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
Baker: Google surpassed OpenAI and Anthropic in total AI traffic
“I think they've taken 15 or 20 points of traffic share in the last two or three months, and that does not, that's just traffic to Gemini. It does not include search overviews. I suspect on a actual traffic basis, Google is bigger than OpenAI, Anthropic, anyone…”
Andreessen: Chinese manufacturer DJI is US Defense Department's primary drone supplier
“DJI is the most widely used drone today by many, many large, you know, American customers, including the United States Department of Defense. Right. The DOD's primary drone supplier is DJI.”
Chris Power claims 90% of US solar panels use Chinese slave labor
“90% of the solar panels in the country are being made in China by basically slave labor where millions of minority and immigrant women are being chemically castrated every year and forced into servitude.”
Ross: Declassified US estimate puts Chinese cyber IP theft above $300B annually
“When I was in government, we declassified a national intelligence estimate, which we tend not to do. Well, we declassified a national intelligence estimate that actually put a number on the amount of intellectual property theft taking place because of cyber at…”
Ross: Iranians repurposed US malware to destroy 30,000 Saudi Aramco computers
“I've seen evidence that the malware that the United States is alleged to have used against Iran it looks like, if you look at the code base, it looks like Much of that code was used by the Iranians against the Saudis in attack, in an attack against Saudi Aramc…”
Tan: San Francisco ABC affiliate refused to cover anti-Asian hate crimes
“ABC News you know, literally the mainstream media TV channel of San Francisco and the Bay Area would not cover anti-Chinese and anti-Asian crime.”
Horowitz: Post-Rampart LAPD recruited gang members who killed Notorious B.I.G.
“What happened in the LAPD with the Rampart scandal right after the Rodney King incident They had the same kind of thing. Everybody got fired, et cetera. They had trouble recruiting. They started recruiting people out of gangs and those gang members ended up, y…”
Horowitz: LAPD corruption and rogue officers protected Tupac Shakur's killers
“Well, in that case, the LAPD was corrupt, and the, well, there were literally criminals in the police force protecting the criminals who killed Tupac, and, you know, thankfully, we kind of reopened the cold case, and we caught the guy, but it's,”
Andreessen: Albert Einstein was pro-Stalin and favored a communist dictatorship
“Einstein was the exact opposite of a moral exemplar. Einstein was Stalinist. Like, Einstein was, like, a full-on, like, Einstein was pro-Stolic, like, not even just pro-communist, was actually, like, pro-Stalin, and Einstein thought, but, like, American democr…”
Ulevitch: Taiwan is seven days from a blackout under a Chinese blockade
“This is an island country. That is, you know, seven days away from a total energy block, blackout if they get an oil and gas blockade from China so that they can't bring in ships to deliver oil and fuel.”
Marc Andreessen: Russian Facebook ad spend during 2016 election was only $80,000
“I think the result of it was, I think it was a result of 80,000 dollars of ad spend by the Russians in, in the relevant period of the election. It was like a total of like a 140,000, but during the actual run of the election, it was 80,000 dollars, and so the …”
Ian Webster: Anthropic Claude censorship matches DeepSeek on Chinese political topics
“Sure. Yeah. So, I mean, the level of censorship here is like Anthropic Claude is actually on par with DeepSeq.”
Horowitz: Major tech and pharma CEOs couldn't get Biden administration meetings
“It's like every major, you talk to any major tech CEO of the biggest companies in the world of the, you know the biggest pharma companies in the world, none of them could get meetings with this administration.”
Andreessen: For every active US dockworker, another is paid to stay home
“For every doc worker in the U S actually works on the doc doc, there's actually somebody sitting, there's a doc worker sitting at home doing nothing, still getting paid.”
Andreessen: FDIC blocked private equity and bank bids to buy SVB
“There were both there were other big banks that wanted to buy SVB, and there were private equity firms that wanted to buy SVB, and basically do a private sector bailout requiring no, no taxpayer involvement, and the FDIC actually blocked those also.”
Horowitz: FDIC rejected SVB buyer to avoid creating another G-SIB bank
“One of the blocks was there was a bank that was going to buy Silicon Valley bank and by buying Silicon Valley bank, it would move up into the G-SIB category, which is globally systemic important banks. And they're like, no more G-SIBs.”
Horowitz: Car thieves are not prosecuted in almost any blue state
“One of the big things that's changed in talking to many police officers is like grand theft auto is no longer a thing. Like if you steal a car, you don't get prosecuted in almost any state. Certainly in any blue state, you're not getting prosecuted for stealin…”
Horowitz: Harvard enrolls more Nigerian than African American students
“There are more Nigerians. I believe there's more Nigerians at Harvard than African Americans.”
Robbins: Meta-studies show 60% of depression patients receive zero treatment benefit
“60% of the people that go in, according to meta studies, for treatment of depression with drugs and or therapy or both, 60% make zero improvement.”
Andreessen: More People Globally Have Smartphones Than Electricity or Running Water
“Sitting here today in 2023, the following is true. More people in the world have computers in the form of smartphones specifically and internet access than have electricity or running water in their homes.”
Horowitz: Native American reservation system is essentially UBI paying $65K yearly
“And the reservation system is essentially UBI. It's 65,000 dollars a year, I believe, per resident.”
Horowitz: Vinod Khosla tweeted that AI will replace human musicians
“Our friend Vinod Khosla, I think, had a tweet that got him in a lot of trouble where he said, like, you know, there won't be any more human musicians because the AI would just program whatever feeling, however you want to feel, they just program it for you.”
Amodei: AI training costs will hit $1B in 2024 and up to $10B in 2025
“I think that next year we're probably going to see from multiple players models on the order of one billion dollars, and in 2025 we're going to see models on the order of Several billion, I don't know, perhaps even ten billion dollars.”
Gluchowski: Optimistic rollups cannot support Validium extensions due to game theory reliance
“There's another Type of roll-ups called optimistic roll-ups. They unfortunately cannot do this. They do not rely on math and cryptography. They rely on game theory and validators, and they cannot have this extension.”
Benet: Academic research proved doubling Bitcoin block size has minimal impact
“The debates that have been raging for the last two years are about relatively minor things, so increasing the block size became this huge holy war, and when you step back and look at what they're talking about, it's just increasing one factor, either by, you k…”
Five well-known lines of code can bypass FireEye's security tools
“And so, you know, you look at FireEye, there are five lines of code that are well known that get you around FireEye. You look at Emmet, you look at a lot of these tools that are preventative, there are known ways to get around them.”
Dixon: Sugar will be the biggest killer of this generation
“Sugar is the new smoking. It's going to you know, kill, it's going to be by far the biggest killer of this generation.”
Ashatosh: Azure and IBM will beat AWS in enterprise cloud within two years
“In fact, we predict that the number one enterprise cloud in the next two years is probably going to be Azure, and not AWS, just because they are sucking up a tremendous amount of footprint of applications. And number two actually might be IBM, and not AWS, as …”
Patrick Byrne predicts a 2008-level economic crisis within two to three years
“I also think there's going to be quite soon a big, in the next two or three years, a big disruption in our economy. I think in oh eight or worse is going to happen, and with each disruption, people will shift farther into online, and then it ratchets.”
McMaster: Apple faces margin pressure and negligible emerging market share
“I believe over time, Apple's even going to have products. You know, problems, because they're not going to be able to sustain these margins, and in these markets where Android is dominant, Apple's market share will be negligible. Right? As these markets contin…”
Sinofsky predicts cars sold in 2019 are the last requiring human drivers
“If you, I look at the automobiles today, and I think that the ones that are being sold today are the very last cars that are going to basically require a driver.”
Paul Krugman predicts only one or two cryptocurrencies will survive
“There will not be 1600 cryptocurrencies out there. There will be one or two.”
Fei-Fei Li: Atlas is the first unification of pixel generation and reconstruction
“It's the first time we have a unification of pixel generation and pixel reconstruction.”
Levchin: Affirm is the only BNPL provider doing multi-year installment loans
“So we are the only company in the industry really, there's plenty of competitors who are trying and some degree of success, but mostly not really, who will go into longer term loans. And by longer, I don't mean mortgage or, you know, 15 plus years, but like th…”
Rogers: Draft foreign legislation imposes strict criminal liability on LLM output
“And I've seen draft legislation that imposes like strict criminal liability if the LLM Is even capable of generating certain kinds of content.”
Sankar: China now hosts 50% of all global clinical trials
“We used to think Wuxi was just some cheap set of pipetting arms for contract pharmaceutical research, and now, 50% of all clinical trials are being done in China.”
Sankar: Europe created zero €100B companies from scratch in 50 years
“Europe has created exactly zero companies from scratch in the last 50 years worth more than a hundred billion euro. We have created all of our trillion dollar companies from scratch in America in the last 50 years.”
Huberman: Clinical trials show infusions of exercised blood provide health benefits
“We know that infusion, blood infusions are beneficial. There's been a clinical trial for this. We know that Blood infusions of exercise blood are even more beneficial.”
Mares: Average US child gets less outdoor time than a prison inmate
“The average child spends less time outside than, like, a maximum security prison where people are spending eight plus hours on phone.”
Mares: Average American gets almost 20% of calories from soybean oil
“Today, the average American gets almost 20% of their caloric intake from soybean oil.”
Mares: No US healthcare payer covers exercise for heart disease prevention
“And yet, if you look at our healthcare system, nothing in the healthcare system thinks about someone who is at risk of heart disease exercising as a healthcare intervention. No payer pays for it. No one incentivizes you to do that.”
Mares: US permits 60,000 to 80,000 chemical compounds banned in EU
“And the end result is we have between like 60 and 80,000 chemical compounds in the U.S. That are not allowed in, in the EU.”
Mares: 80% of US schools hold contracts with soda companies
“80% of schools have contracts with soda companies.”
Mares: Lifestyle and functional medicine interventions outperform talk therapy for depression
“There have been studies that show just by focusing and taking a functional medicine approach, you know, focusing on sleep, focusing on gut health, focusing on lowering your inflammation through diet and exercise, that combination of therapies works better than…”
Mares: Big food outfunded the NIH 11-to-1 on nutrition science research
“Most of nutrition science is funded by a big food company. They outfund the NIH, like, 11 to one on nutrition science, at least historically.”
Moore: Perplexity Comet browser launch traffic surpassed ChatGPT Atlas
“If you look at the data, like the spike at launch and the sustained traffic for Comet was actually much higher than for ChatGBT's own browser launch, Atlas, which is kind of crazy given how much more distribution ChatGBT has than Perplexity.”
Langley: Most homicides are now random drug or gang incidents
“The majority of crime was domestic. You would kill a partner, you would kill a girlfriend or boyfriend, so it was it was a not randomized crime. Now the majority of homicides are random. It is a drug deal gone, gone wrong. It is a gang rivalry over territory. …”