CIA World Factbook is dead – Here is an attempt at recreation
worldfacts.app
worldfacts.app
I missed it recently when wanting to compare government revenue and expenditure for several countries. Without it, I didn't bother as I'd have to look figures up manually through each respective country's own budget website, and ensure figures were like-for-like (which they rarely are), and doing this for each country each with its own conventions is prohibitively tedious. Therein lies the value of Factbook; all that miserable distillation work was done for us.
The rationale for defunding was 'why should the US tax-payer fund something that's equally valuable for everyone in the world'. I think that's fair. But I lament its removal and wish the US could rattle the tin so other countries chip in and bring it back.
edit: There was absolutely nothing "CIA" specific or sensitive about it whatsoever, it was basically like if you paid some government employees to attempt a job similar to the mid 1980s era Encylopedia Britannica. Maybe with a bit more emphasis on public statistics like literacy rate, percent of houses with telephones, economic statistics, other basic public stats that governments are known to publish.
Sort of the same reason US government works end up in the public domain "This work was funded by the US citizens and as such it is owned by the US citizens(in the public domain), it is too much hassle to try and prevent non-US citizens access so if they can get a copy they are free to use it as well"
I liked the idea of having the intelligence agency maintain a public intelligence encyclopedia for it's citizens. Sort of how the geological survey provides public maps and earthquake alerts.
There's also some propaganda power in maintaining a widely-cited encyclopedia (and maybe a psyops angle).
Terminating it for US citizens as well so no-one else can have it? That's more like small.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Factbook
this is the new open source site:
Maybe @dang can fix the autocorecto
(p.s. @dang doesn't work - I just saw this randomly. If you want semi-reliable message delivery, hn@ycombinator.com is the only thing that works.)
You’ve earned yourself a bookmark :)
I can't tell for sure what happened around 2005 or so, youtube spawned up as well and it seemed for a while it was going great and then things started dying off, getting walled-in and dying within those walls as well.. I don't know how it happened, maybe as Hemingway put it - two ways. gradually, then suddenly.
Factbook was one such place that carried memories of ye olde past.
Also, CIA FACTbook, not CIA FACEbook, although when you think about it and In-Q-Tel lol.
Because America has a hammer which makes everything a nail.
All of its PDF are still out there in the public domain, just scattered and not well organized in a single set of tabular pages. Here's its final report for an example of what it did.
https://www.ecoi.net/en/file/local/2145129/sigar-final-repor...
darkreader.org helps.
Low effort looks like low effort, even if you have an AI helping.
I mean Claude literally does not have eyeballs, it cannot feel discomfort, it does not need to squint, it cannot be annoyed by low contrast, and it cannot desire something better, it will not seek to improve this unprompted as a human would to "scratch its own itch".
but it's the 99% that don't care who are responsible for the low contrast websites we're talking about
Those 99% are going to make it harder to find the good 1%, too
c'est la vie