The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 556 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Evans: On-device AI models will fail as capability gains outpace compression
“Will we have small models running on devices? No, because the small models, the capabilities are moving too fast for the small models to shrink the small model onto the device.”
Andreessen: Leadership fails when IQ gap exceeds one standard deviation
“One of the things that they've found over the years is if the leader is more than one standard deviation of IQ away from The followers, it's a real problem.”
Rabois: Trump is reaching career-high approval ratings during shutdown
“Trump's gonna be more popular than ever. He's literally posting the highest popularity and approval rate of his career right now, and the government shut down.”
Power: US no longer manufactures capital equipment for domestic factories
“We don't even make the CapEx that goes into the factories in the US anymore. Like it's all German, South Korean, Japanese or whatever, and they're controlled products.”
Mark Cuban says Cost Plus Drugs is the only pharmacy publishing prices
“Costplusdrugs.com is still the only pharmacy company that publishes an entire price list.”
Chen: Only one physical book printer remains in the United States
“There's literally, I think, like one book printer left in the U.S.”
Ulevitch: One third of global wind turbines are out of service
“I think I read that globally, one third of all wind turbines are out of service at any given time.”
Sinofsky: The US produces no domestic drone parts, relying on foreign rivals
“All of a sudden, drones are the most important thing, and like, all of a sudden, we were like, we don't even, we don't, not just, we don't make the drone, we don't make any of the parts for the drone. Yeah. And they're all made, the only person who makes them …”
Vance: US added 9,000 auto jobs last month
“Last month we posted 9000 new auto jobs after many, many years of stagnation or even decline in the auto sector.”
Sivulka claims Hebbia pioneered inference-time compute scaling
“And this is a technique scaling at inference that was first actually pioneered at Hebbia, and we quickly noticed another scaling law, where if we ran more models and basically more compute at inference time, you could get much better results for very complex t…”
Schimpf: SpaceX received one-third of Boeing's Starliner funding
“I think SpaceX had a third the amount of money that Boeing was given to make Starliner work.”
All robotic arm components currently originate from Shenzhen, China
“Right now, all the components for robotic arms, everything that you might, that might go into an autonomous factory is all coming from Shenzhen.”
Horowitz: Grand theft auto is no longer a felony in major cities
“Grand Theft Auto, Is not actually a crime in any major city anymore, unless like it's a crime if it's, you know, some huge auto ring, but like if it's just stealing a car, like if I steal a car and I just like ride it around, smash it into the wall or whatever…”
Horowitz: Half the population of Buenos Aires uses Worldcoin
“Half the people in Buenos Aires use them.”
Andreessen: Alibaba filed notice reassigning Jack Ma's voting shares to unnamed citizens
“They put out a revised financial statement the summer after they defenestrated Jack Ma, and they announced that the Jack Ma, Jack and his CFO, their voting shares had been reassigned to a set of, I think it was four unnamed other People's Republic of China cit…”
Andreessen: Xiaomi's electric car offers Porsche Cayenne quality for $20,000
“Xiaomi is one of the big Chinese makers of smartphones. They now have a car. And it's like sort of the equivalent of a Porsche Cayenne SUV. But it's like 20,000 dollars, and it's really good.”
Schmidt: Decentralized training of 400B parameter AI models is solvable by 2025
“I think it still is, it would still be, you know, like a next year sort of environment thing that we would have to do. There are some scaling problems, or not scaling problems, but technical things about how you shard the model, because at that point you get t…”
Horowitz: Half of Buenos Aires residents frequently use Worldcoin
“It's something that half of the citizens of Buenos Aires use on a frequent basis, so, like, it's a really great, useful, important product that, you know, can make everybody's lives better, and we've just outlawed it in the United States, and it is you know, j…”
Andreessen: Top 1,000 taxpayers account for half of peak California tax revenue
“In the peak years up to half of total tax receipts for the state of California come from the top thousand individual taxpayers. Which is basically all tech.”
Andreessen: Nuclear Regulatory Commission went 40 years without approving new designs
“They did not approve a new nuclear power plant designed for 40 years.”
Andreessen: Journalist advised Zuckerberg to accept $1B Yahoo acquisition offer
“Facebook got just tons of, you know, it's just like this is the most trivial, stupid, useless, you know, thing that doesn't matter, you know, Facebook, there was almost a deal for Facebook to get bought by Yahoo early on, and I remember a certain very prominen…”
Horowitz: AI is already far superior to humans at medical diagnosis
“Machines are far better at medical diagnosis already than humans.”
Horowitz: Bitcoin mining energy use is tiny compared to AI
“Campaigning against crypto because of the like Bitcoin mining, which is like tiny, tiny, tiny compared to what people are using on AI now.”
Horowitz: SEC has lost five consecutive crypto court cases
“First of all, you know, the sec has lost, I think five cases in a row. So, you know, like some of their like arbitrary enforcement of things that aren't laws is not working.”
Nearly every country now possesses cruise missile-equivalent drone technology
“Nearly every country has what is the equivalent of cruise missiles.”
Langley: Dozens of police agencies using Flock achieve 100% violent crime clearance
“We, we've got dozens of agencies that, like the sheriff, are at a hundred percent clearance rate on violent crime, and they are approaching a hundred percent clearance rate on nonviolent crime.”
Horowitz: Administrators outnumber students at many elite universities
“At many of the kind of elite institutions, the number of administrators outnumbers the number of students.”
Andreessen: Stanford and Yale have more administrative staff than enrolled students
“There are multiple large institutions too that have been identified in public, Stanford and Yale, that now have more administrative staff than they have students.”
Pande: FDA rejects new drugs that are cheaper but equal in efficacy
“If you had a drug that was as good as the best drug, but cheaper, That still can't get that won't go by the FDA because they actually has to be better than the last drug, even if it's not better scientifically, but it's better in other ways.”
Robbins: Mayo Clinic finds second medical opinions differ 74% of the time
“So the Mayo Clinic has found that 74% of the time the second opinion is not the same as the first.”
Casado: Eric Schmidt banned web browsers while CTO at Sun
“I remember when Eric Schmidt fucking banned the browser. Like, he was like, you know, this is Eric Schmidt, the CTO of Sun. I was like, you can't have a browser because people aren't going to work, right?”
Andreessen: Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved zero new plants in 40 years
“Zero new plants in 40 years.”
Horowitz: Over 70% of top music streamers are independent
“Over 70% of the artists that are the top streamers are independent. They're like outside of what you would call Hollywood in the music industry.”
Andreessen: Venona transcripts show McCarthy understated Soviet infiltration in U.S. government
“What we know today is McCarthy actually underestimated the level of Soviet penetration in the U.S. Government. Just on the numbers, he underestimated it. And so his estimates, you know, topped out, I believe, in the 200, and it turned out, you know, the number…”
Doug E. Fresh: No artists owned their masters in 1984 and 1985
“That's how I was able to own my masters in 8485. No artist had ownership of their masters, but I paid for my own records to be made because nobody was making the record the way I wanted to make it.”
Aviation could account for 50% of global CO2 emissions by 2050
“But our own industry projections are that by 20 50, that's going to be anywhere up to 50% of all CO two emissions everywhere.”
Ismail: Smartphone maker Xiaomi incurs zero marketing or promotional costs
“Then you have Xiaomi in China, the second biggest phone company, and they're successful because they have a thousand super users that vote on what features should go into the new phone, and they get the phone early and can boast to people, look, I voted, and a…”
Hefets: US home prices will decline 10% to 15% by Q1 2023
“Our view at Divi is that we're gonna start to see heading into Q-one year-on-year declines in home prices across Economist. That is likely to be somewhere around 10 to 15% year-on-year home price declines.”
Stephenson: Lamina1 will require node operators to purchase verified carbon credits
“The system's going to be designed in such a way that in order to participate, to operate a node, you need to demonstrate that you've acquired, you've bought a certain number of carbon credits from a legitimate company”
Over 50% of the US F-16 fleet is grounded missing parts
“If you look at the DOD stats, more than 50% of the F-sixteans are grounded, and it's mostly because they can't maintain them, and it's mostly because they can't get parts, and what ends up happening is they end up cannibalizing other planes for parts, and that…”
Power: Traditional manufacturing factories lack real-time operational observability dashboards
“No factory on the planet has observability. So you can't simply, and maybe like Foxconn does but you can't simply throw up in a dashboard and go, what is my uptime? Where are the costs for this job? How much labor did we spend on it? It's all kind of swags and…”
Fielding: Over 40% of registered space objects violate international space treaties
“Where they looked at how many objects in space are in or out of compliance with the Space Act and treaties. And the number out of compliance is over 40% of those registered objects are out of compliance.”
Shirley: Ethereum 2.0 eliminates single shared state space composability
“What Ethereum gave us, and what Ethereum too is unfortunately going to be taking away from us, is a single shared state space where every smart contract can talk to every other smart contract and maintain those, you know, acid transaction guarantees that make …”
Riccitiello: Viewers will walk inside 3D movie scenes within three years
“I am certain within the next two to three years, you'll be able to freeze the frame put on a set of VR or AR glasses or look through your phone and walk into the scene and go anywhere.”
Yahya: CryptoKitties introduced true digital ownership for the first time
“CryptoKitties is one where, where people became very invested in owning this digital collectible which is, this is something that is fundamentally new. Never before would you be able to directly own something that's digital. This is the first time that that's …”
De La Garza: A Chinese cybercrime group specifically targets hospitals with ransomware
“There's a Chinese group right now that's focused on ransomware for hospitals, because hospitals pay up, right?”