Obviously, facts do not play a big role in the current government's world view.
Ironically, most people who think that also think the opposite of the previous administration.
CIA to Sunset the World Factbook
201–210 of 279 posts
Re: CIA to Sunset the World Factbook
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes they hallucinate them, or if they exist, sources include blatant nonsense (like state owned propaganda, such as RT) / don't support the claims made by the output.
wtf are you conversing with LLMs that you regularly are running into "state owned propaganda" in the references? my "blatant nonsense" detector is going off...
My favorite is when it cites 5 sources, and 1 of them is a real source, and then the other 4 are short form junk that point to the first one as the source. So basically its just picked one article and summarized it for you and not picked any info from any other places. Oh and bonus points when I type the exact same prompt into a search engine, and that 1 source is the top search result anyways.
Re: CIA to Sunset the World Factbook
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least Wikipedia is supposed to cite its sources, while AIs don’t.
Have you used one recently? The big providers all cite sources if give a research prompt.
Unfortunately, the citations are generally quite low quality and have in my experience a high rate of not actually supporting the text they're attached to.
Re: CIA to Sunset the World Factbook
#204I really wish more people funded Britannica or some other traditional encyclopedia. Most volunteers on Wikipedia do an excellent job, but sometimes the absence of traditional editorial structures shows its limitations.
Wikipedia is Creative Commons. Someone could conceivably publish a dead tree version that goes through an editor / editorial process.
Imagine being an editor of Britannica. Without having domain knowledge into absolutely everything, you are forced to trust domain experts.
Wikipedia has a marked advantage when it comes to building that trust, as the articles have been written under public scrutiny and with a great deal of discussion.
What else are you looking for with "traditional editorial structures"? Consistency in quality and completeness, which Wikipedia lacks. However, whenever an article has lower standards, Wikipedia is happy to point that out to the reader, and allow further refinement. A more traditional encyclopedia would simply omit the article entirely.
I'm not really seeing what a traditional editorial structure would be gaining anyone, seems like it would just be a smaller encyclopedia.
Re: CIA to Sunset the World Factbook
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
It predated the World Wide Web as a client for browsing. It was developed at the University of Minnesota and named for the School's mascot. The client was not graphical. I felt like it was like swinging from vine to vine with each vine being a gopher site. Once one was on a site one could drill down a directory structure of published data. One would access an initial site by typing in it's IP address or domain name.…
Gosh that actually sounds a amazing I am always annoyed that I have to leave terminal so much to explore I can understand the common person being daunted by that but a terminal accessible browser client sounds lovely for a lot of use cases
Lynx supports gopher [0] and check out Bombadillo [1], it's a stripped down "small web" (gopher, gemini, finger) only terminal browser.
Gopher is sort of like Latin, it's a dead protocol, but is still useful.
0. https://lynx.invisible-island.net/lynx_help/lynx_url_support...
Re: CIA to Sunset the World Factbook
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's part of a multi-pronged approach to intentionally cede US soft power. To what ends I'm still fuzzy on, but this discontinuation follows a pattern we've seen with this administration knee-capping or outright dismantling many of the ways this country spreads soft power such as through humanitarian services via USAID, broadcasts from Voice of America, ending international research opportunities and divesting us fro…
Soft power is just a buzzword to give value to things that have zero demonstrable value. The CIA Factbook has played zero role in giving the US any measurable power.
I agree. People use "soft power" as the reason the US should do so many things for free, but the benefits aren't coming back to the US.
Re: CIA to Sunset the World Factbook
#207Trump will soon be issuing the "World Alternative Factbook" as a natural replacement
Re: CIA to Sunset the World Factbook
#208No link to the World Factbook in the article, sloppy journalism.
No, the World Factbook has been totally taken down. If you try to go to a page, e.g. the entry for Canada[1] it redirects to the statement[2] which the article does cite. That's all that's left online of it, there's nothing else to link to
[1] https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/canada/
[2] https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/spotlighting-the-world-factbook-as-we-bid-a-fond-farewell/Re: CIA to Sunset the World Factbook
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gosh that actually sounds a amazing I am always annoyed that I have to leave terminal so much to explore I can understand the common person being daunted by that but a terminal accessible browser client sounds lovely for a lot of use cases
For Gopher, I used to use a little terminal browser called Phetch: https://github.com/xvxx/phetch It's written in Golang and was last updated in 2022. There's a GIF on the Github page to give a feel of what Phetch & browsing Gopher in the terminal is like. I mostly use the Lagrange GUI client though, which is fantastic. Gopher still exists. If you're starting out, you can get your own "gopherhole" and Unix shell acco…
I kinda of remember when Mosaic supported all the protocols. One would just replace http with whatever protocol wanted to connect to the host with.
gopher:// or ftp://
Re: CIA to Sunset the World Factbook
#210Facts always create problems for authoritarian regimes. So they do everything they can do get rid of facts. The primary reason they spread disinformation is not to get people to believe the nonsense (which is merely an occasional bonus), it is to get people to give up on finding the truth. Once people have no substantial quantity or quality of truth, they can be entirely manipulated. This regime is following the stan…
This regime is just following the same path openly. Give Trump some gold points for not being a hypocrite like all of his predecessors.
Not sure I understand this comment. Trump deserves points for being transparent about his disdain for liberal democratic values? Not sure that's a flex. Hmmm.