I read Glass Bead much later in life, and had a completely different interpretation of the novel than anything I've read online. (I too have never met anyone who's read more than Siddhartha)
Isn't the whole novel a joke on the formal yet perhaps empty intellectualism of the developing modern world? The character latches onto the formal structures of the elaborate hierarchy, climbs the ladder and reaches its zenith. All the while being the expert in a game that seems like the sort of game two hallucinating LLMs would invent as a game/language to understand humans.
Spoiler.
Having reached the highest in his order, he begins to see the emptiness of his order and realises that teaching the (elite) youth from the real world is the grandest aspiration one can have, and promptly dies after jumping in a lake and having a heart attack, before even giving one formal lesson to the youth.
The first time I read The Glass Bead Game, the ending (of the first bit) made me laugh for about three minutes straight.
My impression after reading most of the book was that Knecht's life was pretty good. I couldn't shake the feeling that, whether or not the Game was worth dedicating so many lives to, the act of dedication was giving the players a great many benefits. I knew there were a bunch of pages remaining, and I expected the book to make some kind of statement of similarity between dedication to pointless academia vs tangible life.
And then Hesse killed him off by drowning him in a pond, and followed it up with a bunch of doubly fictional essays.
I've always viewed it as a tragedy and commentary on how intellectual ivory towers are meaningless unless they are opened up and afford interaction with the greater world, and that the rôle of education is to ensure that each student becomes the best possible version of themselves in body, and intellect, and spirit.
That said, it was the "Glass Bead Game" which captured my cupidity.
While I appreciated the author's thoughts on a canon of books I have also imbibed at an impressionalbe age, I can't help notice the strange fixation on how the author is perceived socially by consuming certain books. Sure, when one is young and emeshed in the schooling social hierarchy (and the years after one leaves school), one may care deeply of their book consumption and their mask of intellectualism.
Maybe I'm just getting old, but doesn't everyone at a certain age stop caring about which books they read, and how the reading of certain books is perceived by others?
Depressing thought that this phenomena is some kind of Nash equilibrium. That in the space of competition between firms, the equilibrium is for companies to outsource IT labor, saving on IT costs and passing that cost savings onto whatever service they are providing. -> Firms that outsource, out-compete their competition + expose their services to black swan catastrophic risk.
Is regulation that only way out of this, from a game theory perspective?
The whole market in which crowdstrike can exist is a result of regulation, albeit bad regulation.
And since the returns of selling endpoint protection are increasing with volume, the market can, over time, only be an oligopoly or monopoly.
It is a screwed market with artificially increased demand.
Also the outsourcing is not only about cost and compliance. There is at least a third force. In a situation like this, no CTO who bought crowdstrike products will be blamed. He did what was considered best industry practice (box ticking approach to security). From their perspective it is risk mitigation.
In theory, since most of the security incidents (not this one) involve the loss of personal customer data, if end customers would be willing to a pay a premium for proper handling of their data, AND if firms that don’t outsource and instead pay for competent administrators within their hierarchy had a means of signaling that, the equilibrium could be pushed to where you would like it to be.
Those are two very questionable ifs.
Also how do you recognise a competent administrator (even IT companies have problems with that), and how many are available in your area (you want them to live in the vicinity) even if you are willing to pay them like the most senior devs?
If you want to regulate the problem away, a lot of influencing factors have to be considered.
"If anything, rivers, oceans and other landscapes are now cleaner and greener in many places than they were several decades ago."
The Global Living Planet Index graph shows a significant decline in the population abundance of vertebrate species from 1970 to the present, indicating a substantial loss in global biodiversity.
I too have lost 6 months of files on Thursday last week. Absolutely devastated. Google Drive is meant to be my backup. I spoke to support and they told me that the files are not recoverable.
I think this might be a forced update to remote clients that has corrupted the client FS where files are stored.
Software should not be written in a manner where files can just disappear off a client's machine. This is unacceptable.
If you set up bidirectional sync with rsync in a manner similar to google drive, you absolutely can wipe out the local copies as well. Backup utilities should generally be set up to only go in one direction, as opposed to both.
A backup has to be at least offline (a snapshot/clone of your "live"-data), off-site (not in the same place as your "live-data"), search for 3-2-1 backups.
Google Drive is live, that's why your files are away and you cant do anything against it, again THAT'S NOT A BACKUP but your files on someone else's computer.
The most important thing with backups, test your restore periodically, my rule is: No successful restore = no backup. Sound's logical, but it happened many time to customers, always a mail with "Backup ok" but when checking the data there was nothing written since half a year.
The line between backups and live data has become somewhat blurred since file versioning was intruduced to protect against overwrites and deleted files can be recovered. Why were these features introduced in the first place if not to provide some of the features that backups have traditionally been used for?
Clearly, what happened here should not have happened. It doesn't matter whether you call it backup or cloud storage. Google promised to store that data. They failed to do so.
My backups are supposed to protect me against my own mistakes, not against Google's mistakes. Protection against Google's mistakes should be Google's job. They should have redundancy. They should have backups.
If they provide a storage system that does not reliably store data, they should put a big fat warning label on every single one of their products that uses this storage system:
Do not ever trust us to store your data! It could be gone any second. Always make offsite backups!
At the end of the day you are right of course. But the users's mistake is not actually to have mistaken live data for a backup. The mistake is to think that Google reliably stores data when in fact there is absolutely no contractual obligation for them to do so.
> file versioning was intruduced to protect against overwrites and deleted files can be recovered.
That's rapid recovery NOT a backup. A backup should survive an exploding computer or a burned down house.
>My backups are supposed to protect me against my own mistakes, not against Google's mistakes. Protection against Google's mistakes should be Google's job.
Should be someone else job was never good enough for my data, and i think i have been proven right (once again).
>Do not ever trust us to store your data! It could be gone any second. Always make offsite backups!
Yes just trust yourself. Yes always make offsite AND offline backups, if your key/password gets stolen for example "insert storage provider" your data is also in danger.
>But the users's mistake is not actually to have mistaken live data for a backup.
Both made a mistake, one did not make a backup the other one is...well google.
> Why were these features introduced in the first place if not to provide some of the features that backups have traditionally been used for?
The key word being "some", not "all".
Yes, file versioning means you don't have to go back to clunky backups to restore an older version.
But it does absolutely nothing for data loss, which has always been the primary purpose of a backup. Accessing older file versions has only ever been a secondary purpose.
The primary purpose of backup systems has always been to protect against data loss caused by failing/lost hardware or by accidentally deleting/overwriting data.
Overwrites and deletes should largely be covered by versioning and soft deletes.
Data loss caused by failing or lost hardware should be covered by a business relationship with a data storage service provider.
This service provider role is what's new and different when we're talking about cloud storage. And this is why I reject a direct comparison with traditional backup systems.
Yes you're right, the data should have been backed up to protect against data loss. But why is it the user's job to do that rather than Google's?
I think users should be able to have a reasonable expectation that their backup needs are covered by using a cloud storage service with versioning and soft deletes.
The fact that this expectation isn't met borders on false advertising.
> I think users should be able to have a reasonable expectation
Sure, of course they should. But nothing in this life is perfect. Google engineers will roll out a configuration change that has unintended consequences that results in data loss. Or your account gets falsely flagged for abuse and you get locked out. Or your computer gets infected with ransomware that accesses your cloud sync, creating duplicate encrypted files, deleting the originals, and emptying the trash -- so much for your version history.
Don't put all your eggs in one basket, create your own backup. It's "the user's job to do that rather than Google's" because at the end of the day, other people mess up, and it's your personal responsibility to safeguard against that if you want to protect against losing your data. It's always been this way and always will be.
I'm not denying that it's a good idea to make independent, offsite backups of cloud data for many reasons (even though some cloud services have protections against your ransomware scenario).
But I think it's a bit unfair to blame users for using something like Google Drive as a backup system, because it does in fact have all the main features of a rather mediocre backup system.
Cloud services are supposed to relieve users of some of the traditional burdens of operating computers, such as making proper backups, copying files to multiple devices, keeping it all up-to-date and in sync.
These things are hard to get right. Most people's backups are utterly chaotic, unreliable, insecure, incomplete and vulnerable to some of the same attacks you describe.
That's the point, OP had it's data just once (on Google Drive), that's not even a bad backup, it's non-backup.
>Cloud services are supposed to relieve users of some of the traditional burdens of operating computers
"Supposed" was never good enough for my data, but now you have Cloud services AND your computer AND you phone AND your password/key AND the chance that they block your account for whatever reason, i just see more burdens not less ;)
In the time of the diskettes, less than half of households owned a computer. We can't really compare the technical competency of today's user with one from the mid-90's.
My guess is it's an ironic reference to the stage play and film from 1950 called Harvey, about a man with a best friend who is a tall white invisible (silent) rabbit called Harvey.
The APU2 is cheap, has lots of hardware support, but is getting a little long in the tooth. If you can deal with maxing out at gigabit speeds, it’s an amazing choice and can run just about any software because it’s just a standard x86 board.
Isn't the whole novel a joke on the formal yet perhaps empty intellectualism of the developing modern world? The character latches onto the formal structures of the elaborate hierarchy, climbs the ladder and reaches its zenith. All the while being the expert in a game that seems like the sort of game two hallucinating LLMs would invent as a game/language to understand humans.
Spoiler. Having reached the highest in his order, he begins to see the emptiness of his order and realises that teaching the (elite) youth from the real world is the grandest aspiration one can have, and promptly dies after jumping in a lake and having a heart attack, before even giving one formal lesson to the youth.
Keeping in mind that Hesse fled Nazi Germany.