51–60 of 279 posts
Unfortunate. So many essays that I wrote in school cited The World Facebook as a source. I'm worried that the death of these easily accessible sources will push more and more pupils into relying on Wikipedia or even worse: AI. Being critical of what you see online and finding facts yourself is crucial to digital literacy.
"Facebook" :)
20 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…
The Croatia flag in particular took quite a while to trace/draw (by hand).
An outdated service that belongs to the era of encyclopedia. Wikipedia moved us past it. ChatGPT has moved us so far past it, it's become a relic.
Isn't it essentially a source for both of those things? If all the sources dry up then LLM 'facts' will be time constrained.
It being a technology that inherently has plausible deniability when it for example starts referring to itself as Mecha-Hitler is a feature, not a bug!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Basically a neoconservative-esque sentimental view of the USA as "the good guys" on "the global stage" (although many would rightly recoil at the comparison to neocons).
The 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.
Feels very short sighted, the Factbook is a great example of low cost soft power.
Are we remembering the same Factbook? It had summary statistics for every country and some brief blurbs about their history, climate, economy, etc. Strictly speaking yeah it generated some legitimacy to publish a resource like this and I find it hard to believe the CIA can't scrape a few quarters together to keep it running, but most of it's value is sentimental.
The Facebook being quoted by so many school kids worldwide was a cheap softening of how the world perceived the CIA and America. Now how valuable that is isn’t clear, but when something is that cheap it doesn’t take much to be a net gain.
Since 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.
That was the last year they published it all in one convenient zip file. Serving 2026 requires a longer running scrape of the Internet Archive.
Earlier 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.
Obviously, facts do not play a big role in the current government's world view.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wikipedia is actually the secondary source when someone reads a page on it, and it requires primary sources (like factbooks) to cite to exist.
This is incorrect. Wikipedia relies primarily on secondary sources, which makes it a tertiary source, and it describes itself this way.[1] The World Factbook does not collect the information it provides, making it a secondary source. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:PSTS