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 584 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 13 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
Goldberg: TSMC's Arizona fab will remain dependent on Taiwan's expertise
“It doesn't mean the U.S. Actually can do advanced chips because that plant is going to be entirely dependent on expertise and knowledge base from the mothership in Taiwan.”
Goldberg: China has failed to copy TSMC by poaching personnel
“And China for years has been trying to poach people out of TSMC to come build their foundries. And it just hasn't worked. Like you, it's something about the whole body of knowledge that's just too, you just can't copy and paste.”
Goldberg: RISC-V will probably capture automotive and IoT instead of mobile
“And I think that's going to have important implications, probably not for mobile or compute, But for all the other things that are getting chips built into them, cars, especially cars, home devices, internet of things, all of that is probably going to end up i…”
Evans: Most Big Tech sub-threshold acquisitions were under $10M and 10 employees
“And the vast majority of them were less than 10 people, and less than ten million dollars.”
Evans: MrBeast viewing time rivals a top 10 to 15 Netflix show
“Depending on whether you think he gets like one minute Per view, or six or seven minutes per view, it looks like Mr. Beast in total would sort of count as like a top 10 to top 15 Netflix show on a weekly, rolling weekly basis, and sometimes more than that.”
Web3 Does Not Exist and Cannot Support Instagram Today
“And in fact, web three doesn't exist yet. And it would not be possible to build Instagram on a blockchain today.”
Benedict Evans: Meta's massive VR spend builds nonexistent hardware supply chains
“It's like, that's kind of why they're spending all this money, because they realize now actually there isn't all the stuff you need to get VR working actually isn't sort of already there waiting to be plugged together the way smartphones kind of work.
and s…”
Evans: Zoom is a feature, not a $200B enterprise platform
“It's just a feature. It's not an enterprise software platform. It's not going to be like the next, you know, a hundred billion dollar, two hundred billion dollar company.”
Evans: Figma will grow to replace all of Photoshop and Illustrator
“This is clearly an existential question because this thing is going to grow. You know, it is going to grow, expand and take over all of Photoshop and all of Illustrator. It's going to be the better way of doing that in a way that Google docs never really did f…”
Evans: Australian court ruled Google is not a publisher in defamation suit
“There was a fascinating court case a couple of weeks ago in which some, someone, a newspaper would describe somebody as a gangster, and the newspaper story is in Google, and the person accused of being a gangster sued Google for defamation, and the court said,…”
Evans: WeWork failed to disclose core operational numbers in its IPO prospectus
“Which is, of course, what happened when we went out and IPO'd, and the real estate investors asked what the numbers were, and they didn't know what the numbers were. They weren't in the IPO perspectives because they just said it's a movement.”
Evans: Mozilla would go out of business without Google search payments
“And the second problem is, of course, that almost all of Mozilla's revenue comes from this. And so if Google stops doing this, Mozilla goes out of business by default, and there's no competitive web browser, or the main competitive web browser, the main compet…”
Evans: The US will not pass an equivalent to the DMA
“The US isn't going to get an equivalent of the DMA.”
Evans: EU will force Apple to open NFC to third-party payment apps
“Certainly they will have to open up NFC, they will have to open up Apple Pay, so you'll have to be able to basically substitute Apple Pay with Stripe Pay or Square Pay. The EU, that's very clear in the DMA that's just kind of, that's going through its final pr…”
Evans: Text-to-video AI generating specific human actions is roughly five years away
“Well, today, certainly make me a picture that says people doing this, and certainly, and then it will be make me a video that says, that shows people doing this, and that's, You know, that's sort of five years away or something.”
Evans: Machine learning cannot reliably scan messages for grooming
“Problem two is that's not a simple database look at. That's a quite challenging machine learning problem, and it's not going to work very reliably. Like, it might work 60, 70% of the time, maybe. Massive false positive problem. Actually, we don't really have t…”
Evans: There will probably be a US political panic over Shein
“There hasn't been a Xi in panic yet, actually, even though it's another Chinese thing that every American teenager is using. But there probably will be. I don't know what form that will take.”
Google's next decade is moving all television advertising onto the internet
“The next 10 years of Google is turning everything, all TV advertising, into the internet. So they've taken everything else, but, you know, TV is a bit that hasn't really moved yet.”
Russia cannot manufacture new tanks due to foreign semiconductor shortages
“So the Russians are fucked, because they can't even make new tanks, because they can't get the components.”
Evans: Linear TV ad slots will disappear within 10 years
“Half of the ad, global ad industry is still on TV. And that's not going to be there in 10 years' time, or it won't be quote unquote TV. I mean, this is this whole, what is TV? You know, is Disney, you know, if you watch it on your smartphone, if you watch YouT…”
Evans: Musk has zero experience in consumer software or social networks
“Whether, you know, Elon with zero experience of building consumer software, or, and zero experience of a social network is the right person to do that is a slightly different question.”
Evans: Bloomberg will never be disrupted because tech engineers cannot access it
“Well, the thing that occurred to me sometimes is that, you know, Bloomberg, for example, will never be disrupted because the only people who could disrupt it can't see it because it's 24,000 dollars a year. So nobody who knows what it is or really understands …”
Evans: Banning profile-based ads benefits Google and could bankrupt The Guardian
“You want to ban advertising based on the user profile rather than on the context. Okay, well, that's probably good for Google and terrible for the New York Times, and the Guardian might go out of business.”
Evans: In 10 years, the metaverse will run on Web3 infrastructure
“Go forward 10 years and the two of them sort of merge. In that, you know, if everyone is doing, if they could both work, and everything that you do in the metaverse will be web three, will be running on web three.”
Evans: Boring enterprise SaaS will out-mint Web3 billion-dollar companies
“While tech is obsessed with Web three and metaverse, There's going to be an awful lot of billion dollar companies that do something that sounds really boring until you describe what it is and you think, oh yeah, I can see how that would be useful.”
Evans: The 30% App Store commission rule is toast
“Look, the 30% rule is toast, but we don't really know quite how and what and where”
Evans: Fully autonomous, driverless cars will not arrive by 2022
“Full, full, full autonomy as in a car with no steering wheel that can drive from San Francisco to San Diego while you sleep in the back and there's no seats, there's just a sofa and no windows, you know, like that kind of autonomy is five, 10, 15, 20, I don't …”
Evans: All of Apple's App Store rules will be overturned within 18 months
“Now none of this will stand because all of Apple's rules are going to get overturned in the next 18 months”
Evans: Laws of physics prevent mesh networks from replacing cellular
“You can't replace, laws of physics prevent mesh networks from replacing cellular.”
Evans: Legacy carmakers will be able to buy autonomy from Google
“It's much easier to say that the screen on a Tesla is an enormous challenge, or even that the autonomy is an enormous challenge, but then they'll be able to buy the autonomy from Google.”
Evans: Cookie Deprecation Only Truly Impacts One-Third of Digital Advertising
“The whole cookie apocalypse thing and the privacy thing and all of this stuff is actually only about sort of a quarter to a third of online advertising because there's YouTube. Which is where video advertising is, there's, well, let me put it another way, ther…”
Evans: Apple's SKAdNetwork limits conversion attribution data compared to IDFA
“They're going to turn it off and replace it with something called SK Ad Network, which will really just tell you there was an install, but not tell you what or how much it resulted in, which is like massively less useful.”
Evans predicts antitrust concerns will force Apple to open iOS NFC access
“Well, I think it's pretty likely that Apple will have to open up NFC access, for example. Because that's a payment monopoly thing.”
Brown: Uber expanded abroad by ignoring local regulations, causing severe backlash
“And it was just so interesting to see the complete lack of understanding of the policies and the regulations, whether it was in Europe, Saudi Arabia, you name it. And they were just like, we're just going to do it the American way and it will stick. And you're…”
Evans: Facebook's targeted advertising does not sell user data to advertisers
“Facebook sells your data. Okay, what does Facebook do? You're an advertiser, you go on Facebook, you say, I want to show an ad for a playgroup to mothers in Cardiff, and I've got 500 pounds to spend. Okay, we'll show that ad to 500 people that we, to a thousan…”
Evans: EU communication privacy law inadvertently banned child abuse scanning
“So late, late in December, the EU had passed a law on privacy of communications platforms, which basically said you're not allowed to look at what people are saying to each other. And suddenly realized, just as this was about to go into effect in mid-December,…”
Evans: Newsletter platforms will inevitably need algorithmic feeds as they scale
“What is it going to look like when you've got 10,000 people on your platform, and everybody's got signed up to 200 newsletters, You're going to have an algorithm. You are. Or you're going to be MailChimp, and you're going to say, that's not my problem, in whic…”
Google and Facebook Will Face Regulation Like Banks and Telcos
“You are going to get regulated like a telco or a bank. You know, if you work at Google or you work at Facebook, you are going to have the same kind of scrutiny that a telco or a bank have. And it doesn't really matter if you think you shouldn't. That's just wh…”
Evans: 10% of Google's workforce will work in compliance by late 2025
“I think the only certainty is that when we come back in five years' time, 10% of people who work at Google will work in compliance.”
Evans: Apple Silicon will blow through Intel on performance
“And now they are on a curve to just blow through Intel and deliver dramatically better performance which is kind of, again, classic disruption theory.”
Evans: Future primary computers will run sandboxed OSs without raw filesystem access
“Well, your main computer is going to be running a sandboxed operating system without Live file system access, probably without running very much native code, and it will be running Chrome, or it will be running iOS, or it will be running something similar, and…”
Evans: Facebook generates trivial revenue from news content
“All my friends at Facebook would basically say, we wish we didn't have news at all. We don't make any money from it. We actually don't make any money from news, although the amount of money is trivial. It's a huge amount of pain and aggravation”
Evans: Every platform allowing file sharing hosts child sexual abuse material
“Any internet platform that allows people to share files of any kind has a child porn problem. Every single one.”
Evans: Splitting YouTube from Google would not spark video competition
“Today, if you split YouTube into a separate company, that wouldn't result in 10 new social media video sharing sites exploding.”
Evans: A DOJ antitrust win against Google Search will have little effect
“And I think this is the problem with the DOJ's case on search distribution, which is even if they win, it's not really going to have much effect.
Because it's, A, it's not actually getting at the levers of power.
It's quite a long way away from the actual sear…”
Facebook cleared out Oculus founders for wanting to build gaming consoles
“This is why they cleared out all the team, because they bought a company staffed by people who wanted to make a games, a high-end games console, and they know they don't want that.”
Evans: Most people cannot articulate tasks for AI agents to execute
“Yeah, because people won't see the thing that they want the agent to do, and then they won't be able to work out how they want the agent to do it. They won't be able to articulate that. Most people can't.”
Evans: Anthropic Leads AI Frontier, OpenAI and Gemini Trail by 5%
“Because right now we've got, you know, Anthropics ahead at the moment. We have OpenAI and Gemini five percent behind, like not far behind. Grok just, SpaceX Grok Nazi model just came out with like a model that's in like the top At the top of some of the benchm…”