Feels very short sighted, the Factbook is a great example of low cost soft power.
One of Trump administration's main goal is to destroy US soft power
CIA to Sunset the World Factbook
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Re: CIA to Sunset the World Factbook
#42Feels very short sighted, the Factbook is a great example of low cost soft power.
What is this soft power and what can the US do with it?
Did you forget the /s?
Some people mentioned the dollar as the global reserve currency, but there's also the use of English as the global lingua franca, the US being the largest global destination for talent and investment, and countries (previous) willingness to make sacrifices or deal with the US on less-than-perfect terms out of a sense of shared culture.
Re: CIA to Sunset the World Factbook
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember this from literally 20 years ago. Maybe the traffic made it not worth the cost? And 'soft power'? Like lying about stats and using it for propaganda? Otherwise its just objective and someone else can do the work. For some reason I never attributed it to the US or CIA.
Under the current administration it wouldn't surprise me if they decided in their last budget cutting meeting to indiscriminately erase everything with the wildcard "fact" in the project's name.
Like how they deny visas to fact checkers.
Re: CIA to Sunset the World Factbook
#4420 years ago, I was working on a consumer device, doing indexing and searching of books. The indexer had about 1 MB of RAM available, and had to work in the background on a very slow, single core CPU, without the user noticing any slowdown. A lot of the optimization work involved trying to get algorithmic complexity and memory use closer to a function of the distinct words in books than to a function of the total wor…
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Re: CIA to Sunset the World Factbook
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where do you think the information on Wikipedia comes from? Not that Wikipedia strongly relies on The World Factbook, but it can't exist without other secondary sources like these.
Wikipedia is actually the secondary source when someone reads a page on it, and it requires primary sources (like factbooks) to cite to exist.
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Re: CIA to Sunset the World Factbook
#46This is incredibly frustrating, something so neutrally appreciated and used by everyone dropped. For no reason at all, but it’s not hard to infer why. Can’t have those pesky facts getting in the way of gaslighting the masses.
Re: CIA to Sunset the World Factbook
#47The Factbook dates from a time when this was the most convenient source of updated concise summaries of all countries. It didn’t necessarily go into great detail except for countries important to the US national interest. This has been eclipsed by Wikipedia, the information there is far more comprehensive and govt officials will go there to make updates and corrections.
> govt officials will go there to make updates and corrections
That's one way of putting it.
Re: CIA to Sunset the World Factbook
#4820 years ago, I was working on a consumer device, doing indexing and searching of books. The indexer had about 1 MB of RAM available, and had to work in the background on a very slow, single core CPU, without the user noticing any slowdown. A lot of the optimization work involved trying to get algorithmic complexity and memory use closer to a function of the distinct words in books than to a function of the total wor…
Bit confused, what's this to do with the CIA World Factbook?
Re: CIA to Sunset the World Factbook
#4920 years ago, I was working on a consumer device, doing indexing and searching of books. The indexer had about 1 MB of RAM available, and had to work in the background on a very slow, single core CPU, without the user noticing any slowdown. A lot of the optimization work involved trying to get algorithmic complexity and memory use closer to a function of the distinct words in books than to a function of the total wor…
Bit confused, what's this to do with the CIA World Factbook?
> this book has little difference between total words and distinct words because it has so many distinct numbers in it. It ended up being a regular stress test to make sure our approach to capping memory use was working
Re: CIA to Sunset the World Factbook
#50Since the world factbook was under the public domain, it would be possible for volunteers to build an archive site of it. It wouldn't be updated under the purview of the CIA but at least the most recent content would be easily accessible.