire is thoroughly amenable to such assessment. As for current academic moral philosophers, both moral realists and moral constructivists, reject the Humean picture. Now I'm not saying that no philosophers have had or currently have a Humean style view about practical reason. My point is merely that it is very far from being the historical default view or the current default view. If the existing decisional capacity model assumes that all it takes to have capacity, where that means to possess a threshold level of rationality, is to have sufficient competence and theoretical reason, then that standard is relying on a highly disputable philosophical thesis about the nature of reason. But let's now add a little complexity. Back with Berg, Appelbaum, and Grissot's criterion three, the ability to appreciate the nature of the situation and its likely consequences. The term appreciate is ambiguous between the descriptive and the normative. It might mean simply that the patient fully grasps her medical condition and the likely consequences of going down pathway A versus going down pathway B. But to appreciate something might also suggest something normative. That the patient has a correct grasp of the values involved in going down pathway A versus pathway B. There is a little bit of literature that presses this point. The thought common to that literature is that at least in some cases and anorexia nervosa is the kind of case often cited, a condition of having decisional capacity is that one recognizes that if one is ill, where to do this involves having certain value-laden beliefs. Jules Holroyd puts it this way and now quoting, we tend to think that someone who weighs being thin or avoiding food over death or disability is not just endorsing a different set of values, rather they are making an evaluative mistake. Such a patient fails to see that she is in point of fact ill, but to get things right here to see that one is ill is to weigh values in a proper way to fail to see that one is ill is to weigh values in an improper way. So there is some complexity about all this in the literature. I don't think that makes much of a difference. In part it doesn't make much of a difference because the literature here about anorexia presses not only that the anorexic has irrational values but doesn't have decisional capacity. Sometimes the literature has another form and says that the anorexic's physical condition has so undermined her ability to engage in clear enough theoretical reasoning and it's for that reason that she is judged not to have capacity. However, the main reason to put aside such complexities is that, at least it's my impression and new clinicians will correct me if I'm wrong about this, is that these cases tend to be marginal. In these kinds of cases the level of practical reason needed to be judged to have decisional capacity is very modest. Many theories of practical reason would be much less modest. So even with a tweak to the current model I think it still remains substantially humane. So, my claim then is that the current standard for decision making capacity involves a commitment to a disputable philosophical thesis about the scope of practical reason. I don't have time to develop the point but I think that if one said instead that the capacity standard is supposed to pick out what it is to have something called autonomy one would end up more or less in the same situation. That is philosophers, surprise, surprise have many different views about what autonomy amounts to and on some views autonomy is effectively a procedural notion that's substantially value neutral. It does not require, so to speak that the agent who's autonomous track the good in doing so. On other views, depending upon the philosopher, either a condition for counting as autonomous or a condition for having autonomy to be worth caring about is that the actions of the autonomous agent do to some significant degree track what is good. So the same kind of issue would come up here if you were simply to say that the capacity model is trying to identify when we call a patient autonomous. That is you are inevitably going to be relying on a philosophical thesis that is in dispute and has been in dispute. So I began by remarking that the decisional capacity standard is supposed to do two things. Specific, specify when the patient has threshold rational capacity and specify when she should be allowed to make the treatment decision. Now, if a necessary condition for permitting the patient to make the treatment decision is that she does have threshold rational capacity then the philosophical debate about what that amounts to would have to be carried over to the question of whether the patient should be permitted to make the decision. The problem in theory would in fact entail a problem in practice. But I'm not ready to go with that entailment. That is I'm not recommending change in practice and certainly not the change required if one were to import a contentfully robust conception of practical reason into the decisional capacity standard. Rather, I'm proposing to separate a claim about when the patient has threshold rational capacity from a claim about when it's proper to let the patient make this treatment decision. And the reason to separate the two is simple. To my mind, no one has yet proposed a morally better standard for determining when the patient may make the decision. Writers in this area often say that the decisional capacity standard should be value neutral. One could aim at value neutrality either by relying on as I pointed out a disputable philosophical view about reason or one could aim at it by relying on certain practical considerations. The old-fashioned paternalism model assumed that the doctor was what Aristotle would have called a person of practical wisdom, a fronimous person who knew best. Few people accept that now, either about the physician or even really about the team as a whole. So if neither the physician nor the team has as it were is the repository of practical wisdom, the obvious question is who gets to make the decision. And there is a long and deeply dishonorable tradition of people in power denying the rationality of those without power of then overriding their preferences on the ground that one ought not to respect the preferences of people who are not sufficiently rational. So as a purely practical model, excuse me, it's a purely practical matter, I think it would be a great mistake to have much in the way of value be part of determining decisional capacity. So despite being problematic in theory in practice, things are more or less as they ought to be. Still, I think it matters how we describe things. It matters how things are in theory. We ought to be honest with ourselves about what we're doing. The very quick defense that I've just given of using a standard for decisional capacity that substantially value neutral is a purely practical defense. One could just subscribe to this defense while denying that practical reason is itself value neutral. So I want to leave some time for questions. I'm going to cut a couple of paragraphs. I want to end by making the point that if you take what I'm saying seriously, you would be willing to say in principle of some patient that she does not pass what you think is the proper philosophical standard for having a threshold level of reason. And yet she should be allowed to make the treatment decision. I actually think that that's probably, as I say, okay in practice, even if maybe a little worrisome in theory. Thank you. All right, I can't resist. Go for it. So I think that this is what we do in psychiatry all the time. And it's noteworthy that you raise the anorexia example, but what we do all the time is dance this dance of what is practical when our patients can decide and when they can't decide. And I think truthfully autonomy is often we're dancing the dance of what is the most practical application of what we can do. And so we're grateful to people like you who can give us philosophical grounding in what we're doing. But I'm not sure that the autonomy model is as we describe it now the right one. Thank you for that. As I say, I'm not prepared to say that things that practice should be changed. What I want to press is that if my analysis actually carries through there is this weird situation in which you're willing to say there's a sense and a real sense in which I don't think that this patient has the kind of level of reasoning ability of rational capacity, not just that she's not making a reasonable decision. We all do that all the time. But that she literally doesn't have capacity and yet the right thing to do is to let her decide. I think the best example of that is when we let somebody who is paranoid who wishes to be living outside but who's making that decision in the context of a Chicago summer versus a Chicago winter live outside. Thanks.


Titan's all access continues with talking ball presented by Duncan general manager John Robinson as always is here Helping us preview Sunday's game against the Denver Broncos.  I mean, I think they got a lot of good players Mike even after you know the chub trade to Miami You know it starts up front with the two guys in the middle DJ Jones and Purcell to really strong interior defensive linemen That can collapse the pocket Draymond Jones is having an outstanding season for him I think he's got 30-plus pressures and half a dozen sacks Two younger linebackers both from Ohio State Cooper and Browning You know they factor off the ball and as rushers and then in the back end you've got to really outstanding Safety's you know Simmons has been to several Pro Bowls Karim Jackson who we know from his days in Houston Both of those guys are really smart football players. They're around the ball a lot and then a corner. They got certain You know, he's a lockdown guy one of the better corners in the league on offense their quarterback is somebody we know from his days in Seattle We're talking about Russell Wilson Does it seem like that he's getting in sync with the Denver offense and that the Denver offense is sort of learning how to Utilize Russell Wilson's special gifts. Yeah, he certainly made a lot of plays both running and throwing and he's gotten better You know, he's he's made a lot of plays in this league. There's not a defense or blitz that he hasn't seen He's got a lot of playmakers around him to with Sutton Judy Hamler, you know the three receivers all of those guys are fast Sutton's probably the biggest of the group a Veteran group of backs in Gordon Murray and they picked up Chase Edmonds in the chub trade as well And they're getting this rookie tight end dulcimer. It's going a little bit, too He's a fast player out of UCLA so you can see the progression starting to take place All right So John, I want to ask you about something that I saw a next-gen stats Which I thought was fascinating and that is the Titans have blitzed less than any team in the NFL and You've gotten more pressure than any team in the NFL with just four men rushing. What's allowed that to happen? How are they doing that so well? Well, I think we've done a good job of platooning players trying to keep as many fresh guys in there as possible I think the coordination of our rush games has been really good in the unselfishness of our players When we ask, you know, a defensive tackle to maybe go pick an offensive tackle So that the outside rusher can come inside and then lo and behold the guy doing all the dirty work ends up Getting the sack or the pressure And then the little details and intricacies of a pass rush that we coach You're starting to see those show up on film more to help them defeat the pass sets of the offensive linemen to get back There and get pressure on a quarterback. What are the keys to beating the Denver Broncos Sunday at Nissan Stadium? Well, I think we've got to affect the quarterback You know when we just talked about continue to get pressure on him and that starts by stopping the run forcing them into passing situations So that we can't get that rush going And then offensively, it's it's what we know It's running the football setting the pass up off of that and letting our special teams complement both phases of the game John thanks as always always a pleasure Mike