That sad thing is that Zuck-the-Fuck has the money for these massively expensive pathetic failures. Something is really wrong with the human race as a group.

Indeed. Essentially gross leadership failure.

Scientists and engineers with intact personal integrity will leave at that point. The smart ones will leave when demands like that are made, because this invariably backfires.

Too easy!

Indeed. And people are likely to vastly overvalue that one hit and ignore the 1000s of fails. It is like "Somebody won the lottery! I will too!" Dumb beyond belief as soon as some a bit larger numbers are involved. Essentially people that never left the mental frame of a tribe.

Yep. I also like the descriptions of the "cold reading" experiments by the Randi Foundation. Especially the one where the actress doing it had to assure people afterwards that no, she most certainly had no "powers". And they did not believe her. Most people are really easy to fool and then insist they have not been fooled when confronted with evidence.

Another nice (if only quasi-religious) example is the MAGA movement and their total disconnect from reality.

Indeed. Also note that "reverence for faith" comes from the incredibly evil things basically all faiths have done at one time or another to suppress some other faith, including quasi-faiths like persona-cults and the like.

My stance is that if people want to have some belief, they are allowed unless they harm others as a consequence. But a belief itself does not deserve any respect, just because some people have it.

Scientific standards are and will remain what separates "likely truth" from made-up hallucinations. Note that some people try to use fake science or empty claims of scientific validity to justify unfounded beliefs. As most people (>80%, apparently) cannot really fact-check, that strategy works.

Indeed. It is all they have. So they create these (after the fact, but their marks cannot fact-check end hence usually do not find out) whenever they think they can get away with it. There are, at this time, zero actually reliable prophecies by religion. There are some that are in the noise floor (if you claim 1000s of things, you may get the occasional hit), but that is it.

Yes, that is basically how it works. The first steps still have some substance, but then hot air creates more hot air.

As to the analysts, they have clearly carefully looked and found a catastrophe in the making. And they did that some time ago and they convinced the ones deciding about the actual investments. Because what we are seeing here is public statements. And these public statements are typically made very late in the process and long after the decision making. They are made right about when the move out of the bubble-stock happens because at that time this move becomes public knowledge and people want explanations.

You must be reeeeaaaly clueless if you think that. This tech was thinkable and actually available about 30 years ago. It just never got cheap enough or usable enough, and that includes content creation. But architects, for example, have been using VR walkthroughs as a means of evaluating buildings for decades.

Hahahaha, no. What a transparent effort at elevating yourself with nothing.

For the record, I have had autist students. I know what it looks like. I am not one of them. What I am is an actual expert on quite a few of the topics discussed here. Yes, shocking, I know.

That claim would be really dumb. That is why I did not made anything like it. You are pretty much functionally illiterate though of you read that in my statement.
What I actually said, which may have required the presence of two (!) working braincells to see is that a) the reference value is not zero and b) other things besides drinking alcohol have an influence.

You know, except for the occasional instance of "better search" (which is really not enough to even remotely justify the effort), it actually seems to be.

Indeed. The "Great New Thing" is simply another step towards full enshittification.

Indeed. But there does not seem to be a way to get more of it, education is not doing it. Now we could make sure all decision makers are actually high intelligence people with intact personal morals and no maliciousness. And we would probably just about have enough of these people. But since that would impact profits and some zealot agendas, it is not going to happen. Instead we put dumb and dumber, with no morals or integrity and high level of maliciousness in power, with predictable results.

Indeed. I remember the ads about Linux being a "cancer" and these days MS has its own Linux distro and Azure is apparently running more Linux loads than Windows ones. And Win11 is looking more and more outdated in comparison. Since I generally do not pay any attention to MS statements, this is the only one I remember as it made the general news here.