Hello my friends and enemies and welcome to the 23rd episode of Patterson in Pursuit. I am your host, Steve Patterson, and for about the past 10 years or so I have been on the pursuit of truth and I've discovered lots of interesting philosophies along the way. One of them I've identified and dubbed as irrationalism. It's the idea that reality is fundamentally unknowable, there is no such thing as truth, logic is contradictory, the universe is paradoxical, and a significant part of my work is exploring why people believe that this could be so. Why is it that some people passionately believe the idea that the truth is that there's no truth? So that investigation has taken me from quantum physics to the Lyres paradox to religious claims to examinations about logic and mathematics, but you can also find it manifested in higher academia, the school of thought called postmodernism. This is what I've brought my guest on to the show today to talk about. He's Dr. Stephen Hicks who's written a book called Explaining Postmodernism, Skepticism and Socialism from Russo to Foucault. Now some of you, if you're like me, might already have experience with postmodernism in the humanities departments at your current college. I'm talking about the English professors, to some extent maybe the history professors, and maybe from the sociology department, you might find yourself as one of the lone rationalist individuals saying such naive things like objective truth exists, and of course by simply mentioning such an absurd idea you're ostracized and treated as being naive. Now if that sounds like you, I do have some good news. The current sponsor of the show is a company called Praxis, and they specialize in taking passionate, competent young people out of higher ed and into the real world.  Plus you don't have to worry about being condemned for believing in such things like objective truth. So if that sounds like something that you're interested in, either because you're currently stuck in academia or because you want to avoid it altogether, then check out their website at discoverpraxis.com. And on their homepage there's a button that says schedule a call. Click it, set up an appointment, talk to them and see if it sounds right for you. So back to philosophy and my discussion with Dr. Stephen Hicks, who is the professor of philosophy at Rockford University in Illinois. In this interview we don't just talk about postmodernism, we also cover what he calls premodernism and modernism. So for about the first half hour of this interview, we're covering about 1,500 years of philosophy. Now if that doesn't interest you, if you don't really care about the history of philosophy, skip ahead to about the half hour mark where we start diving more into postmodern philosophy, which is very closely tied to the philosophy that I have called irrationalism. Enjoy. Thank you Stephen for sitting down and talking with me about the subject. I hope it'll be fun. A lot of your work has focused on postmodernism, explaining the philosophy. What I'd really like to do is focus first on basic concepts. I think when we're trying to understand any philosophy, any claim about reality, you gotta first focus on the basics before you get into more advanced stuff. And before diving into postmodernism, it would make sense just to first start with modernism or even premodernism. This is an approach that you take in your book, and I was hoping that you could just spend maybe a few minutes explaining some of the basic concepts in, we'll start with premodernism, and maybe I'll ask you some questions about that, and then we'll talk about modernism for a few minutes, and then the rest of the discussion we can focus on postmodernism. Alright, good structure. So I think that most ideas don't come in little isolated packets. It's not just, I think it's a mistake to just to focus on epistemological claims or metaphysical claims. Usually those claims come whole package in regards to a bigger world view. So if we could speak in broad brushstrokes, obviously we're gonna be missing some nuance. In your mind, what is the premodern world view if you could summarize it? Right, well each of the issues in philosophy, you can separate it out and consider particular arguments formed against on their own merits. But yeah, the goal of philosophy is to integrate those into an entire philosophy that guides you in your life as a whole. And then of course what we're interested in is how those ideas play off against each other over the course of history and how they then influence historical eras. So if we take very broad stroke breakdowns of historical eras, clearly something happened in the early modern world and so we say that modern world represents a break with the premodern. And I would then say, we're just gonna talk about the premodern, of course, then we can talk about lots of ancient civilizations and so on. But the target in question in the modern era, in the early modern era is to contrast what was going on then as a break with say what had been going on in the previous 1,000 years. So if we take essentially from say the decline of Rome on through the Renaissance, that's about a 1,000 year chunk of time, and we asked what was the dominant intellectual framework in the west and we call that premodernism. Then we say it's some form of broadly religious philosophy and then more specifically it's a form of Christian philosophy and then from our modern perspective Christianity break down to a number of things. We would say essentially it's a form of Catholic Christian philosophy that's dominating that era. Now then to narrow that down right more specifically we say well who are the major intellectuals who frame the thinking for that era. Then certainly we have to say Augustine, say Augustine as the dominant thinker and then by the time we get into 600 years, 700 years later then we're into Aquinas who in some ways is a break with Augustine but a continuity as well. So essentially what we have is a Catholic Christian philosophy that is the intellectual framework for the era. Then we say what do we mean by a philosophy? Philosophy has a number of sub-questions. I think I did once to the tally. I think I came up with something like 113 of core issues that are philosophical issues. That's too many to go through. So we chunk those issues into broadly metaphysical, epistemological, questions about human nature, questions about ethics, and then questions about political philosophy as well. So what we get then if we go this route then is we have a metaphysics that is oriented toward the supernatural. We have an epistemology that emphasizes first mysticism in the form of revelations received by prophets back in time, delivered to a select few individuals but then the rest of us are to accept those on faith as absolutely binding. We have a view of human nature that emphasizes kind of a duality, of human nature, its matter and spirit, its body versus soul. There's a sense of the badness of human nature, a strong notion of original sin that people either can't control themselves and that's either because they don't know any better or even if they do know better their badness right out. And then the idea also that human beings are by nature subject, they should be subject to higher authority, most specifically God. You have an ethic right then if we turn to ethics issues that emphasizes or have an anti-materialism and even that kind of valorizes an ascetic approach to life. So the best human beings are people like monks and nuns who vow poverty and obedience and celibacy and dedicate themselves to living according to those values. And then we have a, when we turn to political issues essentially a hierarchical and authoritarian political structure where everyone of course is to be subject to God who is at the top and then to obey. And then God's representatives on earth, the temporal political structures manifested in the church, pope, cardinals, archbishops, bishops all the way down to the broad mass of people at the bottom who are laity. And then that theological institutional structure that is a very natural fit with feudal structures where you have the king at the top with all authority and they integrate that with a kind of a divine right of king's idea and you have the same structure all the way down. So something like that then is broadly what I am calling pre-modernism and that's what early moderns are reacting against. So when you say early modern, where do you roughly put the transitionary period from those ideas maybe to the next phase of modernism? Yeah, 1400s, 1500s, and then certainly on into the 1600s. So who are some of the initial thinkers that started to question and change that prevailing paradigm? Yeah, well there's a school of thinkers in northern Italy. School might be a bit strong, but there's certainly a collection of thinkers who broadly are known as humanists. So what you find in them is an increasing interest in the natural world. A lot of it is through a great admiration of the newly-admired texts of the Greeks and the Romans with their much more worldly concerns. I like to emphasize Galileo, which is extremely important here, that epistemological battle that he is a frontman for with respect to the authority of the senses and experiment and reasoning versus the traditional authorities, so that epistemological battle is being engaged there. With respect to human nature, where we have in the Renaissance the cultivation of the individual, a re-discovery and emphasis of the idea that people are not necessarily sinners, but that human beings can be beautiful and noble. We have an ethic that encourages people to cultivate their talents in a way that enables them to enjoy their lives, to enjoy worldly values, and that's not in opposition to cultivating your spiritual values or your psychological values. Then also at that same time, in politics, you start to see a breakdown of the hierarchical structures in Florence and Venice, the reintroduction of republican forms of government, new forms of early democracies in some of the city-states, and so on. Even if you go back to the 1400s in northern Italy, you see an increasing naturalism, an increasing reliance on empiricism, the senses and reason, cultivation of the individual, worldly ethical values, and an initial flattening. That's a little bit too strong, but a weakening of the traditional political hierarchies as well. So would it be fair to say, if we were to speak very imprecisely, that roughly the modernist worldview is going from the supernatural to the natural and from what you might call the irrational or the non-rational or the mystical to the rational, and what you might view as from the hierarchical, the strongly hierarchical, to the individual? Is that fair? Sure, yes. So that would boil it down to three points, yes, and that's essentially fine. There's already that's going on in the 1400s in northern Italy, in the 1500s. Of course, we have to talk about the reformation and what that means for religious thinking, but the religious thinking has a huge amount of epistemological battle, do we, as the Protestants emphasize, say that each individual has to have his or her own relationship with God, right? So then you're saying that each individual's judgment should be respected, and then that cultivates then people's ability to debate because then people start intensely debating all of the religious texts. And even though the Protestants or reformers were not advocates of reason, as an unintended consequence to the extent that people are arguing all over the place about what religious text means, then de facto you get a cultivation of people's intellectual abilities. You have a cultivation of more individualism because then as a result of the counter-reformation battles, you have a lot of breakaway individuals going off and starting their own churches. You have the emphasis that if individuals are going to have their own relationship with God, that means that they need to know God's word for themselves. So you have a mass movement toward teaching young people to read. And then again, as an unintended consequence, when people start to read one book, they're interested in reading other books so people start to become more educated. And so epistemologically, right, then in the early modern world, we have a strong increase in epistemological individualism, right, to use that phrase. Also in the 1500s, what is important is, you know, Columbus is crossing the ocean, bringing the worlds together. The era of modern globalization is going on. And that has, you know, huge impact for all kinds of social dimensions. So that is another social-political factor that has philosophical significance. So as we move from the early moderns to the later moderns, this sounds like this is what lays the groundwork for what most people think of as the Enlightenment. Is this essentially, was the Enlightenment then maybe the peak or the manifestation of the modern ideas? I think so, yes. So what you have is a lot of, in the early modern era, European thinkers can rediscovering the Greeks and the Romans, and in fact, they're going back to school. There's some, you know, independent new discovery that's going on, but a lot of it really is rediscovery and it's not necessarily systematic yet. And then a lot of things that are happening in lots of areas, and then as people in the 1500s and early 1600s start to reflect on the significance of the new world that's being created, right, then they're developing an explicit philosophy to formulate their understanding of the new kind of world that's going on. And then that all tours by the late 1600s, certainly the early 1700s, and then we are into what we call the Age of Enlightenment, where to some extent, a lot of these philosophical revolutions have already occurred and what's going on is that it's being conceptualized. The arguments for them are more sophisticatedly developed. The developments in epistemology and in politics and ethics are being integrated with each other. And so you have a coherent, systematic world view that you can call, say, the Enlightenment philosophy. What I find interesting is around this time period, the political correlate of this philosophy is something like a great liberalization, or a great classical liberalization, as we might have to call it today, where you had the opening of markets, you had the degradation of the institution of slavery, you had to some extent protectionism, nativism is somewhat replaced by this idea of international trade. And what I think is an error is to think that this is out of the blue, it's just an historical artifact. And I think what the underlying causes does point to something like a change in the philosophy. You're absolutely right. If you look at the arguments for liberalization across a number of dimensions, if you're going to be liberal in your religion, for example, then that is underlying the concept that individuals should be able to make up their own minds and we're going to trust people to make decisions and that it's properly private. And so that's an individualism. If you think that you mentioned slavery, for example, that slavery becomes a moral abomination by the time we get to the end of the 17s, and really for the first time in human history, that notion is there. Well, again, that slaves are individuals as well, that they are human beings, and so they have the same capacities that any human being should have. And that's, again, an individualistic theme. If you are going to liberalize markets, in many cases the arguments are that any individual with normal capacities can govern his or her own business life, an economic life, make their own decisions about what their careers are going to be, whom they're going to trade with, and so on. And again, that's an emphasis on the capacity of individuals to govern their own lives. Or if you're interested in Democratic and Republican modes of political organization, again, those devolve political power to the individual. You think about the, you know, the astonishing confidence, right? In individual judgment, if you are going to have any sort of Democratic political system, what you're going to say individuals should be able to, the broad mass of them, think about important political matters, have arguments about them, and that's the most formed and responsible of votes. So yes, I'm agreeing with your point, right, that in all of these different areas, it could look like they're springing up out of the blue, but there are underlying individualistic and pro-lesion principles that have become spread. And so the more basic set of philosophical principles is being leveraged in a whole bunch of particular areas socially. So what then do you see as the general timeframe to transition from the modern era to now the post-modern era? What, not just what are the, what's the timeframe, but who are, do you think, the foundational thinkers that started this transition? Yeah, well let me, Ernest, the first part of your claim. I think we still are living in the modern era. Essentially our culture, modern 21st century global culture is modernist culture. So when we say that we are living in post-modern times, I would make that a more modest claim, because in my view, we do have a very vigorous post-modern movement in intellectual circles, but even that's too broad in some intellectual circles, in the humanities, in some areas in the social sciences and so forth. And they've had some cultural manifestations in the arts and other areas as well, certainly in the educational establishment. So what I would then say is that we have a broadly modernist culture and some respects, important respects is still vigorous and thriving, but that there are within some sub-cultures or sub-institutions within that broader modernist culture a very vigorous post-modern intellectual framework. Then the second part of your question is, so when this starts to happen, I put the dates to be in the second half of the 17th century. So the 1700s are the long 18th century is broadly, we call it the age of enlightenment, we call it the long 18th century, because you would have to go back to Locke and Newton at the end of the 1600s and then on, say, through Napoleon. But then what you have is within that enlightenment era, all of the philosophical issues are always vigorously being debated and all of the major positions are represented. But what starts to happen toward the end of the 1700s is that there's a vigorous reaction right against many of the Enlightenment themes. We start to see this particularly in northeastern Europe, and in my view it's in the German states. And I focus on Kant and some of the other Germans. What you find in them is a reaction right against many of the very strong claims that the Enlightenment thinkers were making about the power of reason to answer all of life's questions and dramatically to reshape all of society's institutions in a progressive direction. And so any philosophy or philosopher then that is critical about the powers of reason and sets himself to put severe limits on the facet of reason that person then would mark a turning away from the Enlightenment. So again, this is very broad strokes, but we focus on Kant's philosophy with his critique of pure reason, where he sets out as part of his project, to say that reason cannot in fact come to know the most important truths about the nature of the world and human identity, and then develops some very sophisticated philosophical arguments right in support of that conclusion that is anti-Enlightenment. And that's perhaps the most provocative thesis in my post-Patern work. And partly to speak specifically of philosophically epistemological issues, but Kant does argue that human beings do need certain regulative beliefs in their life. They need to believe in a kind of God. They need to believe in immortality of the soul and freedom of the will. And he believes that Enlightenment philosophy is going to destroy all of those beliefs. So if you can find a way to limit the claims of reason and science, then that's going to, as he puts it, make room for the kinds of beliefs that he thinks are philosophically important. And then this he's joined in a large number of early, what I call counter-Enlightenment philosophers. To some extent, this was driven by political concerns. We mentioned Napoleon right a little earlier, out of the degradation that followed from the French Revolution. Napoleon rises to power and then he sweeps through Eastern Europe, conquering everywhere. He beats the German states. They're really horrified by this. They see from their perspective Napoleon really as a Westerner. They see him as a representative of Enlightenment philosophy and the French Enlightenment. And so they are very concerned to say, how are we going to, so to speak, reinvigorate German-ness against these French imports that are being, they're not actually imported, they're being imposed upon us by this foreign conqueror. They're partly motivated by just political nationalistic reasons. You get a reaction against everything from the West. And that then includes all of the Enlightenment ideas of separation of church and state, comes under attack, the ideas of individualism, the secularism and so on, all of which are part of the Enlightenment package. I'm very glad that you make that distinction between the, what you might call, higher academia culture, which I think is, in my own experiences, thoroughly postmodern in several areas, maybe not so much in the hard sciences, but certainly in the humanities, for example, I think you see anti-Enlightenment ideas very popular. But I think you are very correct to point out that in the society at large, I think you see, well, you certainly have the postmodern ideas, but I think the majority of people have not bought on to the postmodern value system or anti-value system. And in fact, what's really interesting is right now, I think just in the last year, since you see this remarkable political Trump phenomenon, I think it has to do with people's rejection and mockery and disdain for some of the what people might call absurdities coming out of the humanities departments. Now, in my own analysis, I think they go to the absurd in the other direction, but I think that's partly a broader cultural shift that rejects the postmodern ideas. I'm hoping maybe you can talk, this would be a good segue to talk more and maybe in more detail about what is packaged in the postmodern worldview in regards to metaphysics, in regards to epistemology. So if, for example, our reason is flawed, do we have any method of accessing the truth? If there is no such thing, for example, as truth, then what are we doing by trying to communicate about philosophy and so on? And political theories too. Yeah, good question. So if we then fast forward, so to speak, to mid-20th century when the leading postmodern intellectuals are coming to prominence. So 1950s, 1960s. And here, so the big names are people like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Léotard, another French, the French were really taking the lead here. On the American side, Richard Rorty is a huge name, maybe Stanley Fish, a little more in literary criticism, but a very philosophical literary critic. If we take them as representative of the postmodern vanguard, all of them are, with the exception of Fish, philosophy like PhDs, and all of them in their graduate training and much of their early writing are engaged with epistemological issues. And what we do find in them is a strong skepticism about the power of reason. And so what has happened, again, this is very broad strokes, is from the high aspirations that the Enlightenment had for the power of reason on dozens of technical issues in philosophy. How does reason work out with respect to integrating with perception and observational data? How do we form abstract concepts? How do we integrate those into propositions? How do we take propositions and integrate them into theories? What's the nature of grammar? How do we develop the logical and mathematical tools and so on? So dozens and dozens of sub-issues that are necessary to develop a full and robust theory of reason. By the time we get to the mid-20th century in both the analytic and continental traditions, broadly speaking, it's a very skeptical moment in philosophy. And so what we get are thinkers, the early postmodern thinkers, who believe that reason is not able at all to come to know the truth. So what we get, for example, is someone like Foucault in a very deep way, saying that there is no such thing as truth. And so truth then starts to be a word that's used ironically. Or it's always put in quotation marks. Or it's relativized that there are only truths depending on a given person's cognitive framework, which has no more standing than anybody else's cognitive framework. Or the notions that truth and reality and reason, these are all things that really are meaningless. So it's pointless to try to exert any more philosophical energy in figuring out what the truth is and so on. And interestingly, Derrida, Foucault, and Rorty, they were all, in their historically informed way, say the Enlightenment project was based on reason and we are now at the end of the Enlightenment project. It has utterly failed. And so now our philosophical question is, what are we supposed to do right now that we no longer, so to speak, believe in truth, reason, reality, and so on? How are those ideas translated into shifts in political theory? Well, one way to do it is then to say, all right, well, if we're not really then interested in figuring out what the truth is, that's no longer going to be our core value as philosophers to seek. What are we then supposed to do? The standard substitute concept is the concept of power. So we do have values and these values are subjectivized and relativized, but it's not that anyone's values are truer or even necessarily better than anyone else's. So all we can do is say that people are trying to assert their values and then necessarily since the values are relativized, all of our values are coming into conflict with each other. And the way we're going to resolve conflict is not through reason, debate, and discussion because we don't believe in reason anymore. It's not a matter of figuring out whose values are truer, right, or good because we don't believe in objective truth and goodness anymore. So the way we resolve conflicts then is only through power. So power then comes to be seen, and this might be a bit strong, but power really is the metaphysical substrate, so to speak. The world's understood only in terms of power struggles. So here, of course, Nietzsche becomes perhaps one of the most important forerunners of the postmodern thinkers. Nietzsche, of course, he was still doing metaphysics and he had a robust metaphysical theory, but it was all a power-based metaphysical theory. Everything is reduced to power, including our philosophies. They're all relativized to our power struggles. And so that's why someone like Foucault, who actually just called himself a Nietzschean, a Nietzschean absent the metaphysics, you put power struggles to the fore. And then once you put power right to the fore, but it's not power in the service of truth or it's not power in the service of goodness or justice, then you have really an amoral understanding of social dynamics. So there's two things. First is a funny aside. I'm very glad that you give that analysis because it reminds me of my time in undergrad where I spent a semester at Washington, or American University in Washington, D.C., and I was doing kind of an internship program there. And one of the obligatory classes I had to take was a class on Russian history. And I never forget this because the professor was from Boston, so she had this very, very heavy accent. And the class was one of the most superficial or fake, or if I might be so bold, bullshitty classes I've ever been into in my life because she was obsessed with Foucault. And in her class on Russian history, she would prescribe readings that came from Foucault. And pretty much every class on several occasions she would mention the power structures of implying her analysis of how the world works. And it was so funny to me because I literally had a running joke, kind of a macabre one where I was essentially trying to see how much nonsense, fluff and irrational writing I could get away with in that class as I would submit articles weekly and see if I could still get an A. And it was to the point where I was intentionally making like absurdity, absolute, you know, abject open absurdities. But then I would incorporate Foucault into it and she aided up and I got an A in that class. That's a funny aside because that's exactly the worldview that she was emanating. But what is, go ahead. Yeah, obviously there are going to be degraded versions of postmodernism. You know, when you set aside the issue of truth and logic and structure and the idea of objective standards, then how do you tell the difference between what's good and what isn't.  You stepped into that into that world.  And some of his things I do find myself right in sympathy, particularly when he's critical of certain other pretentious philosophical outlets. So I wouldn't want to say in any way shape or form that Foucault is a bullshitter. I think there are bullshitty things that he is doing a lot of times he's a little more fooling around the same thing with respect to to Rory. I think Rory was always a very serious guy, well versed in in all the major philosophical traditions.  Yes, this is an excellent transition into what I want to ask you. Talking about this just the actual epistemology of this worldview, what is screaming in my mind is what is it not a claim about reality to claim that we cannot know reality? Isn't that a claim? Isn't that making a truth claim itself? All right, so then you get into all the self referential contradictions. You know, if you try to state skepticism, right, so you want to say, you know, the truth is that there's no truth, right, or I know that we know nothing, right, or, you know, the absolute truth is that everything is relative. There is no, there is no, there are no meta narratives, right, but that's a meta narrative claim right itself. So this is certainly something that the postmodern struggle with because at the same time, you know, they are saying that, you know, language is fundamentally in a way non communicative in the way that we have traditionally thought of language right as as communicative. And then it seems like, you know, at that point you should take the, the, the Kratylus option, as I think about Kratylus being an ancient Greek skeptic, right, who realized, you know, that, you know, if words mean nothing, right, ultimately, then the only proper response is to say nothing.  So the question then is what are you trying to do when you are using words and apparently, right, trying to communicate people and, and marshal what you might call evidence and arguments, right, to try to convince people rationally that they should adopt your, your non rational or anti reason, right, worldview. So here, I don't know, maybe we'll take a Rorty, right, you know, at one point he says that he made a decision that he's no longer going to think of himself as a philosopher as someone who's trying to work with the scientists or work with the the physicists. And he came out of, at least in his formal training in his early career, have a logical positivistic and then a broadly positivistic or analytic right approach to philosophy. And one of the hallmarks right of that entire philosophical tradition is to say that the philosophers should see the scientists as the major exponents of what truth seeking is all about. And as the name analysis suggests that what philosophers do is they are providing analytic guidance right to the scientists who are working on all of these problems. So the job of the philosophers is to analyze the various components that go into scientific method. Various data organizational right methods and proposition formation and the logical and mathematical tools that the scientists will use so we are, so to speak handmaidens right of the scientists and the scientists are broadly speaking looking for, for the truth. But then what word he realizes right as he goes on his philosophical journal or journey rather is that you reach skeptical dead ends as the as the analytic tradition did by the 1950s. Here, Coon in the early 60s and Paul fire Robin. Also in the 1960s, sounding the death knell that it's really just a bunch of paradigms that we make these leap of faith shifts from one paradigm to another and we have to talk about science not in terms of truth and progress but rather in terms of a more socially subjective paradigms that hold for a group of scientists for a given period of time, and we leap into some other one. So Rorty is all, you know, sophisticatedly involved in those discussions at that point and basically what he says is, you know, I realize that I right as a philosopher and no longer an ally of the poets that I need to see myself as an ally of the poets. So what we ask them is if that's the important shift right well what are poets doing right. And in a way you know we can talk about poets, questing for truth and so on, but our more common understanding is that poets just make stuff up. They're totally in a fictional universe and the idea is that we are creating linguistic structures that are expressive, but they're not expressive of any sort of objective reality instead they are expressive of subjective states. I hear that, but there's still that voice in my head that says well hang on, if he's saying I am no longer an ally of the philosophers I am now doing the work of poetry, is that not still inescapably a claim about what is in reality? Even if he were to say something like I am in my own reality, we are all in our own reality, that still does not satisfactorily get over that question are you not still making a claim about reality? There is no way to escape the paradoxes and so I agree with you right on that point. So if Vordy right at this point is saying well this is what poets really do, right, poets really are, they really are subjects and they have internal psychological states and in their language they are expressing these things and that's different from various others. So yeah all of those are to make realistic objective claims about a certain kind of human activity. So this is then where the irony then comes in, so what Vordy has to say is yeah I'm not here making a truth claim, instead all I'm doing is, and I have to water it down, right, is that I'm suggesting a certain way of thinking about what we are doing with language. So a better way to think of it might be to think in terms of what poets do, and that then is a subjective self expressive thing that, you know, rhetorically, when you turn to the reader or the consumer's perspective, right, might press certain value buttons in you and cause you to have a certain, right, subjective experience. So that's then the model of what's going on if we generalize it to all of language and all of discourse, that everybody is merely expressing the way poets do their own subjective value preferences wherever those come from, we'll talk about that later. And we're all, so to speak, rhetorically trying to influence each other the way good rhetoricians do, and that it doesn't help us in understanding this phenomenon to use the concepts of truth or reality. Now I would love to dive in specifically to unpack more of the philosophy that you've just presented because I find that really fascinating. Maybe I'll have to have you on sometime in the future because I don't think we're going to have time for this episode, but I do want to ask you something that I find really interesting and maybe you can help me with this because when you explain that philosophy about the subjectivity of everything and to me it is, you know, as you said the paradoxes are inescapable and I would add the paradoxes are inescapable, elementary and self-evident and however my perspective is to say a thinker who is serious about analyzing phenomena to arrive at such obviously patently inaccurate beliefs, self-contradictory beliefs, it's very hard for me to accept the idea that that is in reality a very subtle thinker that Rorty or Foucault in regards or Nietzsche in regards to epistemology that for me is kind of an unforgivable thing if your epistemology is such that you make such a base level confusion then it's very hard for me to accept that there's much else that's not going to be reflected in the other areas in which you've applied your rational analysis. Can you help me? Part of the response to be there is say if you reach a self-contradiction then your reaction like Steve Patterson then is to say wow this is a huge problem and I should be embarrassed by this. But the implicit in that is the idea that self-contradiction is a bad thing. And self-contradiction is a bad thing only if one is supposed to be logical. So what we then would need to do is again look at the history of epistemology here and again look at the continental tradition, the post-Contean continental tradition. If you start reading people like Hegel in the next generation and ask what's the status of logical contradiction in Hegel or the status of logical contradiction in Marx. Here you have two thinkers both of whom are rejecting any sort of classical logic coming out of the Aristotelian tradition in favor of what they would call a dialectical logic which builds into it the whole notion that contradiction and self-contradiction are metaphysically built into the universe. If you then look at the early and proto existentialist thinkers like Kierkegaard and then a little later Nietzsche in the subsequent generation after Kierkegaard. And again you find a very strong disdain for logic as essentially pointless and that carries on through thinkers like Heidegger. And all of these guys right Hegel, right Marx, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger are extraordinarily formative in the thinking of the postmodern thinkers Foucault, Derrida and so on. So when they get to the point of saying oh we've reached a self-contradiction here that's not a problem because they've already bracketed logic in a fundamental way. And I don't disagree with that in terms of historical analysis but from what I would say is it might be true that these thinkers are historically influential. That they wrote a lot of words but for me it's as close, it is I suppose the ultimate litmus test that if it's the case that your understanding of self-contradiction is something which does not worry you. I can't escape the idea that that's a reflection on your own intellectual shallowness which sounds preposterous. Yeah I have to push back on you. I think what I would say is that what you have is logic working against itself because then when you read all of these guys, they are very logical. So if you just take Richard Rorty as an example here he starts off as a gung-ho right advocate of analytical philosophies methods and he is able to follow the development of very sophisticated arguments over the course of many generations. And that requires a high aptitude for logic and an embracing of logic. But what then happens to you if as a result of pursuing this intensely like logical investigation you reach skeptical anti-logic conclusions. What you've then got as a person obviously who's got some psychological torment right going on inside. And then maybe the next time we talk we can talk about some of the psychology here or how to evaluate people reactions to that self-contradiction when they reach it. Yes I would love to. I think that is just a fascinating topic. I really appreciate you. This has been an excellent introduction, an excellent overview. So thanks so much for talking about it. My pleasure Steve. Bye for now. Alright so that was my interview with Dr. Steven Hicks of Rockford University. I hope you guys enjoyed it. There's obviously a great deal more to say on this topic and I'll make sure to get Dr. Hicks on the show again so we can continue talking more about the psychology of logical contradictions. That's obviously something that if you've been following my work you know I'm very much interested in. I freely admit that I am biased towards logical coherence and I just can't get over the idea that if you're okay with self-contradiction you're probably not a genuine intellectual. But hopefully he can help me overcome that bias in the future. So that's all for me today. I'll see you guys next week.


A new jobs are on the way for Nigerians in the new year, according to President Mohammad Abu Hari. The president in his new year message said his administration will deploy ICT, of course information and communications technology platforms, for the purpose of job creation. It will also ensure the diversification of the economy to support other emerging sectors. Senate President Ahmad Lawan asks Nigerians to continue having faith in the country and its democratic institutions. Ashwaju Bolatini Abu said that given the way Nigerians fought to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, there is no doubt that they can equally stand up to problems that seek to shackle us. There were similar Goodwill messages from other political leaders.


Okay, I think we can start so Today we are gonna present the the work we've we've done for almost a year with Richard to support mlc-nandy in the in the canal So I am Boris Brezion and I'm working for three electrons and I'm a child of mine blogger and working for Sigma star game. They are and we are both doing consulting in the area of embedded Linux and This project we are working both on and had a lot of fun with Emerson and and Now we'll progress give you a short introduction to emancy and then I will take over and tell you More details on on ubi and other stuff Yes, so, you know SLC NAND is supporting for is supported for a long time now and it's started to Begin to to be bored we started to be bored and so NAND vendors decided to Invent and using to to to let us keep our job. So they invented mlc-nand So let's see a bit what the constraints are for on mlc-nands. So the first one is kind of well-known and expected You get reduced lifetime, which means you have fewer erase cycle program erase cycle You also have to program all the pages in the ascending order. We'll see later why We are that our retention issues, but we already are those issues with a substance the only difference is that we have a lot of them and Yeah, it tends to To Complicate a lot the process We also have the bird pages project problem, which I will detail a bit later and again, I don't know if NAND vendors try to be mean with us, but That's that's a bit hard to deal with and the unstable bits problem Which When you design your board your you'd better Make sure you have Some capacitors to to be able to finish the program or erase operation You are doing before the real poor cut happens. So we'll see if we can solve that So the first one is the reduced lifetime actually, this is not a big issue because Ubi has been designed to distribute the work over the wall device The only thing you have to do here is just tweak a bit the configuration That should work pretty well The second issue we have is the Data retention issue and before I describe that one. I just want to show you What's the difference between an SLC cell and an MLC cell so in SLC cell you have only two levels One is erased and one is P1 in which the bit is set to zero and In MLC cell you have four different levels This means you can only go from the bottom to the top and then when you want to go back to the Erase state you have to erase the wall block So Why is it a problem for a data retention? This is mainly because of Read and write disturbance so with MLC cells Since you have more levels this means the the distance between the levels are Smaller and you're more like more likely to switch from one state to another if you have some charge loss or if you gain some electrons So this is partly why MLC names tend to be more sensitive to to Read and write disturbance You also The fact that MLC cells are smaller and are closer than Our closer together means that each time you have to program or read a page the disturbance is even Stronger So here The only solution we have to deal with that is either to increase the ecc level ecc strengths But then again, you'll eat the problem at some point So no matter the ecc strength you put you'll have to detect that you reach a level of bit flips that you Count all the handle and just move the data somewhere else And this is what actually this is what ubi is doing ubi is When ubi reads a block it checks the number of bit flips and says oh this block is gonna be unreadable Soon, I'm gonna move the data somewhere else So yes, I just said that before Then comes the bird pages problem Actually, this is one of the biggest problem we have with MLC So let's go back to the MLC cell diagram You see that you have two bits inside the cell and That would be too easy for us if the two bits were assigned to the same page So then Vendors decided to assign them to two different pages And each time you want to program one of the bits So you have to first to program the low lower bit and then the upper bit and each time you want to program one of The bit you have to change from one state to another If you look at the different states we have here If the first bit you want to keep it to one and then you want to program the second bit to Zero then you have to go from erase state to p3 And if you have a pocket in the middle you not only corrupt the the second meet Which is kind of expected by the upper layers, but you also corrupt the first bit Which was already programmed before and assumed to be safe So this is kind of breaking a simple rule which a lot of people were relying on so That's that's the problem. We are we have with third pages So that's the reason NAND vendors ask you to program all the pages in ascending order And Actually, it's a bit worse than that Because if you look at the differing scheme we have in the wild So this is just an example. We have different period scheme, but this one is already Quite complex so You see that Lower pages and upper pages are kind of interleaved which means you can say, okay Even if my pages eight kilobyte Let's say that my page is actually 16 kilobyte and I program tries to page and at once And that's not possible because they decided to interleave the pages Actually, I think they have good reason to do that that It's not clearly and explain in the data sheet. I I guess they do that to improve performances and Also mitigate the right disturbance, but maybe someone in the audience can give some clue No Okay, so anyway, it's how it works and it's kind of painful to deal with And the last problem we have Actually, this is not something we experience during our test but some people reported that if you Almost finished the program or erase operation You might be able to read back the data after the poor cut But only once so you read back the valid data once and then when you read back again Really read it back again. It's invalid and Again, that's a problem because Ubi and Ubi FS they don't know Which block was programmed last and we don't have that information right now. So since We never faced that and it's not really described in Datasheets or Nen vendors tend to say no my name is immune to that Which I don't trust But since we never seen that we decided to kind of ignore the problem and My guess is that it's not just a black and white problem. It's a bit more subtle So my guess is that if you interrupt a program operation in the At the end of the operation, you might be able to read the data back but you'll probably see a lot of bit flips and If Ubi sees a lot of bit flips, it will it will decide to move the data somewhere else. So Hopefully we will we are kind of safe safe against the unstable bit problem But yes, if some Nen vendors are able to Give us some more clue about the this problem that that would be great Then there was some problems we were not We didn't knew before working on on the solution. So the main problem is that We we saw that if you don't write the block completely So if you only write partially the blocks, then you will see a lot of bit flips and the last pages you programmed and You have so much bit flips that if you read several times the same page the same last set of pages You will have the read disturb effects which will generate even more bit flips and soon the page will become Unreadable, so that's not really a problem because Ubi is able to detect that and move the data to somewhere else But this means that in this case Ubi skips moving data around and it just works the Nen much faster So yes, that's something We discovered and we that that would be better if we Knew that before so this is what we called the open block issue Well, we also discovered some good thing The main one and the one that we are relying for our solution is that you can program Blocks in SLC mode So in by SLC mode, I I mean it's a software software MLATS SLC mode Which means you only program the lower pages of each block And of course it works. It solves the page pair pages program It tends to solve It tends to show less bit flips in those pages and Those pages tend to be less sensitive to read read this write disturbance But the main drawback with that solution is that you lose out of the capacity and that's not really acceptable So just one last word about the name constraints Yeah, that's really good to have some more information from Nen vendors because right now we are just Trying things and failing and then trying to understand why it's not working and why the name is acting Weird so yes, please Nen vendors share the share some more information so now I'll let Richard talk a bit about UBI and then present the solution So now a few words on UBI basics because later we will dive into the details and We have to make sure that you know the the UBI basics first of all UBI nomenclature and that's something often gets wrong and people get horrible horrible confused by it As you know, UBI is a mapping between Logical and physical erase blocks all blocks UBI Presents to the user is actually only a logical block and is then mapped to a real physical block That's why we have denotation of the BEB. That's the physical erase block and LEB the logical erase block. That's the easy part Then What most people get wrong is the UBI image the UBI image is this File or or dump that you have on your empty partition For example the tool ubinize creates you a UBI image and then you flash this image under your empty T Can be one one empty partition or so the whole names Then at at the runtime we have the UBI device That means when we start UBI and UBI Scans the whole partition and it's ready to work then we have the UBI device. It is also being found under slash death is always UBI and and a number and Then we have also UBI volumes Just think of the logical volume manager. We have for block devices. That's something for flash so UBI offers you a way to partitions your UBI Device in multiple parts namely the UBI volumes That means you can have multiple UBI FS Instances on the same UBI device Please never ever create multiple UBI devices on your NAND unless you really know what you're doing It's a day. We had a nice discussion on that that at some point it makes sense to to have multiple UBI instances when you want to make sure that the view labeling won't hurt a specific part on your NAND, okay, but Actually, you should have the view labeling to domain as large as possible So and then finally we have the word attach That's basically the the process of floating and starting UBI because UBI has to scan Either the fast-map or the full flash image and this process called attach So when you when you report me about on a mailing list, then I ask you does UBI attach work? And then you know now what I mean so and now How does UBI look on your flash? Does this cursor work? It's really small No cursor, okay We have the the logical erase blocks on the top The logical erase block number starts always with a zero and start with zero for each volume that means when we have one volume then we have an erase blocks starting by By zero but when we have multiple volumes then the logical erase block number always starts with zero and The user above UBI for example UBI FS only sees the logical erase blocks That's it. That's important to know because UBI FS may report LEP number five is bad. Then I know that's the fifth logical block. It's not the physical block sometimes people get this wrong and then to a to a NAND dump and go in the hex fewer and Search the offset of the fifth block and get confused So then you see in the next row the physical erase blocks obviously the physical erase blocks start by by one and go to N, but they They have only one one instance for each number UBI just starts numbering then by by the by the offset zero and goes up to N Every logical erase block has a mapping to a physical one Of course, it can also have multiple mappings because UBI does copy on write This operation is called the atomic lip change. That means you can change the logical erase block atomically We need this to preserve power card safety for example when UBI FS Starts writing a new journal head Then it finds which logical erase block number has the journal and then it says, okay I update the data and then it just does an an atomic lip change and for a small time frame We have on our flash two copies of the same logical erase block data But since we have a sequence counter UBI can decide which one is the newer one and of course we have also A checksum when we do a copy that means when we face a power card and the data is not fully written we can use a checksum to find out that we have That that has a problem while writing the The new copy and can just go down to the old one so each Each physical erase block has two UBI headers Meaning the erase counter header also referred as easy header and the volume header also often called the volume ID header These are two have two headers As soon UBI finds a free physical erase block it immediately places the erase counter header on this block The purpose of this header is as the name says preserving the erase counter Because UBI wants to know how often each block has been erased for purposes of relabbing and As soon a physical erase block gets assigned to a logical erase block Then the volume header is placed onto the volume header Contains the logical erase block number and the volume ID and some other details, but for now we only Focus on the volume ID and the logical erase block. Is this clear so far? Do you have any questions? That's the basic concept how UBI works or nice a Room full of UBI experts. I have more questions So Boris said for before and we can write a physical erase block Just I'm too fast first. How does the how does the header and how structure look like on SLC names? as I said before we have the Erase counter header and the volume ID header So far so good now the Now the the first Special trick comes into place namely sub pages on SLC names You can write a single batch into multiple steps In data sheets you find this as the NOP not that number of programs is typically four That means you can program a single page in four steps And that's why Linux says when it finds an SLC name That we can have four sub pages for each page And that's why UBI is able to place the erase counter header and the volume ID header into a single page Otherwise we would have to waste two pages for the metadata Here in the graphic you see it as that both headers are in the in a page be zero that means we We have an overhead Being from you be only by one page. That's rather acceptable And the other pages are used for the payload of the of the logical erase block meaning the real data you can use For example used by UBI FS so Now a few words on the data retention issues mostly because they are really really visible on on MLC on on SLC you have a hard time to Reproduce them on MLC. You see them really fast so mmm on MLC you face mostly read disturb for example on an SLC NAND you have to read the same page a few hundred thousand times just to hit a single bit flip due to Read disturb on the MLC when you are unlucky 500 reads are enough So that's a real problem So as the typical solution to deal with read with read disturb is detecting bit flips Before we have more bit flips than we can incorrect and scrub the block scrubbing means we copy the data to other block and and after a Fresh programming then then the bit flips are are prepared to deal with that and Mostly to do more experiments with that we have the UBI health demon It's actually a very simple user space program that can fetch from UBI Statistics how often each page has been has been read and then UBI health demon decides, okay Let's trigger a scrub Now more on this slide Untypical SLC NAND You have a crone chop which reach from time to time your whole UBI volume and that's basically enough I write here on SLC without fast map for a reason because Fast map is a nice optimization for UBI to have a fast boot up because it doesn't have to scan all pages When we do a disk dump from UBI Zero underscore whatever then we read only a volume and we read only the payload not the metadata That means we can only address read disturb issues on the metadata and the the volume headers and also the internal UBI Volumes are only read doing boot up That means on SLC you are you're only safe and I do from kind of from time to time a reboot without fast map and do a disk dump On an MRC. This is not enough and that's why we had the UBI health demon The disk dump command is also not so nice because of course you have to you have to read The whole volume and it will introduce a large IO load and maybe your your real-time application will block whatever It's not nice and that's we have the UBI health demon. You can tell the demon, okay Please make sure that within time frame from one month The whole name chip will be read blocked by block and then the health demon will will start read commands After a few hours up. You can just make sure that within a given time frame the whole name is being read and Redisturb is being addressed We currently not sure whether it makes sense to keep UBI health demon as user space program When it turns out that it can be solved easily in the kernel, we will move into the kernel But for now we keep it in in user space just to do more more experiments with with specific writes and read patterns and Such things. We also use it as a small reporting tool to get known Which application introduces which read load because sometimes you have a rough Application with which reads a lot of data and maybe start rich Disturb more soon and you may have demon can tell you So and now I will hand over Where we have the read counter from and actually I've I've added a new interface to To to UBI which exports the read counters and UBI has an in-in memory counter That that exports them to the daemon and the daemon then has a configuration file where he can store the counters Of course, but we also say it doesn't matter when the counters are not precise for example when When we have a power cut before the daemon was able to to dump down the stats and we lose Two days of read counters. It doesn't really matter because we don't need exact numbers We only need a rough measurement. How often is this read roughly? It doesn't matter when it's read 5000 times or 6000 times it was often read Yes, of course the daemon writes the file more often than a single month And you can also Dump this counters into a UBI static volume Then you don't have to have it as file on UBI FS so and now I will hand over to to Boris and he will Talk about about the bird pages issue Yes, so So we saw that we need to program blocks in SLC mode and in order to do that the upper layers need to know Where are the lower pages? Where are the upper pages? Actually, this was the easy part We just needed to expose an API which is providing a way to retrieve Which space is a low page which pays is an upper page? And that's all So this part should be or at least Some part of it should be in the 4.9 kernel The rest should be In the 4.9 10 kernel So then you need to patch the upper layers and with UBI UBI FS you have two solutions as are you do that in UBI and UBI FS is Absolutely not aware of the spare pages problem or you try to handle that in UBI FS So the first Approach we tried is to solve that in UBI FS And inside UBI FS you have two approaches so either you Try to write everything in the SLC mode and then consolidate the data afterwards Or you try to write everything in the MLC mode and then when you want to secure the data you just skip the pages skip some pages and Try to start to write new pages but Far enough so that the previous pages are protected The pros for this approach is that UBI FS knows better than anyone Which data is valid and which data is dirty and so it can select which blocks Should be concealed solidated and which one should not And UBI FS knows when data needs to be protected so when the user space Does a sync on file then we need to protect the data So that's why we try to do that in UBI FS first Actually the solution to was not possible because of the pairing scheme we've seen so the interleaving pages the open block issue so we try that but it didn't work and I also tried to implement solution one that After day or two trying to modify the UBI FS implementation. I just realized it was Too invasive to to be acceptable So then we decided to go for the UBI UBI implementation I let Richard So Yeah, and then we came on a came on an idea how to implement a problem or how to solve the problem not implement in UBI so on the basic idea is we we write Every logical erase block by default in SLC mode meaning we use only half the pages and We of course waste half of the space but as soon when we run out of three blocks, then we combine or Consolidate to logical erase block into one block where both both page bars are used namely the lower page and the high page and that way we can gain one more three block That means That we can combine two Partitially written blocks into one fully written block and so all we have to do is is teaching UBI to to know when to combine blocks and then we can produce us a new three blocks that way we can use Over time all pages and pretty easy problem solved. Let's go home. Oh, no there are more slides. There are no more issues So now in detail On the left-hand side No, that's your right-hand side You see The the life cycle of a logical erase block without LEP Consolidation namely on an SLC NAND by default we start in the unmapped state and as soon we start writing It's in the open state. That means We can append more data or also unmapped it as soon as we write to that last page the the block is considered as full and then we can can only Unmap it again namely also erase it and then start writing again on the With LEP consolidation. We have a little bit more states Which I will explain you now first we start again with the state unmapped then again We can start writing being in the state open and Then as soon as we write the last page then UBI Has it as a candidate for LEP consolidation. That means you buy it now knows Okay, this one is full and when I find another full one I can combine them to a fully written one then it then it is in the state Consolidated that means when we have a physical erase block Which hosts two LEPs both LEPs are in state consolidated now consider the The unmapped we have the physical erase block which hosts two to LEPs and the unmapped one LEP Then we have a problem because We cannot change the data because we can only erase the whole physical erase block But when we when we erase the whole one then we would also kill the data from the other logical erase block We still need that means This block we would we we are willing to unmap is now in state invalid That means the data is still here, but UBI must not use it and As soon both LEPs are in state invalid then we can actually erase the block We will hear more detail that is on this later because it's it introduces some interesting corner cases So I think I have to speed up a little bit The slide here said everything one question why can we only consolidate LEPs with which are full The answer is When they are consolidated we are using high and low pages and then we can no longer change the data Because when we would change the data then up on a power cut we would kill already written data That's we only consolidate full LEPs So Now we extend our Existing UBI nomenclature for the following terms. We have an SLC LEP. That means it's an Logical erase block that sits only on the low pages This is also a candidate for Consultation when it is full The full LEP is when the when the last page is written We actually don't know whether it is completely written We only care about about the last page because when the last page is written You can no longer write a page in between Then we have the C LEP. It's the LEP which is consolidated meaning it sits on a physical erase block with more LEPs on it so and Here a short time frame. It's also also very important when should you be I start with consolidation Because when we would only start with consolidation when we run out of space Then the whole system may be slowed down. That's what that's why we have a trigger When you buy Decides that it is still has three blocks, but just does already consolidation and produces three blocks in advance here we see That we have two full LEPs LEP zero and one and one empty one and Then we start writing to the empty one being then LEP X X and then we We go over the threshold watermark and you guys start with consolidation and consolidates LEP zero and LEP one into the states See LEP zero and see LEP one and it produced one more empty block so When we have an MRC NAND and write a an LEP in in SSC mode Then we only use the low pages here For example, we have the erase counter head of being on the page zero Which is a low page and the volume ID head of being on the page One which is also a low page One interesting fact is MRC has no sub pages That means we have to waste two pages for the UBI headers That's not so nice because on MLC typically the pages are larger, but we have to use two pages and Then the payload is also used only is also only stored on the Low pages here. For example, we have page three and page n minus two and the other high pages are ignored on the other head when we have and consolidated LEP's then the layout looks like the following we have on the first page again the erase counter header and then on the next page we have both volume ID headers and then we have the payload for for for both logical erase blocks and Important we have to add at the bottom abetting that's the open block issue Boris mentioned before we have to fully write the block and Of course the stored data is is immutable. We cannot change it. So now some Problems we had or some challenges I typically SLC name. We have as many LEP's as we have PEP's because the mapping is one to one easy on MLC it is one to two that means we have twice as many LEP's as we have physical erase blocks Is it clear because we just using half a data, but we have in some the whole data We have to provide as far as many LEP's but when we combine them then we have to the full storage again That led to some interesting issues because within UBI on many places the number of LEP's is actually used as number of PEP's and nobody noticed and nobody cared to change and Yeah, we figured the hard way For example, that there's also an issue in the sysfs API where actually UBI exports the number of of LEP's but the user space tools think it's the other ones and get probably get probably confused But that's all only the minor issues One problem is also that you cannot assume that you can actually Use all all LEP's you have to you have to have to reserve a few for the internal housekeeping For example, when you have two full LEP's you you have to combine them into in the one New block to gain a new block. You need One more block as temporary copy because we do copy on right. We cannot change existing data Yeah, and we need some guarantees from the UBI user namely UBI FS UBI FS has to fill the LEP's completely namely it has to write the last page and it has to has to Has not to open and many LEP's in parallel for example when UBI FS would write One page into every LEP then it would run out of space But we could not combine them anymore because the last page is Never written But luckily UBI FS turned out to be really smart and and always tries to fill up a single LEP as much as possible before it claims a new one But we also have to know how many Open LEP's we can have for example for UBI FS we have one for the journal head One for the lab property tree. It's a number about around five. That means we have to hold back at least five blocks to be able to do LEP consolidation. Otherwise, we would run out of space while producing Producing space and now one. I really a fancy corner case Usually UBI can deal with the fact that you have and have an old LEP on your flash that is no longer used. It can happen when you have a power cut doing a copy and write operation Then you have two versions When we have now a physical erase block that contains the LEP X and Y but then unmap the The LEP X then it is in state invalid That means the data is still present But we would like to get rid of it so far so good When now the user above UBI FS Claims a new LEP with the same number for example X again, then we have two copies of LEP X One in SLC mode and one in MLC mode, which is invalid and now What UBI can do UBI FS can do is Unmapping and deleting the the newest copy of LEP X and we have the The the the old LEP X still present and when we now have a power cut We end up with the old copy as the newest one and UBI FS has a few corner cases where it is probing for LEP and then finds oh This one is still present. I will use it and then it's using all data and leads to interesting failures the solution is Either having a lock in UBI Implementing a journal that's impossible or really a lot of work what we do is what was fixing UBI FS namely Finding the Finding the places within UBI FS where it does an unmap erased by hand. Yes the question There is no flag. There's only Yes Because we cannot write in SLC mode or in MLC In SLC it's so it doesn't care because when you say UBI please unmap me this LEP And then it is queued for for erasure that are synchronous either erasure happened or it happened not Because UBI assumes that the user above it does the housekeeping on its own It knows UBI FS does only unmap a block when it does no longer need it so it's not a fully FDL it's only a kind of FDL and And says the user has to do the housekeeping so and now and we had to turn some Some unmap and evasion operations in the actually atomic lip change operations within UBI FS and that solved the problem because now We have the same LEP always reference it And the housekeeping of UBI works again So I'm not really late and hand over to Boris for the conclusion Because the zombie LEP problem is solved, but there are more problems. Yes, so basically we managed to Use MLC named with UBI and UBI FS And actually if you want to use the prototype all you'll have to do is Maybe create an UBI image using UB nice So when you create the image you'll have to pass a few more things like which pairing scheme is used on this name That's pretty much all you'll need the UB nice the new UB nice binary will be able to build the correct image for you As I told at the beginning of the talk we Already have most of the PCs for exposing the pairing scheme in the kernel, which is good we already have most ECC engine which are able to do strong strong ECC So the one we are using is the all-winner all-winner controller and it's doing up to 64 bits per Kilo byte, so that's already good Yeah, so keep in mind that you should use UBI else demon because otherwise you'll see Bitflips sooner, but It works Yeah, I Think I'll let Richard answer that one So the question was whether we can create a heat map of your NAND I have no tool to create me a heat map, but you can use the file that you by half demon creates It's basically a text file containing the counters and you can use the scripting language You like and create a bitmap But the UBI help them is currently heavy changed and we are not so sure what we should do with it Maybe we integrated into the kernel. Maybe we make it more advanced and keep it Currently we use it to to play with it So yeah, it as I said the solution works, but it's not perfect and For example lab consolidation is slow because you need to completely lock the the labs before consolidating Otherwise one could just unmap the lab the lab while you are consolidating it or or just update it. So That's kind of Yeah, that's expensive to consolidate labs together We saw that we have a problem with space reservation A few problems with the lab and pep concepts which have to be clarified And another thing that we think we should change is The fact that we only considered consolidate the full labs and actually this may not be the best decision because Imagining you have a lab which is updated a lot, but each time it is updated. It's completely filled and Even if it's full there is no It's it's useless to consolidate this lab because it will be just unmapped soon. So instead of doing the lab consolidation only on full labs, we will try to Maintain an LRU which is this time least recently updated database We'll all try to update you to consolidate the the ones which are Least recently at least updated. So that's that's the plan Yeah, it's still networks. It's it's currently been being worked on but it's not it's not finished yet So we are working on a version relaxing the consolidation thing Fixing the pep reservation and Reworking the consolidation stuff. So I didn't put any get up your URL because it's Not in a good shape. So but if you want some more information or want to access the Repository just ask on the entity manliness then I'll I'll provide the links Submitted We posted actually reached out position RFC. Yeah, actually since I'm the main dinner. I have to I have a preview of my own stuff No, actually, that's a big problem Currently there are not so many UBI experts out there and even less guys from From nand vendors who are willing to help. So I posted sometimes males with what we are doing and with links In patches, but there was not much feedback. So when you have an mlc nand device and want to test please Maybe we can solve a few issues, but I'm currently both and I are more or less on our own That's not a nice situation, but well That's it. Yes, you mean something like msc support for for Nancy Actually that could be done using Nancy And I have some batches for Nancy to to add the fancy stuff from emersy, but the the really odd things use your face only on the real hardware on my desk being now such a Pile of pricked nands That works best so we have a customer who is willing to give harder to us. That's good But we don't have a former language model. Yes So the question is what is the performance impact currently the impact is rather high because on emersy nand a Block could be multiple megabytes and consolidation means you have to copy around and read multiple megabytes That's one of the issues. We want to get rid before we remain like that so currently The impact is rather high Start when the UBI volume starts to be filled. So a lot of SLC labs in there and Consolidation takes place then you see a slowdown. Yeah We didn't do any measurement because the the main goal was to get reliable support for MLC and not Getting the best performances, but that's something we are taking into account for the the second version So you will probably do some measurements for the second version Yeah It was not all full. It's yeah Yeah, that that's why we start consolidating in background But the way the consolidation is done, which is led by our true labs by true labs, it's it's it's This is where the contention is so no because as soon as PEB is containing an invalid lab then it's a new candidate for a consolidation so you can Yeah, it could still be on the flash dirty data Yeah That's Yeah, but if you want to put the logic at the UBI level then you have to accept that Yeah, we thought about that Maybe we'll add something to say from UBI if it's okay this LEB is containing a lot of dirty data Please don't consolidate that one, but currently that that's not done. So The last question. Yeah, actually I'm working on an slc mod at the volume level which You will you will be able to create a wall volume which will always operate in slc mod Actually for read-only volume static volumes It's not so useful to write in slc mod So you can just write in mlc mod and pad the last block with zeros for example And then you you're safe because this is read-only volume and you won't write on it UBI is just Moving the data around and when it's when it's doing that then the wall block is compiled somewhere else So that's that should work. Thanks


Okay, we're back with Jim Shook, who is the Director of the Cybersecurity and Compliance Practice at Dell Technologies. Jim, good to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Dave, thank you. Delighted to be here in person with you. That's great to be in studio. It's always a better conversation, right? So for our audience, Jim is someone who spends an enormous amount of time with customers. So we're going to dig into what's changed in the conversations, and in particular, who are the decision makers these days regarding cybersecurity and data protection versus in the past. Jim, what about it? What's changed? Who's driving the bus these days? Yeah, I've had a good perspective on this, Dave, because I've been talking to our customers now about cyber resilience and recovery from ransomware destruction for eight years. And we've really evolved the conversation over that time. One of the things I've seen that I think is really important is we've moved from having just, say, IT and infrastructure at the table to talk about these things. We added along the way that cybersecurity took an interest, obviously. We get risk and compliance from time to time, but even legal will get involved. Now it's a lot of seats at the table are taken by people who are focused on the business. Sometimes it's the C-suite, sometimes it's heads of business lines, but that's been a really important development. And audit, too, right? Audit, in some cases, from a process standpoint, is like the last line of defense. Actually, backup and recovery is the last line of defense, and we're going to talk about that a little bit. But as you point out, and I'll share with the audience, I've observed, and I think most people understand this, exactly what Jim was saying, that cyber, it was once the domain of IT and the SecOps team, and then it became a boardroom issue, and it now feels as though it's organization-wide. And Jim, has cybersecurity in your mind gone mainstream, and if so, why is that? It definitely, definitely has, especially over that same timeframe. We get more and more digitally oriented over time, and so businesses have realized that they are digital.  So if you're not protecting against those threats and have the ability to be resilient to them, you're not protecting your business. And it's everybody's job to do that. I think it's really interesting that the business has become more involved, and that's also evolved the conversation to focus more on outcomes. What happens, how can we return to business and how much time versus say, let's buy the next shiny toy or have a cyber control that does this, it's more focusing on the business outcome. It seems like there was a change. When the board started to get involved, it was almost like prior to that, it's kind of early last decade, let's say, it was like this, there was a mentality of failure equals fire. So a lot of times people were like, don't talk about that. And we saw that change where folks who understand cyber would come to the board and say, no, you are going to get attacked, you were going to get infiltrated, it's going to happen. So it's all about that response and you got to be transparent. Do you agree with that, that that sort of failure equals fire mentality has changed and there's now much more transparency and that's part of this sort of mainstream awareness? Yeah, clearly. And it's been a really good development. It used to be a lot of times cyber security teams would not get involved in these conversations because their thought was well, if we're having a recovery conversation, if we're working on being more resilient, we failed at our job. They've realized that's not the case. The attackers are going to be successful sometimes and part of a good cyber practice is the resilience and the ability to recover if those attacks are successful. Now, Jim is a lawyer. So, and there's an intersection going on at the board level between cyber security and legal issues. So, Jim, we want to understand that from your, put on your legal hat for a second. What's that board discussion like these days? It's really interesting. The board is aware that these are risks to the business so they have to become more involved. There's regulatory pressure. The SEC has been looking at new rules that might come out this month. They might come out in the fall that's going to require the board to take more interest and have more expertise in these areas. There's just risk to the business and that's always what one of the things that the board has focused on. And I'll give you a really good example where the board's getting more involved. It's in the idea of having to pay a ransom. So a lot of times I would hear from customers, well, we're not worried about this problem. Worst case, we'll just pay the ransom. Why not? Yeah. And they don't understand sometimes there is no ransom to pay. Sometimes it takes longer to recover if you have the ransom. But from the board perspective, I think where they got interested is there are some laws that will prevent you from paying a ransom depending on who gets the money. So those get really complex. It's very difficult to tell who's going to get the money. So you may make a payment and then get in trouble later on even though you've been diligent with your process. That's high risk. And so the better outcome is to not have to pay the ransom. It's to be prepared to recover. Clearly, but I got to ask you. So you're saying it's illegal because not necessarily to pay a ransom but it's illegal to what pay a felon? Yeah, there are laws on the books in the financial industry that say you can't do business with certain restricted nationals or geographical areas. So North Korea is a really good example of that. If you do business with them and paying a ransom to them would be doing business with them, you violated those laws. Yeah, this is where you definitely need somebody who understands the law to figure this stuff out. All right, let's talk about misconceptions. What are the most common misconceptions that you see in cybersecurity that people really need to understand? I think I still see a lot of the same ones but fortunately we've all learned along the way and I don't see them quite as frequently. A big one is that the thought that we've already invested in disaster recovery and that's going to cover us for a cyber recovery situation. And that's just not the case. The technologies that you have for outages and natural disasters are still as important as they ever were. Think about backup, think about replication, even continuous data protection. They're not going to help you very much in a what we would call severe but plausible cyber disruption. So you have to look at those things separately. You're not, you spend a lot of money and time. It's just not going to help you that much in those types of disruptions. What about the cloud? I mean, a lot of people think, well, I got my data in the cloud. Those guys have awesome security, which they do by the way. They do. But does the cloud solve my problem? Do I have to not worry about it? If my data's in the cloud? I think there's still some misconceptions out there. And if you think about in the cloud, the shared responsibility model, your cloud provider or your SaaS provider, whoever you're working with covers certain things, but you maintain responsibility for other things. And if you're not understanding where that point is, what is your responsibility? You're going to be in trouble. Ultimately, and I've heard this a lot from regulators, they don't care who you use as a partner, who you use for a cloud provider. It's on you to make sure that things work properly. Jim, are there any other misconceptions that you want people to know about? Yeah, there's a few that come to mind pretty quickly that I'm hearing frequently. One is we're not a target. We don't need to worry about this. And I think that totally misunderstands the landscape. Everybody's a target. You think about attacks like NotPetya, a lot of organizations were not focused on the target, but were collateral damage because sometimes malware does unexpected things. And really anybody who has a presence on the internet, the bad actors many times look for just the vulnerability that's out there. And if they can find it, they'll leverage it. They're not looking to see who has the vulnerability, just somebody has it, I get in, I lock up their data, I demand my data. They're knocking on doors and it's automated. Door's open, I'm going in. And if I get something out of it, great. If not, I'll move on. That's exactly. Another one is we have cyber insurance. And cyber insurance is definitely a component of an overall risk strategy. You help to transfer some of the risk, but it's not the strategy. You have to be secure. In fact, in today's world, if you don't have good cybersecurity, you may not be able to get a cyber policy at all. And in any case, an attack is always going to have costs related to it. There are going to be exclusions in insurance policies. You know, ultimately, an insurance policy is just a contract. And the terms of that contract control, there's no such thing as cyber insurance and everybody gets it. It's what you negotiate with the provider. That's a big one. I heard Warren Buffett on TV the other day. You know, they, you know, Berkshire owns Geico, saying they're now going to six, every six months they changed the policy. He'd love to go to a month. So, you know, you're exposed. Yeah, absolutely. It's a key component. And the third one is kind of along similar lines, but it's a technical side of it. We have turned on immutability on our storage platform. And that's a great control. We talk about that a lot in our data protection portfolio with our data domain. Turn on that retention lock, but it's not the destination. It's really a first step. It will make you much more resilient, but there's a lot of other things that you have to do to really build that resilience. Tell us why customers should trust Dell for their, you know, cybersecurity strategy generally. But, you know, you guys obviously, we're talking data protection and backup and recovery. Why Dell? I think there's a lot of reasons. I mean, we have a big practice group. So my group alone, eight years that we've, since we founded it, just out there to help customers understand and deal with these problems. That kind of fits into the whole idea of Dell's global scale and skill. We're everywhere. We have a lot of expertise. We have certainly a wide range of offerings, best in class among compute to storage to the things that we do in the cloud with the hyperscalers, our partners are consulting, all of those things really tie together. And Dave, those are becoming more important because a lot of customers are working on their cyber strategy, which includes a component of managing and the risk from their third party service providers. So as part of that, number one, they have to vet their partners. And number two, many of them are scaling back. They don't want to have 200, 300 people that they do business with. And so our ability to have those offerings to have all that global scale and skill is important. And then when they dive deeper and they have to make sure that their partners are doing the right things to protect them, the things that we do with secure development lifecycle, things that we do with the secure supply chain are really powerful. We don't talk about those enough, we're starting to talk about them more and surfacing those for our customers so that they understand what we're doing in that space. All right, Jim, thank you. Appreciate your time. Thanks, Dave. Okay, in a moment, I'll be back to share some new information about data protection and its relationship to a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy. Keep it right there.


Welcome to Learn WordPress. In today's session, we are going to be talking about templates. A template provides the structure for how a page is displayed. That usually includes a header template part, a content area, and a footer template part. I think it is important to clarify the following information from the start. Templates are not for posting content. And templates for a post or page display your content with the post content block. Templates are, as the name implies, design templates that can be applied to single or multiple pages and posts. To access templates, make your way to appearance and click on editor. This will take you to your site editor. The site editor can be used to modify templates, template parts, and also customize the style of your site. When you click on the styles icon, top right, you have the ability to change the typography, colors, and layout of your entire site. But we are here to talk about templates. So click on templates in the template list view. When you start building a new website, you can edit existing templates or add new ones. And the theme you are using will determine which existing or built-in templates are available to use. So first up is the page template, which creates structure for how individual pages will be displayed. Next is the single post template, and this displays a single blog post. The index template is used to display posts, and the 404 template displays where no content is found. And then of course there are other built-in templates also worth exploring. To add a new template, click on the insert or plus icon next to templates. The modal appears where you can choose between different template options. You can even create your own custom template that can be applied to any post or page. But how do you edit templates via the site editor? You merely have to click on the template, and once it opens up, you can start editing your header and footer template parts. Let's just pause to reflect for a moment. When you create a template, you get the best use when you separate the dynamic part and the static parts. The dynamic part is the content part that will change for every page or post that uses the template. And the content from your page or post will be displayed where the post content block has been added. And the static parts are the reusable parts of the template that will stay the same like the header and the footer areas. Let's look at a sample page to see how this practically works. I've added my content to my page in the block editor and I've assigned this page to the page template, which is the default template. And this is the dynamic content that will be displayed on the front end through the post content block. And when we click on preview, we will be able to see the structure of the template that has been assigned to this page with the header template part, the content which is being displayed by the post content block, and the footer template part. When we make our way to manage templates, it is important to note that it says customized next to a template that has been customized. And when you click on the three vertical dots on the right hand side of the template, you will be able to clear all customizations you have made in one click. Next, let's talk about template parts. When we make our way to template parts, we will see template parts that we've created ourselves and ones that have been provided by our theme, which we can edit. For context, template parts are used to create areas like your header, footer, and sidebar. To add a new template part, click on the insert next to template parts. You have an option between general, header, and footer template parts. General template parts are not tied to any particular area. And remember to give your template parts a descriptive name. Lastly, we are going to discuss the template editor. So I've created a custom template with a new header and a new footer. We are gonna make our way to the dashboard and open up our sample page. The template editor lets you edit, create, and assign templates to individual posts and pages. When you create a new page or post, it is automatically assigned to the default template. And for pages, the default template is the page template. To add a template, click on the add template icon top right. And once you've named it, you can set up a custom template as you did in the site editor. To assign a template to this page, click on the drop down and select one of the custom templates you have made or one of the built-in templates provided by your theme. I'm going to assign the custom template that I've created to show you how the structure of the page changes. So once I've updated, we can click on preview. And now you will notice that this page has a new header template part and a new footer template part, as I've assigned this to a custom template that I've made. We hope you now have a better understanding of how templates work. To review, a template provides the structure for how your content is displayed. And it can be assigned to single or multiple pages or posts to control the layout and look you are after. Please visit Learn WordPress for more tutorials and training material.