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But since D&D has become, by far, the most influential and popular expression of fantasy in current times (perhaps not literature, but most fantasy people interact in videogames, etc. is directly influenced by it), the register and tone it uses (classifying everything in game terms and in a 'scientific' way) has become widespread, which means that some of the magic of fantasy, including supernatural things that cannot be defined in gaming or 'scientific' terms, falls through the cracks.

* Something something square cube law, I'm not a scientist and I'm just going stream-of-consciousness here, sorry.

In most cases, the Spark organelle just smooths things over a little bit, providing the scientific justification for anything that might have to be explained as "well it's just magic i guess" or "maybe a wizard did it".** Species that evolve a way to magnify the Spark are liable to develop other implausible abilities over time in order to leverage the excess of divine energy they now have available to them. It is possible that they will then develop more effective ways to magnify the Spark in order to fuel those abilities, in a kind of positive feedback loop that, on long evolutionary timescales, bootstraps them from "animal" to "animal with some weird tricks" to "creature of magic" to "semi-divine being" to "actual god".*** This is why dragons can not only be implausibly large flying lizards, but also breathe fire, develop advanced intellects, &c. &c.

** This is how, e.g., something as heavy & non-aerodynamic as a pegasus can fly, or a twenty-foot-tall giant can walk bipedally, or unlikely hybrids like manticores can come into being.

*** There may be a point in this process where the organism in question has the power & intellect to start steering or accelerating their gradual apotheosis -- either on an individual or species-wide basis -- or there may not be. It is possible to reach full godhood without actually developing sapience or an understanding of what godhood is.****

**** Put this in your D&D setting to allow a Cleric of Giant Slug. Giant Slug has no commandments or doctrine; it's just a species of really big slugs. One worships them by attuning one's own Spark to theirs, which mostly involves studying them, interacting with them, & engaging in Slug Behaviors when practicable. Giant Slug does grant spells, but as, like, a reflex -- the slugs have no understanding of what they're doing, but autonomic processes leverage divine energy to benefit Giant Slug, & due to the nature of divinity this includes the empowering of worshippers.

they've had to face settlements against stealing from current authors, so they'll just go for the old books now. they're also doing this so they have the only copies of rare books.

“A physical book is a delivery mechanism for information,” it continues.

“Once that information has been extracted and encoded into an AI model, the delivery mechanism has served its purpose. What remains is paper, ink, and binding material. The book is not destroyed. Its value has migrated. The paper returns to the material cycle; the knowledge enters the intellectual one.”

This is, pretty much, true except for a few factors, and two questions. The questions first.

First: why are they pulping the remains. Scanning pages doesn't destroy them. There is nothing stopping them from boxing up the pages and either re-selling them or donating them to an archive, besides maybe not wanting their competitors to be able to buy them. Why on EARTH are they pulping the pages after scanning?

Because this is the minor factor – sometimes, an old book is MORE than just a delivery system. There can be information in the book that a scanner doesn't catch. Texture. Material. Things (flowers &c) preserved between the pages. Etc.

Second. Are they, in fact, keeping the data of the scanned books, separate from their LLMs. We all know by now that LLMs do not retrieve intact information from their databases. Are their databases accessible as archives themselves? Because if not, they ARE destroying the contents of a book that may be the only copy of the information contained within it.

If they're scanning these books and keeping them as a digitized archive, as WELL AS feeding the scans to an LLM, then again: they could easily make those digital scans available to archivists and public audiences. If not, then... yeah, they're not just drstroying a physical book, they're destroying the information within it, because LLMs do not, again, retrieve data intact except by coincidence.

My half-joking potted history of business is that people used to go to business school to learn how to run businesses, and then they would graduate and run businesses. They’d take over their family business back home, or climb the ranks at a big company. This was good, because it was good for businesses to be run well by smart, hard-working professionals who were familiar with best practices for management and capital allocation.

And then finance became a more important part of the economy, and people who graduated from business schools decided to go into finance instead. Finance is a sort of meta-business, a layer of abstraction on top of regular businesses, so it creates leverage:

Instead of working at a company and figuring out whether to build a factory or how to price a product, you could work at a hedge fund and allocate capital to dozens of companies that are good at building factories or pricing products. Over time, this makes businesses better and more efficient: You allocate capital to the good ones, the bad ones get starved of capital and go out of business, and we asymptotically approach nirvana.

On the other hand not everyone can be a hedge fund manager. Someone has to build the factories and price the products. You can’t tilt too far in the direction of finance, or else everyone who is good at business will spend their days allocating capital to people who are bad at business. 

One solution to this problem is of the form “actually being good at business is not especially correlated with graduating from a top business school, and people who are good at building factories should build factories while people who are good at trading stocks should trade stocks,” but that is boring. Another, funnier solution is to construct a financial system that:

1. Selects the “best” people in some sort of brutal meritocratic competition,

2. Funnels them into prestigious finance jobs, and

3. Makes it so that those prestigious finance jobs consist of running regular boring companies. “I have arrived at the pinnacle of my career in high finance,” you think, as you sit down to optimize the pricing of your company’s pest-control services.

[...] In some ways it’s just about going back to basics: Find a founder-run business that has room to grow, pull together a small syndicate of equity and debt investors, and buy it at lower valuation and with less leverage than what’s typically used in larger deals. A growing number of baby boomers who founded businesses are looking to retire, and the smallest end of the private equity industry provides ready buyers. [...]

YOU DO IT ON ONE OF THESE! OBVIOUSLY!!!

and that brown end? the hard bit? pencil sharpener. or sharpened with a blade. are you following me? now, attach six of those to a harpy.

I do not like this style. I will never like this style. ... My biggest criticism is that I merely dislike this [art project]. Make me hate it. Make me furious over how much fun you're having with this thing I hate.

As preamble: i am one of the proud 27% who voted “good” on the first poll (didn’t see the second in time to vote). And, in fact, I found the imagery of “claws like sharpened bananas” so provocative i just had to give sharpening a banana a go (plus i remembered i threw some ripe bananas in the freezer like five months ago and thought hey, might as well! bananas, i’m sorry i failed to use you in smoothies as intended; i hope you find peace knowing you were donated to science instead. Rest In Peels.)

For my first attempt, I decided to take the easiest though least faithful-to-the-vision route first: sharpening the banana stem.

I was delighted to discover that a banana stem does fit into a pencil sharpener, so i got grinding.

And grinding.

And grinding.

Things were looking promising at first, but i rotated that thing in the sharpener for over three minutes and after a certain point, it just stopped getting sharper. I guess it became too narrow for the sharpener to like, reach?

(Pictured: the moment my wife asked me what the fuck i was doing to that banana)

But luckily my wife appeared around this time and, after expressing extreme bemusement, she acquiesced to applying her whittling skills to the task. I bestowed upon her a second frozen banana and she got to work.

What a champ.

And…it actually worked!! That bad boy was SHARP!

Like, not “draw blood easily” sharp. But yeah, if claws looking like this ^ were to shoot towards me, i’d be at least mildly afraid. That’s not nothin’ — right? right?

(I’m so good at photoshop)

But at this point i had to admit to myself the thing i’d known all along. Sharpening solely the stem wasn’t actually @pangur-and-grim’s vision.

So i tried, i really tried to sharpen the entire outer part of the banana with a knife sharpener + knife! Maybe it’s because the frozen bananas had thawed too much at this point but. it didn’t go…all that great

Then it was time for my final attempt.

I peeled one of those half-thawed nanners and shaped its soft body (which was the consistency of melty ice cream) with a combination of the knife sharpener and my bare fingers into what i hoped would be a fine point — once it re-froze.

One of them i “sharpened” the tip of; the other i tried to kinda sharpen the side of? By making a very thin ridge all along it. Because if they’re going to be claws they shouldn’t just poke people; they need to slice

Anyway that was an hour ago so i just checked on them and…

tragically, they are not sharp.

BUT i flattened them a little thinner to see if that helps, and now i’ll be patient for once in my life and wait to check on them till morning. Maybe being fully frozen will help

So yeah! The good news is you CAN sharpen a banana stem and that’s gotta count for something. The bad news is that sharpening the actual body of the banana has proven much more challenging.

if i never reblog with an update, it’ll mean I failed, no sharp peeled bananas to present. If i do update….

Well. You’ll get a photo of a razor-sharp banana.

Inspired by "Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan"

Yeah, I'm finally living up to my user flair😎

Also, a funny detail I noticed:

I swallowed past a lump in my throat. It always caught me off guard, just how frigging much I missed her, when I thought about her. I’d give anything for a thirty minute conversation with her, right this moment. I didn’t have the slightest doubt in my mind that she could have made sense of everything, put things into terms so simple that working it out looked easy.

- Tangle 6.9