Follow AI Builders — Not Influencers
Re They had a most excellent editorial voice, as demonstrated by this "what's new" entry from December 10th 2020 about the height of Mount Everest https://simonw.github.io/cia-world-factbook-2020/docs/whatsnew.html
Spotlighting The World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell
Spotlighting The World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell Somewhat devastating news today from the CIA: One of CIA’s oldest and most recognizable intelligence publications, The World Factbook, has sunset. There's not even a hint as to why they decided to stop maintaining this publication, which has been their most useful public-facing initiative since 1971 and a cornerstone of the public internet since 1997. In a bizarre act of cultural vandalism they've not just removed the entire site (including the archives of previous versions) but they've also set every single page to be a 302 redirect to their closure announcement. Up until 2020 the CIA published annual zip file archives of the entire site. Those are available (along with the rest of the Factbook) on the Internet Archive. I downloaded the 384MB .zip file for the year 2020 and extracted it into a new GitHub repository, simonw/cia-world-factbook-2020. I've enabled GitHub Pages for that repository so you can browse the ar...
