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.
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.
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
The issues start when you try to compare data, because different sources will use different methodologies
That's one way of putting it.
If all the sources dry up then LLM 'facts' will be time constrained.
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...
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.
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.
The Croatia flag in particular took quite a while to trace/draw (by hand).
loloquwowndueo•1h ago
Discussed a few days ago as well