Not to mention that even people who could barely read (and maintain efficient long-distance communications and even barely understand the concept of a standard) were in extremely short supply.

Was there a concept of "ingenuousness" for the natives? Even the Aztecs were relative newcomers to the area. They came from the north and enslaved the area. Why prefer their terror to the unknown future with the new people that appeared?

Maybe the Aztecs were seen as bloodthirsty oppressors, and the Spanish as a chance to liberate from the yoke of Aztec empire?

I don't think local models would require hardware at nearly the scale that the datacenter buildout for OpenAI/Anthropic/etc. required. Nvidia got as high as the Icarus, it will be hard not to melt, despite they being a real company with real product that is so in demand that you can't buy their hardware even when you're willing to pay above the recommended price. They are addicted to billions, and the cold turkey clean-up will be painful as hell.

They DO vote with their wallets, though. They're still buying that crap, don't they?

Since you can't really go buy the same work translated by a different publisher, voting with your wallet means boycotting it. I agree it would be the right option to punish publishers, but people find it frustrating to miss out on both the work they were hyped for and its fandom; the latter is a really big deal for those deep into reading subcultures.

I know, but really, in the 21st century, aren't there many substitutes for whatever pop-hype we're talking about? Not enough worlds with wizards, or swords, or dragons, or whatever you like?

Unfortunately the answer is no. Reading or just owning a book by a certain author can be a matter of fashion or prestige. That allows for really bad work still be published.

If it's just for prestige, they should buy the original (English?) version and get even more prestige.

Proficiency in English in Spain is still rather low, and someone carrying around the original could be challenged to show they actually understand it.

Sometimes the drop in sales is less than the cost savings

Who (what) would all these middle managers manage? Agents? Why? If agents were so capable, they'd sure be capable of managing themselves or each other...

I mean I did word that carefully, "as much of the workforce as possible." So yes entirely possible that the middle managers get automated out too.

I genuinely don't get what the endgame here is, just AI's talking to AI's everywhere and somehow they think everything just keeps on making money I guess? But then again our current crop of oligarchs are pretty mediocre all around, so calling any of this a "plan" at all feels a stretch. Just cut costs every quarter, make the products worse, fire everyone who knows anything and sail off into the sunset making more money than any human being can actually spend in the process.

/s I thought AI can now give us the source of any binary? What happened to all the vibe coded Nvidia/CUDA drivers?

That's because it's AI-slopped.

Luckily, the jargon in the vibe coding space go away even sooner than it comes :)

At this point I would hold that silly sounding message in a much higher regard than I would hold AI slop.