[HN Gopher] CIA to Sunset the World Factbook
___________________________________________________________________
CIA to Sunset the World Factbook
Author : kshahkshah
Score : 328 points
Date : 2026-02-05 12:53 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.abc.net.au)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.abc.net.au)
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891794
|
| Discussed a few days ago as well
| afavour wrote:
| Feels very short sighted, the Factbook is a great example of low
| cost soft power.
| adammarples wrote:
| What is this soft power and what can the US do with it?
| afavour wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_power
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| I believe Trump has asked that exact question. But also asked
| how much it costs and whether it can be privatized.
| LPisGood wrote:
| Shape the world to benefit the US - having US dollar be
| strong primarily.
| jonstewart wrote:
| Make the dollar the global currency and reap the benefits of
| facilitating gentle commerce?
| biofox wrote:
| 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.
| mikemarsh wrote:
| Some people really do think of soft power, propaganda,
| shady covert operations, etc. as something "the other guys"
| do (China! KGB-Putin!), but assume the US is somehow above
| all that.
|
| 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).
| kergonath wrote:
| Having friends means that you can build bases where if you
| ask nicely, rather than having to invade. It prevents those
| friends from undermining you in a lot of cases. It makes them
| help you when you need, e.g. to get your hands on someone
| plotting attacks against you. It makes them more likely to
| trade with you under advantageous terms. I am sure you could
| think about at least a dozen other cases in a couple of
| minutes.
|
| Soft power is spending pennies to convince other countries to
| do your dirty work.
| vdqtp3 wrote:
| > build bases where if you ask nicely, rather than having
| to invade
|
| How much of that actually came from soft power rather than
| "hard power", like USA actions in WW2?
| cfmcdonald wrote:
| I think it's instructive to compare the U.S. and Soviet
| stances in Europe after WW2. To maintain a military
| presence in Eastern Europe, the Soviets had to rely on
| repression, coercion, and occupation. This was expensive
| and fragile and eventually fell apart. The U.S. was
| openly welcomed into Germany and other countries in
| Western Europe. This was the value of "soft power."
| PlatoIsADisease wrote:
| 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.
| potatototoo99 wrote:
| You can make propaganda without lying, by choosing what
| metrics you value over others for example, by adding them or
| omitting them or implying whether a stat increasing is
| positive or negative.
| PlatoIsADisease wrote:
| Interesting. I read about this. "Concealment and spinning"
| are two ways to not lie.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Also choosing which methodology is the "right" one to
| measure a specific number.
|
| There are lots of ways to measure ethnic groups, the size
| of the capital or the unemployment rate. If you publish the
| numbers you get to choose which one suits you best, you
| just have to be globally consistent
| woodruffw wrote:
| "Soft power" refers usually to credibility. The point of the
| Factbook is to be a _credible_ public resource for an entity
| that would otherwise not have much.
| PlatoIsADisease wrote:
| In International Relations, my #1 or #2 hobby, credibility
| does not refer to soft power. (my number 1 hobby is
| philosophy)
| jfyi wrote:
| Credibility is the core currency of soft power, whether
| one views its ultimate goal as manufacturing consent or
| fostering genuine cultural attraction. Without that
| perceived reliability, the indicator "soft" loses it's
| meaning.
| PlatoIsADisease wrote:
| >Credibility is the core currency of soft power, whether
| one views its ultimate goal as manufacturing consent or
| fostering genuine cultural attraction.
|
| Not sure its worth dissecting this, but there is a lot of
| grey area in your claim of the meaning of Credibility.
| (Credibility and cultural attraction? Pretty sure these
| have little correlation. Dictators can make creditable
| threats.) Further, its a debatable claim that there is a
| 'core currency' of soft power.
|
| As a contextualist, I am not going to die on this hill
| for your personal meaning of Credibility. But I can
| attest that your conviction in your claim is stronger
| than any International Relations Realist practitioner
| would make.
| jfyi wrote:
| It's not that complex, good faith builds good will.
|
| It's a shame we can't have nice things.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Credibility is not what soft power means, though they are
| related. Power is the ability to get other people to act in
| your interest. Hard power is when that is done through
| immediate, direct economic or military coercion. Soft power
| is everything else.
| emsign wrote:
| 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.
| vaylian wrote:
| Reminds me of the forbidden word lists that they created at
| the beginning of the second Trump term:
| https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/07/us/trump-
| fede...
| haritha-j wrote:
| I don't know if you jest but thats exactly what they did
| with many other words. What a timeline.
| isleyaardvark wrote:
| Like how they deny visas to fact checkers.
| some_random wrote:
| 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.
| Retric wrote:
| Soft power includes positive perception. Every time someone
| learns that GPS is completely paid for by the American
| government and then freely available to the rest of the
| world, that shapes perception.
|
| 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.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| We have Hollywood and spy movies/series now.
| Retric wrote:
| Hollywood and spy movies/series predate the web.
|
| What makes the CIA Factbook useful is it reframes
| learning about other countries.
| 0sdi wrote:
| Americans famously have near-zero knowledge of other
| countries. Nothing valuable was lost in this aspect. You
| need something new.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| I had something similar to this talking globe[1] when I
| was a kid and it was amazing for raising my geopolitical
| awareness. You tap on a country with the pen and it tells
| you the name and some facts about it. Even if I hadn't
| learned anything, I had fun pressing "Azerbaijan" over
| and over because 10-year-old me thought it was a funny
| spelling and pronunciation.
|
| [1]https://www.walmart.com/ip/World-Globe-for-Kids-
| Interactive-...
| Retric wrote:
| You completely misunderstood what everyone was talking
| about. The point is to make people _in other countries_
| do what we want them to do.
|
| American diplomacy, foreign policy, spying, soft, and
| hard power etc is obviously primarily targeting non
| Americans here.
|
| Thus like most things the CIA does this is targeting
| foreigners or foreign influence, though of course direct
| impact on Americans is a nice bonus. We don't want young
| Americans looking up facts on a Chinese or Russian
| website.
| JasonADrury wrote:
| You might be underestimating the reach, you've got
| schoolchildren around the world using it as it's usually the
| most convenient source you're allowed to cite for this data
| afavour wrote:
| I grew up outside the US. I have a distinct memory of using
| the Factbook for homework assignments and being told it is a
| reliable source of information. That shapes people's
| perceptions of the US and the CIA from a young age.
| Yizahi wrote:
| As an anecdote example, I've never ever accessed said
| Factbook, but I've heard about it enough times to remember
| that such thing exists and that USA govt. is collecting a
| relatively objective fact list. So yeah, it was a tiny bit of
| soft power of sorts. It showed that USA cares about outside
| world, in some way at least.
|
| PS: and I live in Eastern Europe, far far away from the USA.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| One of Trump administration's main goal is to destroy US soft
| power
| jfyi wrote:
| I agree, well mostly.
|
| The administration is dispensing with the institutions of
| soft power. I don't think it's the main goal so much as a
| consequence of their worldview. Soft power is essentially
| worthless to people who have no interest in maintaining a
| facade of international cooperation.
| zackmorris wrote:
| Or maybe a conscious decision, as neoconservative Robert Kagan
| writes:
|
| _" President Trump has managed in just one year to destroy the
| American order that was and has weakened America's ability to
| protect its interests in the world that will be. Americans
| thought defending the liberal world order was too expensive.
| Wait until they start paying for what comes next,"_
|
| https://www.npr.org/2026/02/04/nx-s1-5699388/is-the-u-s-head...
| chuckadams wrote:
| > Wait until they start paying for what comes next
|
| They'll just blame liberals and double down on the
| authoritarianism as they've always done.
| Isamu wrote:
| 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.
| Antibabelic wrote:
| 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.
| notRobot wrote:
| Wikipedia is actually the secondary source when someone reads
| a page on it, and it requires primary sources (like
| factbooks) to cite to exist.
| Antibabelic wrote:
| 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
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| It can be both. It uses Primary and Secondary sources.
| That is why you check the references and use them
| appropriately.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| > Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable,
| published secondary sources, and to a lesser extent, on
| tertiary sources and primary sources. Secondary or
| tertiary sources are needed to establish the topic's
| notability and avoid novel interpretations of primary
| sources. All analyses and interpretive or synthetic
| claims about primary sources must be referenced to a
| secondary or tertiary source and must not be an original
| analysis of the primary-source material by Wikipedia
| editors.
|
| Primary sources aren't completely disallowed, but they
| are definitely discouraged.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| So, not, not allowed.
|
| "The concept of primary, secondary, and tertiary sources
| originated with the academic discipline of
| historiography. The point was to give historians a handy
| way to indicate how close the source of a piece of
| information was to the actual events.[a]
|
| Importantly, the concept developed to deal with "events",
| rather than ideas or abstract concepts. A primary source
| was a source that was created at about the same time as
| the event, regardless of the source's contents. So while
| a dictionary is an example of a tertiary source, an
| ancient dictionary is actually a primary source--for the
| meanings of words in the ancient world."
|
| "All sources are primary for something
|
| Every source is the primary source for something, whether
| it be the name of the author, its title, its date of
| publication, and so forth. For example, no matter what
| kind of book it is, the copyright page inside the front
| of a book is a primary source for the date of the book's
| publication. Even if the book would normally be
| considered a secondary source, if the statement that you
| are using this source to support is the date of its own
| publication, then you are using that book as a primary
| source."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_and_u
| sin...
| Antibabelic wrote:
| I'd be interested to see how these quotes show that
| primary sources are not allowed on Wikipedia.
| Loughla wrote:
| The problem is who checks the sources. Of the what billions
| of sources, how many have actually been verified?
| lazide wrote:
| Also, when there are conflicts, who decides what the
| 'facts' are, eh?
|
| _is_ is the Gulf of America or not?
| hk__2 wrote:
| Nobody, you just mention the different points of view
| that are in the sources.
| lazide wrote:
| Which nobody does (really) because it turns into a giant
| narcissist shit fight then for who can come up with the
| most absurd 'truthy' answer for publicity.
|
| Everyone has to end up filtering at some point or it's
| all just noise.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Mexico_naming_contr
| ove... There's an entire article on it.
| lazide wrote:
| Now imagine that for toilet paper over the top, or over
| the bottom, or sitting on top of the toilet tank. And
| everything in between.
|
| We have plenty of bits, at least.
| Isamu wrote:
| >who checks the sources
|
| I do, when I'm reading something and accuracy matters.
| Anybody who cares about accuracy will investigate the
| sources. I know people will complain that "nobody" does
| this, but it is essential, without checking sources you
| are just casually reading. That goes for books and all
| media consumption. If a book or any media (ahem Tucker)
| doesn't give you enough information to be able to look
| something up, that is rather a red flag of obfuscation.
| philwelch wrote:
| The thing is, there's really no good way to check a lot
| of the numbers you see in sources like the World
| Factbook.
|
| Take population estimates for instance. Much of the world
| either doesn't have the state capacity or can't be
| trusted to maintain accurate, publicly known population
| figures. There are some countries where they haven't had
| a census in decades and their official population figures
| are entrusted to numbers provided by regional governments
| which receive national funding on a per capita basis.
| Every region has an incentive to inflate their population
| numbers and, in a system where they're all competing for
| funding from the central government, this eventually
| becomes common practice. Even national governments have
| little incentive to share honest figures with the rest of
| the world, and national governments that aren't even
| accountable to their own people like China and Russia are
| also well practiced in keeping secrets. And population is
| probably one of the easiest things to measure.
|
| The problem is that some people just accept the first
| number they find and are militant about not thinking
| beyond that point. If you tell them the radiation meter
| tops out at 3.6 roentgen, they say "3.6 roentgen, not
| great, not terrible".
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| Wikipedia does not allow primary sources.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Which is often stupid when the only people who know the
| truth are the people who were there. Hearsay from
| secondary sources is not an improvement in that case.
|
| That's why I used to like Quora - you would often see an
| answer provided by the primary (and only definitive)
| source for questions.
| Antibabelic wrote:
| This is very much false, Primary sources only play a
| supporting role on Wikipedia, but they are definitely
| allowed. For example, if you're writing an article on
| Apple you can cite Apple for what Wikipedia calls
| "uncontroversial self-description". However, before that,
| you have to establish the notability of Apple through
| reliable secondary independent sources. The contents and
| focus of articles is also dictated by secondary sources.
| For example, if you take a controversial subject like
| Urbit, the article would have to reflect the priorities
| of (mostly critical) journalistic pieces on Urbit. You
| can cite its documentation for a technical description
| (that would be "uncontroversial self-description", as I
| mentioned before), but this would have to be a small part
| of the article, because it wouldn't reflect the focus of
| secondary sources.
| tokai wrote:
| Encyclopedias are by definition tertiary sources.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Most countries have some kind of statistics department that
| publishes that kind of data in great detail.
|
| The issues start when you try to compare data, because
| different sources _will_ use different methodologies
| pseudalopex wrote:
| And some methodologies use false information.
| nikanj wrote:
| The Factbook dates from a time when facts mattered
| 837263292029 wrote:
| > govt officials will go there to make updates and corrections
|
| That's one way of putting it.
| alex1138 wrote:
| Can we please, please not outsource everything to Wikipedia?
| Many of the editors there are hardly impartial
| hk__2 wrote:
| And the CIA is impartial? ;)
| alex1138 wrote:
| Do please take note of the fact that I did not include "We
| should trust the CIA" in my comment
| riazrizvi wrote:
| 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.
| kshahkshah wrote:
| ChatGPT and Wikipedia are not primary sources of information.
| serf wrote:
| a primary source is not inherently the accurate one, and
| collab tools like wikipedia allow for _more_ sources -- this
| makes the difference.
|
| yeah it's game-able, and a bad actor can ruin work, but we're
| comparing it to a literal singular gospel source of
| information from a three letter agency.
|
| p.s. I noticed I used an em dash, appropriately or not. i'm
| leaving it in. I like it. maybe im turning bot. changing the
| way I speak/type to avoid being taken that way irks me to
| hell.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Isn't it essentially a source for both of those things?
|
| If all the sources dry up then LLM 'facts' will be time
| constrained.
| rileymat2 wrote:
| It aggregates many public sources, so much of it is findable,
| but not all.
| input_sh wrote:
| That's the idea, yes. Kill all primary sources, wound all
| secondary sources (examples: WaPo or "Grokipedia"), convince
| everyone that they should use this tertiary source whose full
| control is in the hands of a _very_ few.
|
| 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!
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| Which means resources like real encyclopaedias will again
| become financially viable.
| threethirtytwo wrote:
| This is so stupid. Wikipedia needs sources and citations in
| order to construct articles, and chatgpt needs training data to
| build it's models. The CIA world fact book sits at the core of
| training and wikipedia citations. It is the inception point of
| all these other services you use.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| It probably also costs nothing to make. The CIA maintains
| dedicated analysts monitoring the world. Have those guys kick
| out a public report every once in a while sounds like the
| cheapest possible program.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| The World Factbook wasn't prone to hallucinations, intentional
| omissions, the whims of billionaires, or the unstated goals of
| astroturfing groups.
|
| If the government has somewhere to tell you what it thinks is
| true, you can use that to double-check another part of the
| government that's misleading you on that same data. You can
| also double-check it against other sources of truth to gain
| insight about potential manipulation in one or more of the
| systems.
|
| Here's one hot take:
|
| https://tcf.org/content/commentary/a-well-informed-electorat...
| rileymat2 wrote:
| I don't think this is true, some of the data is not clean and
| is created through estimates and modeling, I'd not trust
| ChatGpt to get this right, and adding your own uncited models
| or estimates to wikipedia will get it deleted.
| vachina wrote:
| LLM's memory recall is extremely lossy. Facts should not be
| lossy.
| kleiba wrote:
| Obviously, facts do not play a big role in the current
| government's world view.
| stinkbeetle wrote:
| Truly dark times when we can't even trust the CIA anymore.
| khat wrote:
| The CIA was formed in 1947 and the first known controversy
| was in 1953. And has a whole list of controversies since
| then. From giving citizens LSD, wiretapping citizens, to
| supporting Central American cocaine distribution. And this is
| where you draw the line on trustworthiness? Lol
| ceejayoz wrote:
| You and sarcasm should get better acquainted.
| MisterTea wrote:
| That was a joke that violently wooshed over your head. You
| might need to see a doctor to check for whiplash.
| DetroitThrow wrote:
| We have to draw the line somewhere
| butlike wrote:
| CIA-distributed LSD would be a weird trip
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| I would love to get some of that.
| toyg wrote:
| This is a good joke, but it's also true that the whole
| charade of trying to look "institutional" and "fact-based"
| was a pretty decent way to go about pursuing the US agenda.
| "Hey we are the good guys, we show you real numbers" was a
| good line to push, and it could often show up the opposition
| as cranks and liars.
|
| Nowadays, nobody even pretends to not be a liar, from any
| side. There is no debate that even attempts to look at the
| facts - it's vibes all the way down and fuck you if you don't
| agree, only money and guns matter. In the long run, this
| can't hold.
| seanw444 wrote:
| > In the long run, this can't hold.
|
| It's always held, management just changes. Money and power
| are two fundamental constants to human nature.
| mannanj wrote:
| Then don't watch "Everything is a Rich Man's Trick" that was
| what showed me a bit of the under dealings of how that
| organization was structured and created.
|
| Spoiler: The CIA was formed around rich people's interests
| and continue to represent them, not in fact, the American
| people. Harsh reality but helpful to know.
| moolcool wrote:
| Like Ken Jennings said about this: "you have wonder if the
| problem was 'world,' 'facts,' or 'books'"
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Ironically, most people who think that also think the opposite
| of the previous administration.
| regenschutz wrote:
| 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.
| icf80 wrote:
| "Facebook" :)
| mrbluecoat wrote:
| I initially read it as Facebook as well and almost celebrated
| :D
| mikemarsh wrote:
| Surely there's a lot of CIA involvement there too ;-)
| regenschutz wrote:
| Oh wow, didn't at all notice that while typing lol. I guess
| my swipe-to-type skills aren't as good as I thought they were
| ekianjo wrote:
| > Unfortunate. So many essays that I wrote in school cited The
| World Facebook as a source.
|
| A source of propaganda? There's nothing the CIA does without
| political motivation.
| Sharlin wrote:
| The Factbook has always been widely regarded as a reliable
| source of information.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| I would hope that most people do understand that the CIA is
| a heavily biased source to use on information on other
| countries.. like wtf?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Heavily biased sources can still provide useful facts, if
| you're careful.
|
| For example, the IDF now accepts Hamas's death toll
| estimates after decrying them as inflated for years.
| https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2026-01-29/ty-
| article/.p...
| kergonath wrote:
| > There's nothing the CIA does without political motivation.
|
| Even then, political motivation in itself does not make it
| inaccurate. It's easy to see why a liberal democracy supposed
| to defend liberty across the globe would be interested in
| making facts accessible. Facts and education are the best way
| to fight obscurantism and totalitarianism. It's also easy to
| see why a regime sliding back towards autocracy would have no
| interest in doing it. If they were competent, they could have
| continued pretending they cared and actually use it as a
| propaganda tool. Same with Radio Liberty and the others.
| schnable wrote:
| there used to be a higher alignment in the US between
| political motivations and morality.
| hk__2 wrote:
| At least Wikipedia is supposed to cite its sources, while AIs
| don't.
| GorbachevyChase wrote:
| Have you used one recently? The big providers all cite
| sources if give a research prompt.
| sofixa wrote:
| 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.
| maximilianthe1 wrote:
| what's worse is when they cite clearly LLM generated
| articles from web
| keeganpoppen wrote:
| 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...
| olyjohn wrote:
| 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.
| sofixa wrote:
| https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/11/04/ai-chatbots-are-
| spe...
|
| Original study: https://www.isdglobal.org/digital-
| dispatch/investigation-tal...
| i80and wrote:
| 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.
| GorbachevyChase wrote:
| This is on par with humans, honestly. I've dug into cited
| studies by consulting firms that were 100% false.
| hk__2 wrote:
| In my experience they just add random links at the bottom
| that are often unrelated to the response they give; there's
| absolutely no guarantee that they did read them or that
| their response is based on them.
| pardon_me wrote:
| AIs that were trained on data obtained through naughty
| channels actively avoid citing sources and full passages of
| reference text, otherwise they'd give the game away. This
| seems to increase the chance of them entirely hallucinating
| sources too.
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| Do you people even use the models or do you just lie about
| them?
|
| https://chatgpt.com/share/6984c899-6cc4-8013-a8f6-ec204ee631.
| ..
| regenschutz wrote:
| You're using the Research model that isn't available to
| Free users. As a pupil myself, I can vouch for the fact
| that nobody is using the Research models here.
|
| Even if a pupil does pay, they will either be too lazy to
| wait the nearly 10 minutes it takes for the AI to do its
| research, or they actually care about getting good grades
| and therefore won't outsource their research to AI.
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| You can replicate on the free tier. You should try it.
| I'm just pointing out that the loudest anti-ai voices
| often either haven't used the models at all or are basing
| their bad opinions on outdated versions. Any opinion made
| about ChatGPT with GPT 3.5 is basically irrelevant at
| this point.
| belter wrote:
| See the positive. At least you would not get a fail on your
| school essay about Greenland...
| sofixa wrote:
| > Wikipedia
|
| There is nothing wrong with Wikipedia, at least in the main
| languages. It's crowdsourced and has citations (and where there
| aren't "citation needed" help identify that).
|
| It gives you superficial, in depth and factual information,
| with links to sources for more details if needed.
| PLenz wrote:
| There's nothing at all wrong with Wikipedia but it needs
| sources to cite since it doesn't allow original research and
| the World Factbook is an important one.
| hexagonsuns wrote:
| >There's nothing at all wrong with Wikipedia
|
| Well, except for the very obvious political bias
|
| https://manhattan.institute/article/new-study-finds-
| politica...
| sofixa wrote:
| > Findings show that Wikipedia entries are more likely to
| attach negative sentiment to terms representative of
| right-leaning political orientation than to their left-
| leaning counterparts
|
| Is that a bias or just reality?
|
| Right leaning politicians in the US include people paying
| underage girls for sex, people screaming about "Jewish
| Space lasers", people obviously stealing money in plain
| sight with crypto pumps and dumps, people running away
| from responsibility, people getting caught engaging in
| sexual acts in public, and on and on and on. Their left-
| wing equivalents are... extremely mild by comparison.
| What, some run of the mill corruption and sexual comments
| that resulted in resignations?
|
| If go past "right wing is associated with more negative
| things", and look into _what_ those negative things are,
| you 'd realise it's just reality. Just because there are
| two parties and two categories of political leanings
| doesn't mean they are somehow equal.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Yes, the left engages only in "mostly peaceful protests"
| throwawayqqq11 wrote:
| Citation needed for mostly violent protest.
| hexagonsuns wrote:
| "Bias isn't bias if I agree with the side it's taking!"
| sofixa wrote:
| It's not bias if it's factual reality. You not liking it
| doesn't make it bias.
| hexagonsuns wrote:
| It _is_ bias if your "factual reality" over-exaggerates
| the "facts" for the "bad guys" and under-exaggerates /
| completely neglects to report on the "good guys"
| array_key_first wrote:
| There are also genuinely good guys and bad guys. Reality,
| itself, has a bias. To think that ideology doesn't
| correlate at all with how moral you might act is,
| frankly, stupid. Not all positions are created equal.
| throwawayqqq11 wrote:
| Which is true for all propaganda outlets.
|
| But to put it with John Steward, what if reality itself
| has a left leaning bias?
|
| What if left leaning people have empirically broader
| empathy [0] which could imply that right leaning people
| have in tendency worse personalities. I guess you would
| attest yet another biased article here.
|
| [0]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10281241/
| O1111OOO wrote:
| When it comes to politics and studies... We all should
| know by now to research those sources too, right?
|
| "The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research is an
| American 501(c)(3) nonprofit[5] conservative think tank."
|
| It is a report generated by this conservative
| organization (that presumably gets donations from many
| other conservatives). Is there a chance that the report
| itself is suspect?
| cataphract wrote:
| "Bias" here is just sentiment analysis. The report (from
| a conservative think-tank) is not about factual errors.
| Plus, the effect they find shows only for US politics,
| where there is really not much of a "left".
| tyre wrote:
| Looking at the underlying study, this isn't evidence of
| bias. It's evidence of correlation between Republicans
| and negative sentiment.
|
| If you look at the sentiment for public figures given,
| the bottom one is, for example, Brett Kavanaugh. Well, he
| was credibly accused of sexual assault during his
| confirmation hearings, which was a huge deal at the time.
| Someone with that on their record will probably be read
| as negative, but, I mean, not the editors' fault!
| philwelch wrote:
| The accusations weren't particularly credible and similar
| slander campaigns against people like Joe Biden aren't
| nearly as prominent.
|
| Even notorious dictators like Mao Zedong get treated with
| kid gloves as long as they're on the left:
| https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/how-wikipedia-
| whitewashe...
| sofixa wrote:
| Kid gloves? The cites text literally says:
|
| > His policies resulted in the deaths of tens of millions
| of people in China during his reign, mainly due to
| starvation, but also through persecution, prison labour
| in laogai, and mass executions
|
| What's "kid gloves" about that?
|
| Let's contrast with the the farthest thing from a
| leftwing dictator we can find, the quintessential
| rightwing one, Adolf Hitler. Here's the intro to his
| Wikipedia page:
|
| > Adolf Hitler[a] (20 April 1889 - 30 April 1945) was an
| Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of
| Germany during the Nazi era, which lasted from 1933 until
| his suicide in 1945. He rose to power as the leader of
| the Nazi Party,[b] becoming the chancellor of Germany in
| 1933 and then taking the title of Fuhrer und
| Reichskanzler in 1934.[c] Germany's invasion of Poland on
| 1 September 1939 under his leadership marked the outbreak
| of the Second World War. Throughout the ensuing conflict,
| Hitler was closely involved in the direction of German
| military operations as well as the perpetration of the
| Holocaust, the genocide of about six million Jews and
| millions of other victims.
|
| Note how the atrocities are last, same as Mao.
| detourdog wrote:
| The CIA World Factbook was one of the major sites to access for
| information using Gopher. I discovered it using Gopher and it
| was proof to me of the usefulness of Internet. I would cite it
| as a reason that someone might want to access the internet.
| xphos wrote:
| Can you add context on what Gopher is for the unknowning? I
| searched for it but
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) is the only
| seemingly relavent thing I found not sure if thats exactly
| what your refering too?
| detourdog wrote:
| 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.
| One could then follow the gopher links until exhaustion or
| all the links on that site were visited.
|
| There was a period of time before the WWW was graphical and
| I found gopher far superior for browsing. One had to
| download files and then view them locally using local
| tools.
|
| One could even follow a gopher link to the WWW. The splash
| page had the slogan "Welcome to the World Wide Web there is
| no top or bottom". This could not be said of Gopher sites
| where each site had to be connected to directly and all the
| links on the site could be visited.
|
| Once IP addressees became available to the public WWW
| browser became graphical. This made the Gopher less useful
| since it was stuck as terminal browser. The IP address made
| the machine one was browsing from addressable to every host
| on the internet. This made inline graphics more practical
| because they could be rendered in line while browsing.
| xphos wrote:
| 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
| detourdog wrote:
| I'm pretty nostalgic for Gopher. If the graphical web
| hadn't been so mind blowing I would have realized how
| great it was at the time. Before the web had graphical
| browser I thought it was pretty useless compared to
| gopher.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| TUI web browsers exist. But many sites are not usable.
|
| Gemini is a newer protocol influenced by Gopher.[1]
|
| [1] https://geminiprotocol.net/
| SyneRyder wrote:
| 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 account at
| https://sdf.org/ It's a long time since I updated mine,
| but I'm at gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/syneryder/
| detourdog wrote:
| 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://
| edsu wrote:
| This makes me wonder if someone is putting the latest
| version of the Factbook on Gopher now. It might be a fun
| little project?
|
| PS. Lagrange is a beautiful piece of software.
| ecliptik wrote:
| 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...
|
| 1. https://bombadillo.colorfield.space/
| mzi wrote:
| > Once IP addressees became available to the public WWW
| browser became graphical.
|
| What does that even mean?
| detourdog wrote:
| There was a time when only institutions were on the
| internet. Eventually one could get dial-up connection to
| a commercial entity. NYC's had an early commercial
| service provided by PANIX (Public Access Unix) and the
| San Francisco bay area had the Well.
|
| This was just a terminal connection where one could
| connect to other hosts on the internet through a dial-up
| connection. The modem would connect to a computer that
| had a route to an internet gateway. PANIX provided a Unix
| user account one could dial into. One didn't need an IP
| address to get on the internet. The difference was that
| an internet host couldn't find/connect to the terminal
| one was browsing on. There was no "addressability". If
| one downloaded a file from the internet it didn't end up
| on the machine one was using. The file ended up in a
| directory on the computer one was dialed into. The second
| step of retrieving the file involved downloading the file
| from your home directory on the Unix machine one was
| dialed into. In my case I think I needed a modem that
| supported the Zmodem protocol.
|
| Eventual the dial-up providers were able to provide IP
| addresses using the SLIP (serial link IP). Once one had
| an IP the machine was on equal footing of all the other
| internet hosts. The computers could exchange information
| directly. This provided an easy way for a web browser to
| directly connect from the machine one was using and the
| host one was connected to. This is when graphical browser
| became available to everyone with an IP address. The
| graphics became inline and could be rendered directly on
| the client.
|
| I believe there were ways prior to this to inline render
| graphics I never experienced them. AOL used to be a
| closed network with graphics and no internet gateway.
| CompuServe may have been similar. I never used either of
| those systems.
|
| Outside of my college's library connection I only
| accessed the internet through PANIX until the internet
| boom. I learned about PANIX through an ad in the back of
| Computer Shopper.
| mzi wrote:
| Mosaic, the first graphical browser was developed by
| National Center for Supercomputing Applications. They
| were of course not bound by dial-up or similar and
| probably didn't care for commercial offerings of
| connectivity in their priorities in development.
|
| And before it, slip had been available and standardized
| for some time.
|
| I would say what drove the adoption of commercial
| services was the graphical web, not the other way around.
| detourdog wrote:
| I think the point I would want to make is the commercial
| availability of IP addresses drove the graphical browser
| adoption.
|
| I read about graphical browsers in MacWeek in an article
| about SoundWire. This was a website that was selling
| music on the web. I believe fulfillment was through
| snailmail. There headquarters were in a Brooklyn
| apartment. I somehow contacted the owner (Joe a friend of
| Dang) and took the subway to his apartment to see a
| graphical browser in action. I don't know how long it
| took to actually get my own IP address but I know it took
| me a few days to get a MacPPP connection to actually work
| over slip.
| mzi wrote:
| That implies that you got on the bandwagon because it was
| a graphical web? At my department in Sweden it was an
| overnight adoption when we found Mosaic.
|
| And I can see you struggle to get PPP to work over slip!
| detourdog wrote:
| Prior to the Mosaic I thought Gopher was superior to a
| text based WWW. Once ISDN became available I used an
| Ascend Pipeline 50 and that made IP addresses available
| across an entire network. The office I was working at
| also immediately adopted Mosaic/Netscape at that time.
| Getting PPP to work was definitely heavy lifting for me.
| Getting an IP address as an individual was difficult in
| the early days.
| cfmcdonald wrote:
| This video [0] shows someone using Gopher (and other common
| pre-web Internet tools) in the early 90s.
|
| I used Gopher when I did a high school summer science camp
| at Indiana University in 1994. It was a really interesting
| time of transition when the graphical Web was just coming
| on-line with Mosaic, but most tools were still
| textual/command line (FTP, pine/elm email/Usenet clients,
| MUDs, etc.)
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDV4zrex18o
| runjake wrote:
| Gopher was a text-mode, menu-based, hypertext-based
| precursor to the World Wide Web. It's what we used before
| the Web and web browsers came along.
|
| Here's a good image of your typical Gopher page:
| https://img.sysnettechsolutions.com/What-is-Gopher-Nedir-
| EN....
| jimt1234 wrote:
| I feel _really_ old now. :(
| homebrewer wrote:
| Don't; I'm pretty old myself, and I've only a vague idea
| of what gopher is because it was never used in this part
| of the world, and internet access also came pretty late.
| Maybe GP is in a similar position.
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| Isnt it already in AI as the prior version were publicly and
| should be in training corpus?
| pseudalopex wrote:
| The World Factbook was updated weekly. This was because facts
| changed.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| Every time an article like this gets posted some commenter
| INEVITABLY brings up "isn't this solved because AI" and god
| it is so depressing. Apparently a whole lot of people out
| there existing in the world genuinely think fucking LLMs
| are going to be reliable stewards of knowledge.
|
| We are fucking cooked.
| cududa wrote:
| Sure but that doesn't mean it'll perfectly retrieve
| information it's trained on. There's a lot of conflicting
| sources, hallucinations, etc.
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| Ai training can be thought of like human training (school),
| much of what you learn shapes you but you forget the details.
| We need to continue to have real sources of info.
| hackingonempty wrote:
| No worries, we can rely on our Dear Leader and his team of
| experts to keep us informed.
| jonstewart wrote:
| ODNI also did not publish its quadrennial Global Trends report
| last year, even though it was written. It probably talked too
| much about the rise of fascism.
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| in a world where "alternative facts" rule, this is just a natural
| conclusion
| rented_mule wrote:
| 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 words in books.
| Typical novels have on the order of 10 K distinct words and 100 K
| total words.
|
| If you're indexing numbers, which we did, 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. But, because it constantly triggered that approach to
| capping memory usage, it took far longer to index than more
| typical books, including many that were much larger.
| nanna wrote:
| Bit confused, what's this to do with the CIA World Factbook?
| vlovich123 wrote:
| > 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
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| So the factbook is an actual book too? That's what I
| missed, I thought it was a webpage so this was referring to
| some other post.
| dylan604 wrote:
| The CIA Factbook being publicy available since 1971 has
| existed longer than the internet
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Factbook
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| That's a great logo. What a travesty.
| nereye wrote:
| Over 30 years ago, was working on a presentation software that
| shipped with a bunch of (vector) clip art and remember using
| the (raster) graphics from the CIA World Factbook as a base to
| create vector (WMF) versions of the flags of various 'new'
| countries at the time (following the breakup of Yugoslavia)
| that were missing from the set that our art vendor provided to
| us.
|
| The Croatia flag in particular took quite a while to trace/draw
| (by hand).
| bilekas wrote:
| This 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.
| steviedotboston wrote:
| 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.
| simonw wrote:
| I have that up and running now for the 2020 edition:
| https://simonw.github.io/cia-world-factbook-2020 - repo here:
| https://github.com/simonw/cia-world-factbook-2020/
|
| 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| There I go, hoarding data again.
|
| Thanks, stranger.
| GJim wrote:
| > it would be possible for volunteers to build an archive site
| of it
|
| It would. But you are forgetting the whole editorial trust
| thing, which is what made it so useful and well cited.
| steviedotboston wrote:
| I'm not suggesting continued changes, but just preservation.
| tw04 wrote:
| A shared knowledge of factual information is the enemy of a
| fascist state.
|
| Not that that has anything to do with the current administration
| deciding to kill a useful apolitical resource that has served
| countless people for 80 years.
| toss1 wrote:
| Facts 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 standard path to authoritarianism.
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| This regime is just following the same path openly.
|
| Give Trump some gold points for not being a hypocrite like all
| of his predecessors.
| rootlocus wrote:
| TruthSocial is the largest distributor of propaganda and fake
| news. That's pretty hypocritic.
| jimt1234 wrote:
| 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.
| nostrademons wrote:
| The Internet Archive has a mirror:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20260203124934/https://www.cia.g...
| thayne wrote:
| Part of the value of the factbook is that it is kept up to
| date.
|
| If it is no longer published, the version on the Internet
| Archive will become out of date.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| [dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891794
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Your comment was more duplicative than the article.[1]
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46899292
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| And yet here we are
| pron wrote:
| My theory of the current US administration and its support is one
| of ideological stupidity. Ideological stupidity wishes to see the
| world as simple. If "classical fascism" made a promise of order
| in a tumultuous world, the new right makes a promise of
| simplicity: the world is not as complicated as the experts say.
| To maintain simplicity, any serious scholarship and study, which
| invariably points to complexity, is to be expunged.
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| What took so long? They've had Wikipedia for years already.
| calibas wrote:
| Where do you think Wikipedia gets its information?
|
| The World Facebook is one of the most cited sources on
| Wikipedia.
| aw124 wrote:
| It's time to sunset the CIA. "I will splinter the CIA into a
| thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds."
| constantius wrote:
| It seems like it won't be a popular opinion given the comments,
| but: a three-letter-agency, especially the CIA, maintaining a
| "factbook" always seemed like an oxymoron to me. Indeed it was an
| oft-cited source in research and school essays, and for the most
| part it was certainly accurate, but, as many tools of propaganda,
| that veneer of accuracy could be a useful cover for the small
| portions of reality where truth was inconvenient.
|
| As an example in recent memory: the World Factbook has been
| heavily cited lately to argue _against_ the idea of a genocide in
| Gaza. Maybe a year or so ago, the Factbook was updated, and it
| claimed that the population in Gaza had grown: no decrease, no
| inflection point in growth, nothing to see... That claim was in
| heavy rotation, as soon as it was published.
|
| That the espionage agency of the main weapons supplier to Israel
| would publish such a claim felt grotesque, and the claim itself
| seemed ridiculous, impossible, based on even evidenced peripheral
| information (the 90+% of people displaced, the destruction of all
| hospitals, the deaths of so many aid workers, the levels of
| starvation), but... the Factbook claimed it, so it became true to
| many.
|
| It would be impossible to quantify the effect of this, how many
| days of horror it added, how many more debates those trying to
| stop the killing had to do, how much fewer donations were sent to
| aid workers. But an effect it certainly had.
| throw263586 wrote:
| Look up actual data instead of making assumptions. Around 130
| children are being born in Gaza daily. Over two years this is
| more than the official number killed in the war, so the
| population has not declined.
|
| https://www.savethechildren.net/news/about-130-children-born...
| constantius wrote:
| I'm feeding a troll here, but for the benefit of those
| reading along:
|
| The official numbers are a subset of all deaths: only deaths
| from direct military action are counted.
|
| In most wars, excepting the shortest conflicts, those deaths
| are a minority of all deaths.
|
| Even taking the numbers of Save the Children (and I'll let
| everyone decide whether they're likely an overestimate or an
| underestimate), it's difficult to think that for every 4
| people killed in this slaughter, _only_ 1 person died of
| hunger, disease, chronic illness, childbirth, age, etc.,
| etc., etc.
|
| Over 2 years.
| throw263586 wrote:
| This is not true. The Gaza Health Ministry published all
| deaths.
|
| You can't just speculate and make up your own numbers and
| then complain that sources are not reliable.
| Havoc wrote:
| Of all the organisations you'd think the CIA would understand the
| value of soft power and having some level of control of facts
| being published
| krunck wrote:
| They do. Their "publishing" of their "facts" happen all on
| social media now.
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| ++1
|
| at least them, yes
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| They do understand, that's why they're doing this. This is a
| fundamentally anti-fact administration -- when facts aren't
| known, you can fabricate reality for the masses, which is what
| they want.
| dmschulman wrote:
| 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 from the WHO, and doing
| everything possible to turn the US into a pariah in the eyes of
| NATO, just to name a few big changes.
| danny_codes wrote:
| Fox News figure-head cabinet might not be the most, ah,
| strategically minded group of people.
| drstewart wrote:
| 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.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| The McNamara fallacy (also known as the quantitative
| fallacy), named for Robert McNamara, the U.S. Secretary of
| Defense from 1961 to 1968, involves making a decision based
| solely on quantitative observations (or metrics) and
| ignoring all others. The reason given is often that these
| other observations cannot be proven.[1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
| drstewart wrote:
| True, TSA has been very valuable in airline safety. Think
| of it as "soft terrorism prevention".
| graeme wrote:
| Millions of people around the world looked at the CIA world
| factbook. It was useful. It gives you a warm feeling about
| the USA and the CIA. Warm feelings are useful.
|
| If you deny this argument do you claim:
|
| 1. No one used it or it wasn't useful, or
|
| 2. They used it robotically and formed no feelings, or
|
| 3. It is of absolutely no use to have people like your
| organization or country.
| bjourne wrote:
| In the early days of Wikipedia many articles were taken
| directly from the CIA Factbook since it was public domain.
| Numerous Wikipedians have fond memories of it and remembers
| it as something the US did that was actually good and not
| evil shit. That and America's Army. Cheap ways to gain
| goodwill. Maybe in the grand scheme of things it didn't
| matter.
| jd24 wrote:
| 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.
| tossaway0 wrote:
| The argument against abandoning soft power is that it's
| going to cost a lot more in hard power to maintain the
| same status. We'll see how it plays out.
| superxpro12 wrote:
| right. because there's zero demonstrative value in USAID
| giving aid to foreign countries which is why we just left.
|
| ...and then china moved in.
|
| The real problem is that the problem isnt binary or
| immediately causal. "This happened, and then that
| happened".
|
| These problems are slowly developing with more than 1 term
| in the equation.
|
| China doesnt build silk road 2.0 because of one little
| decision. It's an accumulation, and by then it's too late.
| drstewart wrote:
| What's the Chinese version of the factbook? European?
| Canadian? Why aren't they all moving in on all this sweet
| soft power?
| MaxfordAndSons wrote:
| The ends are to create vacuums for big businesses to come in
| and provide the same services, for private profit rather than
| public benefit
| 4fterd4rk wrote:
| I'm not saying the Trump regime is filled with people
| beholden to or influenced by Russia... but if they were I
| don't see what they'd be doing differently.
| swed420 wrote:
| > 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 from the WHO, and doing everything possible to
| turn the US into a pariah in the eyes of NATO, just to name a
| few big changes.
|
| Seems like it's to manufacture consent for a narrow overton
| window of capital interests, which is nothing new to this
| administration in particular. It keeps up the illusion of
| democracy by looking like changes are happening all the time
| as a result of voting, but really it's a race to the bottom
| except for the uber wealthy.
|
| Since most voters of both corporate parties have pretty much
| universally internalized and accepted they're voting for the
| "lesser of two evils," it's safe to conclude our political
| system is captured and has been for decades. Furthermore, 1/3
| of people refusing to vote is not solely out of laziness.
| Many of them have concluded the system is FUBAR.
|
| We're given two shit options which come about through a
| broken primary process and is reported on by monopolistic
| media. The news media and social media is siloed in such a
| way that people filter into one of two corporation-approved
| spheres of groupthink. These two spheres manufacture consent
| for each other in numerous ways, one of which is exemplified
| above. The good cop/bad cop setup makes it look like things
| are constantly getting broken only to have the illusion of
| being re-fixed by the other group, as measured by a pre-
| approved narratives that are disseminated.
|
| The COVID pandemic is another great example. Sadly the CDC
| has been a disgrace under all recent administrations of both
| parties and has lots of blood on its hands:
|
| https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-
| co...
|
| Unfortunately the WHO has similar issues:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/ZeroCovidCommunity/comments/1q87aki.
| ..
|
| Almost as if capital interests are running the show. But what
| are we fighting about in 2026? That's right, whether we
| should or should not be affiliated with the WHO, and to what
| extent our CDC should be funded. Two broken institutions and
| a performative fight about them. Meanwhile millions have/will
| see their grave earlier than they otherwise would have,
| thanks to long COVID (many of whom will never even make that
| connection, including their doctors who were spoonfed the
| "vax and relax" / "back to normal" messaging in service to an
| archaic consumption-based economy.
| thisisauserid wrote:
| That sucks. It was the first thing I would check when someone
| said, "Hey, do you want to go to Sao Paulo/Oman/Laos?"
|
| What's a good resource now for "Do I need K&R insurance?"
| Stevvo wrote:
| Advisories on https://travel.state.gov/
| probably_wrong wrote:
| > _What 's a good resource now for "Do I need K&R insurance?"_
|
| "The C Programming Language"?
|
| Less tongue-in-cheek: I'm sure your embassy issues travel
| advisories.
| low_common wrote:
| No link to the World Factbook in the article, sloppy journalism.
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| 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/
| elzbardico wrote:
| I 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.
| crumpled wrote:
| 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.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Trusting domain experts is precisely what I like in
| Britannica. I want an environment where real domain experts
| are not drowned by a mob of midwits.
| crumpled wrote:
| Arguably, you get more and better domain experts in
| Wikipedia. I have a set of Britannicas, it's severely
| lacking in citations and definitely out of date, no matter
| how new.
|
| The question of article quality has been studied from the
| very beginning. Wikipedia almost always wins.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| I cannot escape the overall impression that Trump is bankrupting
| America and we increasingly cannot afford to provide even the
| most basic of government services.
| wigster wrote:
| facts?
|
| where we're going, we don't need "facts"
| mannanj wrote:
| I don't understand why they created or obtained control of the
| world Factbook in the first place, anyone have a story around
| this?
|
| I thought the CIA was formed to represent rich people's interests
| and maybe in that way the Factbook was another trick to lend
| legitimacy to their organization.
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| > on July 26, CIA was officially born. Just a few months later,
| on October 1, CIA assumed all responsibility for the JANIS
| basic intelligence program. Shortly thereafter, JANIS was
| renamed the National Intelligence Survey (NIS), but continued
| along the same tradition, providing policymakers and military
| leaders with up-to-date data, maps, and other reference
| materials.
|
| > In 1971, the Factbook was created as an annual summary of the
| NIS studies and in 1973 it supplanted the NIS encyclopedic
| studies as CIA's publication of basic intelligence. It was
| first made available to the public in 1975 and in 1981 was
| renamed The World Factbook.
|
| https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/history-of-the-world-factb...
| dougb5 wrote:
| Not to be confused with The World Almanac and Book of Facts,
| which is still publishing after 140 years.
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Almanac)
| systems_glitch wrote:
| End of an era. We used to get it on CD in school.
| elif wrote:
| "Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book
| rewritten, every picture has been repainted."
|
| George Orwell (1984)
| emeril wrote:
| Trump will soon be issuing the "World Alternative Factbook" as a
| natural replacement
| sharyphil wrote:
| The only useful thing CIA ever did is gone. :(
| password4321 wrote:
| 3rd discussion, simultaneously on the front page:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46899808
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