The CIA just stopped publishing their World Factbook and took every page, including the archived copies of previous versions! This sucks. It was public domain, so I recovered the 2020 edition (the last one published as a zip file) and shared it to GitHub simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/5/t...
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 …
simonwillison.net
![Why S3?
In my previous post, I explained the benefits of Zero Disk Architecture. A log on S3 is attractive for several reasons:
No disks, so it is elastic and scalable.
We don’t have to roll our own distributed storage server. We get durability, availability, and replication for free just by using S3.
No operational overhead.
Cost. Systems like WarpStream and BufStream claim to be 10x cheaper than Kafka.
Customers and enterprises love BYOC! You make $$$
The Log Interface
type Record struct {
Offset uint64
Data []byte
}
type WAL interface {
Append(ctx context.Context, data []byte) (uint64, error)
Read(ctx context.Context, offset uint64) (Record, error)
}](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:iwpxnj7rzdynjkkr7rxaa5is/bafkreihvs274xp7k2vxdy5a4u4x6whdwrgvikgncm3ljkav4dsjqdl43ry)
