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 60 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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: Creators most upset about AI art lack originality
“The really unkind thing one could say is that the people who are most upset about AI art are the people who are making stuff that has no particular authenticity originality. I mean, if you, if you've made, if you wrote 10 vampire romance books last year and yo…”
Evans: The Cambridge Analytica scandal was basically a hoax
“And of course the irony of Cambridge Analytica was it was, in the end, it was basically a hoax. There was nothing there.”
Evans: Sam Altman's Windows and utility analogies for AI are flawed
“Sam Altman talked about windows, which is a really bad analogy because windows had network effects. He also talked about water companies and electricity companies, which are like completely the opposite. They're regulated utilities with crappy margins selling …”
Evans: Bottom-up enterprise adoption only ever succeeded for Slack and Notion
“This is like the great fallacy of enterprise software that you can just sell to the users, and it's like it only ever worked for Slack and one other company. Maybe Notion, but even Notion has capped out.”
Evans: No AI lab has unique models because everyone builds identical tech
“What's happened so far is that people leapfrog each other every couple of weeks or every month or two, but because everyone is basically building the same stuff nobody has anything unique in the models.”
Evans: Dismissing AI as useless is like calling the internet useless in 1999
“I still see people who say, no, it's just like a stochastic parrot. It doesn't do causation. It doesn't work very well. It's got hallucinations. It's all useless. These people are morons. Like, they are just idiots. But they're idiots in the sense of somebody …”
Evans: Skeptics dismissing AI as useless or like NFTs are ignoring reality
“The real idiots are the people who are just saying, oh, none of this works, and it's all nonsense, and it's just a stochastic parrot, and it's useless, and I don't know what it's for and this is all, like, nonsense, and this is a rerun of NFTs. Because these p…”
The DOJ gerrymandered its market definition in the Apple antitrust lawsuit
“The DOJ is suing Apple for having what the DOJ, claiming the DOJ describes as a monopoly of, quote, performance smartphones, which Apple described as gerrymandering, and I'm kind of inclined to agree”
The Microsoft antitrust case did not create Google or the iPhone
“This is kind of bizarre assertions that somehow the DHA Microsoft case resulted in the rise of Google or resulted in the iPod and the iPhone, which is just ignorant nonsense.”
Evans: Rabbit's 'cack-handed' AI hardware is becoming a 'smoking hole'
“And we saw this kind of completely cack-handed attempt at doing this from Rabbit, which is now well on the way to being a smoking hole in the ground.”
Evans: Open-source clones of commercial products never succeed
“Well, so I was looking at, I looked at Metaverse, sorry, at Fediverse, and saw, this looks like an open source claim of Twitter, and open source claims of commercial products never work. It's the only people who use them are people who care that it's open sour…”
Brody: Blockchain will eventually let sports fans vote on transfer decisions
“I think there will come a day where fans will be heavily engaged. In what goes on on the field. Like, and whatever that looks like, whether it's they're making game day decisions, or whether they're making transfer market decisions, or they're voting on those …”
Twitter needed an 80% to 90% staff reduction and cultural reset
“And so it needed, like, a total cultural reset, and you needed to, like, fire 80 or 90% of the people and then hire back. So that instead of having, it had well over 10,000 people plus, plus contractors. And it's gone down to a thousand or something, and maybe…”
Evans: Musk's management of Twitter has been a series of self-inflicted wounds
“But since then, we've just had like one massive self-infected wound after another. Like he doesn't have, he's shot himself in the feed so many times, whether that's banning external links, like banning people, blocking people. And like, yes, the content modera…”
Evans: Twitter is a failure compared to Meta's multi-billion user apps
“It's an amazing success. Like, no, it fucking isn't. It's got two hundred fifty million users. Each has, like, Meta's got three or even four products that have each got three billion users. It's a failure.”
Elon Musk lacks an intuitive understanding of how social networks work
“Like on past form, you know, Elon is just going to keep doing this because he clearly just hasn't, doesn't have any understanding or any kind of intuitive sense of how social networks work. And he doesn't understand that he, every time he does these things, he…”
Musk's controversial tweets destroy half a billion dollars in value each
“When you do that, you just, that, that, that, that tweet cost you half a billion dollars. Every time you do that, that's another half billion dollars gone. Like, why do you do that? It's worse than a crime. It's a mistake.”
Evans: Developers will have little reason to build for Meta Quest
“I feel very sorry for Meta because they spent, you know, however many tens of billions of dollars on their product that, you know, no one's really, only a couple of million people are really using and doesn't have traction. And after this, why on earth would y…”
Evans: Generative AI is going to demolish the porn industry
“It's also going to happen to porn. It's just going to demolish the porn industry. Because again, there's vast amounts of training data.”
Evans: Near-zero AI error rates render semantic understanding questions practically irrelevant
“And as the error rate goes down, you get this philosophical conversation, which is what gets you to AI risk, where people are saying, look, you throw another hundred X more compute and 200 X more data at it, and the error rate goes to 90 X percent, 99.98%.
At…”
Evans: DOJ e-books lawsuit effectively protected Amazon's monopoly
“The DOJ basically goes to court in order to protect the position of a monopolist. Now that was actually what happened. What they said they were, or thought they were doing, was protecting low consumer prices, which was also what was happening. But the low cons…”
Evans: Netflix is a TV company, while YouTube actually disrupts television
“Netflix is a TV company, not a tech company, because all the questions that it poses, the TV industry questions, and it hasn't actually changed what a TV show is. It's just bought more of them and made more of them. Mr. Beast clearly is not a TV show. It's som…”
Sequoia Was an Unsophisticated Investor Duped by FTX
“FTX was selling Wall Street to non-Wall Street people. In this case, it's an, it's a funny, you could almost say it's an increase at Sequoia with the unsophisticated investors who got taken to the cleaners by some clown from hedge fund land.”
Bitcoin and Ethereum Currently Lack Real Utility
“At the moment we don't really have utility for them other than people building stuff that we hope we'll be able to do stuff with at some point in the future.”
Evans: Policy papers cannot control AI because models are open source
“And indeed the whole problem I had with the whole concept of AI safety and AI ethics was like, this stuff is all fundamentally open source. So aren't five companies that can do this. Anybody will be able to do this. So you're not going to be able to sit and wr…”
Evans: Netflix using algorithms to commission shows is "all bullshit"
“So all this stuff I read about how Netflix is using algorithms and software and artificial intelligence to work out what shows to commission, it's all bullshit. You're not paying somebody twenty million dollars a year if you've got a machine that tells you wha…”
Evans: Requiring Google and Meta to pay news publishers for links is ludicrous
“Completely ludicrous idea that Google and Facebook should somehow pay newspaper companies to link to that.”
Evans: The idea that Big Tech buys up all startups is nonsense
“And they're actually a very small percentage of all the acquisition, all the startups in the field, or indeed all of the exits, because, you know, I think it was something like 60 or 70 of those 400 were more than fifty million dollars, which is the point that…”
Evans: Nest and Within probably would have failed without Big Tech buyouts
“The practical effect would probably be that Nest would have gone out of business. Within would probably have gone out of business.”
Evans: FTC Chair Lina Khan falsely claimed Amazon sold below cost
“Basically she claimed Amazon was losing money, which was This wasn't true. Or she claimed Amazon was selling below cost, which wasn't true.”
Evans: Vast majority of platform moderation decisions are universally agreed upon
“The vast majority of the decisions are not the lab leak theory from China or Hunter Biden's laptop. They're not things where people disagree. They are, you know, things where literally everybody who thinks content moderation is bad would look at that and go, o…”
Evans: Decentralized social networks with multiple clients are an illusion
“And so this idea, which is also a web three idea, which is that you could sort of have a decentralized social network and have lots of different clients all plugging onto the same database is kind of an illusion because what's going into the database is what t…”
Evans: Open source and Linux failed completely as consumer products
“So Linux failed completely. As a consumer product, open source failed completely at creating consumer products.”
Evans: Tesla's energy business is worthless in software vs. cars debate
“The pair of that, of course, is Tesla, where, you know, half the questions are car industry questions, and half of them are software questions, and indeed, you know, the argument about Tesla is The Tesla stock is the bulls think it's a software company and the…”
Evans: Tesla is dangerous because it claims it drives itself when it cannot
“That intermediate, weird intermediate thing is the reason a lot of people think Tesla is dangerous, because Tesla tells you it can drive itself and it can't.”
Evans: VR will only succeed as a niche gaming subset
“I'm afraid I am now deeply on the sort of, okay, I don't think VR is going to work except as, I mean, the school of thought that says I don't think VR is working except as a subset of games. Now clearly there's a bunch of people who think that's just because t…”
Evans: Tesla Risks Becoming a Subscale Legacy Automaker Like Saab
“You know, there is basically the bull argument on Tesla is it's a software company and the bear argument on, on Tesla is it's a car company. If it's a car company. Then it's basically a subscale car company and it's going to end up like sub. Great cars, but su…”
Evans: Silicon Valley's anti-advertising sentiment is 'really fucking childish'
“There's a kind of person in Silicon Valley that thinks that advertising is evil, and advertisers shouldn't want to know anything about us, and I never bought anything from advertising either, and I think this is really fucking childish.”
Evans: China will match US per capita GDP within decades
“China is going to have the same GDP per capita as America, more or less, at some point in the next couple of decades.”
Evans: Reliance Digital will not become a global internet superpower
“There's this whole story about how Reliance Digital is going to be like the next global internet superpower, and I read this and think it's all horseshit, and this is, telcoes always say this, every five years there's another telco that says, we're going to be…”
Evans: The Open Internet Could Not Have Been Built in Germany
“If you tried to build that in Germany... Never mind all the other reasons you wouldn't have been able to build it, but you would not have been able to build that in Germany.”
Benedict Evans: Search and social networks are natural monopolies like water utilities
“There are clearly structural reasons why it's very hard to create a new search engine or to create a new social network. There are very strong network effects, which I, the last, one of the last pieces I wrote, I described as basically a natural monopoly. And …”
Evans: WhatsApp proves harmful content is not caused by ads or algorithms
“WhatsApp doesn't have an ad model. WhatsApp has massive problems with harmful content. They have massive problems with rumors in India, for example, and people forming mobs and killing each other based on rumors on WhatsApp. They don't have advertising. They d…”
Evans: 1990s antitrust intervention against Microsoft had no effect
“And actually none of the antitrust intervention had any effect, but that's again a separate conversation”
Evans: OpenAI's new ChatGPT work product is a confusing disaster
“I was playing with a new chat GPT work product, which is clearly not that it's a complete disaster. It's chaotic, confusing mess”
Brown: Silicon Valley is building incredible AI capabilities that nobody needs
“And maybe this is the first time that the disconnect is just so obvious that we have this insane capability of building these things that are incredible and yet no one actually needs it right now.”