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 537 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: AI image generation requires human curation akin to photography
“It's like, you know, if I take a photograph, is the camera now the artist and not me? Well, no, it's me that decided what the picture was, and where to point it, and how to take it, and which of the 2000 pictures you took is, is the one. And, you know, I was t…”
Evans: Secure encryption cannot exist with law enforcement backdoors
“There is no theory of what that would be, like, a secure encryption means no one can read it, but the police can read it, ok so it's not secure.”
Evans: Metaverse standardization efforts resemble cable TV, not the internet
“The more that you try and make things open and standardised, And interoperable and portable, the more you're actually describing cable TV, not the internet. Because the whole fucking point of the internet is actually how little of it is standardized, as much a…”
Evans: Data portability mandates inherently conflict with user privacy regulations
“As a conflict between interoperability and privacy, because if you say, you know, you can say, make it easy to explain. You know, the competition regulator says, make it easy to export data, and the privacy regulator says, make it hard to export data, because …”
Evans: Tech failed to turn TV into a single Spotify-like library
“What the tech industry always wanted to do was to turn TV into YouTube or Spotify. That is to say, or what YouTube or Spotify then became, which is you've got this single universal library of everything, and you pay one fee, that's a reasonable amount of money…”
Evans: Algorithmic discovery and direct audience ownership are fundamentally incompatible
“You're asking for a recommendation algorithm that will drive all the readers to you, but you're also asking to own your list, and I think that's kind of a contradiction in terms, because if what you're saying is, I want somebody to open the app and have the ap…”
Evans: Cryptocurrencies are fundamentally open-source computers, not just digital gold
“Cryptocurrencies for want of a better term are not fundamentally about replacing gold and fiat currency and being a store medium of storage. That's just sort of the one of the early and obvious applications. What you're really seeing here is a way to run an op…”
Evans: Simplifying layers inevitably centralize decentralized systems
“And so there's a whole bunch of reasons why you tend to get simplifying layers and abstracting layers and aggregating layers. You know, most people don't open a command line on their PC. They don't want to. They just want to click on the icon that says interne…”
Evans: NFTs are architectural software primitives, not fundamentally about art
“NFTs aren't about art either, just as crypto isn't about money.
the point, you know, what we're still doing is trying to work out what the building blocks are.
And so the NFT might be another building block within how a crypto social system or publishing syst…”
Evans: Major tech paradigms are no longer built top-down by giant incumbents
“Tech doesn't work like that. It hasn't worked like that since the seventies, maybe the eighties, but the days when like big companies could say, right, we're going to build the future. Like that's not how the future gets built.”
Evans: Crypto token activity blurs speculation with real product traction
“The stock price going up does not help the company, except that it makes them easier for them to raise capital by selling stock and issuing stock options. But the price going up itself doesn't tell you that they sold more product. Whereas a token activity in t…”
Evans: Telcos are infrastructure and Netflix is TV, not software companies
“Telcos aren't a technology business. They're infrastructure business. Netflix isn't a software company. It's a TV company. On the other hand, Airbnb, but Airbnb isn't a hotel company. It is a software company.”
Evans: Superior Software Rarely Guarantees Strategic Leverage Over Legacy Industries
“There's a very standard presumption in Silicon Valley that software companies can learn other industries faster than those other industries can learn software. And that's generally true, but.
Well, it's generally true, but it might not matter.
I think that's…”
Evans: Consumer tech is driven by cultural insight, not software engineering
“A lot of like consumer tech now is as much pop culture as it is tech. You know, is Snapchat tech or is that pop culture? You know, that, the inside, whatever you think the answer was, it wasn't software engineering. It was some insight about how people wanted …”
Li: Chinese tech should be framed as parallel evolution, not the future or past
“And I think the way to look at China might not, the framing in which I find the most helpful is to view it as this parallel world. You don't, you shouldn't view it as like the future. You shouldn't view it as like the past, but you just view it as like, Had th…”
Evans: Apple views user privacy violations as analogous to malware
“I think Apple sees privacy as sort of analogous to malware. It thinks that this is an architectural problem on the computer. It controls the computer. They make the operating system. It's their job to fix it in the same way that it was sort of Microsoft's job …”
Evans: Privacy is a strategic asset because Apple lacks an ad business
“Privacy is a strategic asset. You know, there's an old line in Silicon Valley that everyone is giving somebody else's business model away for free. Apple doesn't have, it doesn't have a social network, doesn't have a search engine, doesn't really have a, it do…”
Evans: Eliminating ad targeting concentrates revenue into large platforms and paywalls
“So the aggregate of all of this is basically the strong get stronger, the big get bigger. The advertising moves to the big, strong, established sites. Small sites, new interim sites, less targeted sites makes less money. Content moves behind paywalls.”
Evans: Banning paid political ads inherently favors populists and established celebrities
“If you say you can't buy reach, what you're actually saying is you can only have organic reach. So Trump has got however many followers he's had, so he's kind of fine. So, so when you say you can't do political advertising, but you can have organic reach, whic…”
Evans: Enforcing platform competition inherently conflicts with protecting consumer privacy and security
“Competition conflicts, almost everything that we want to do here. Competition conflicts with privacy conflicts with everything else. You pick one.”
Evans: Real tech competition redefines business models, ignoring antitrust market definitions
“The big strategic competition in these markets is not someone who's in your market that fits an antitrust lawyer's definition of your market. The competitive threat is from somebody who changes the whole fucking business into something else, or offers your cus…”
Evans: If Tesla is a car company it is screwed; if software, everyone else is
“Tesla, this is the argument. Is it a software company or a car company? If it's a car company, it's screwed. If it's a software company, everyone else is screwed.”
Evans: For Facebook's VR to succeed, it must transcend gaming
“And so for Facebook, paradoxically, VR needs to not be about games.”
Evans: Silicon Valley's monopoly on tech innovation is over
“The world in which all the ideas came from within 50 miles of Silicon Valley, well, that's kind of over.”
Evans: Building social competitors requires network data, defeating individual data portability
“If you wanted to make an Instagram competitor, I would like to see everything that you've posted and everything that you'd like, and I also want to see everyone you follow and everything they like, because that's what Instagram uses to give me recommendations.…”
Tech Can No Longer Rely on Expanding the Total User Base
“The trouble is, as I mentioned, we've kind of run out of people now. So there's not like another step change to come in that kind of process.”
Evans: TikTok competes with YouTube rather than Instagram due to graph mechanics
“I would actually argue that Instagram is about people you choose to follow, and mostly people you know, whereas TikTok is about people you don't know. It's a completely different graph, and it's a recommendation-based graph, not a people you've met-based graph…”
Evans: Breaking up Instagram or YouTube would not reduce harmful content
“If Instagram was a separate company, that wouldn't have any effect on teenage girls looking at self-harm content on Instagram. If YouTube was a separate company, that wouldn't have any effect on the prevalence of jihadi content. That's not a competition proble…”
Evans: Spinning off Instagram or YouTube will not make competing easier
“If Instagram was a separate company, that wouldn't make it easier to compete with them. Because the network effects that make it hard to compete with Instagram are part of Instagram. They don't come from it being owned by Facebook. The same thing with YouTube.…”
Evans: Antitrust fines lack deterrent value due to decade-long enforcement lags
“The enforcement is so disconnected from the original decision that, like, nobody who's actually Nobody who's making those decisions understands that in 10 years' time they'll be defined as a monopoly. I mean, they're arguing about it now. You know, there's peo…”
Kevins: 95% of enterprise users require direct sales and IT support
“No, five percent of people will see it, realize it, and adopt it, and be able to get the company to buy it. The other 95% of people, you need to tell them it exists, you need to tell them why, and then you need to help them work out how on earth they're going …”
Evans: Online harms stem from total connectivity, not algorithms or ads
“A couple of years ago, there was this whole thing in India of lynch mobs forming based on wild rumors that were spreading on WhatsApp, which was super interesting because WhatsApp is not, doesn't have an algorithm and doesn't have advertising. And so like thos…”
Evans: Content moderation is unscalable without architectural constraints
“The creation of bad stuff is fundamentally infinitely scalable, because it's people. It's four billion people saying, retweeting stuff that fits their prejudices. And the content moderation or the virus scanning is fundamentally unscalable, because you're one …”
Evans: American cultural dominance over global internet regulation is over
“The first 25 years of the consumer internet was basically American, and the big companies, you know, the agenda, and therefore the kind of the cultural attitudes and the legal attitudes to how they should work were all American.
And you can, again, you can gen…”
Evans: Heavy platform regulation protects incumbents like Facebook from startups
“Part of the point of regulation is that it's expensive and it helps incumbents.
You know, if you, Facebook has whatever it is, 30, 40,000 human moderators. If you create a law that says if you have a social network, a human being has to look at every post, wel…”
Evans: Commodity DTC sellers cannot profit because Instagram ad spend replaces rent
“Instead of spending all of your money on rent, you spend all your money on Instagram, unless you have some other way of getting, unless you have some other way of getting to people. But if you're just selling a commodity product, you know, in a commodity Chann…”
Evans: Lower E-Commerce Barriers Make Achieving Revenue Harder Due to Global Competition
“The fixed costs and the barriers to entry are gone. So you don't need to rent the store and get up on the ground of inventory necessarily. You don't need the kind of, the initial expenditure might have changed completely. It doesn't mean that getting to a hund…”
Evans: Fragmented European markets prevent US-style city-by-city marketplace rollouts
“If you're going to do Instacart, say, You can launch in San Francisco, and then you can pick 10 more, and then 20 more, and then 10 more, and then 30 more, and you can kind of go, go out step by step by step across the country. Whereas in Europe, you couldn't …”
Evans: Tech events outside Silicon Valley act like 'gay pride' for founders
“I sometimes describe things like web summit and four years from now, it's being like gay pride. Which is to say if you live in Stanford, you don't need an event to tell you. If you grew up in Berkeley or Stanford, you don't need an event to tell you about star…”
Evans: Domain expertise differs fundamentally from software product design capability
“If you're a great accountant, or a great video editor, or a great graphic designer, or a great salesperson, or a great lawyer, those are different skills to being the person who's going to work out the right way to make a really great piece of legal discovery …”
Evans: Making tool-creation easier will not turn enterprise employees into builders
“You're not the right person to see all of those problems. You're also not the right person to get everybody to use this. And so there's just this kind of huge gap between we give everyone a tool that can make stuff, and therefore everyone is going to make new …”
Evans: Knowing what code should do is harder than writing it
“Writing the code isn't the hard part. Writing the hard part is knowing what the code should be doing. It's seeing the problem and knowing the right way to do it. It's the opinion.”
Cameron Brown: Enterprise Clients Won't Pay $100M for Software Without Human Consultancy
“No one's going to pay a hundred million dollars just for the technology that you can buy off the shelf. They need to understand how they can map this to the needs that they have.”
Evans: AI makes producing software orders of magnitude cheaper and faster
“The first of them is, well, clearly this is an order of magnitude, maybe several orders of magnitude, cheaper to make any given piece of software. A piece of software that you might have thought of 10 years ago that has nothing to do with AI, you can use AI to…”
Evans: The hard part of making software is almost never writing code
“The underlying point, though, is I think the hard part of making software is almost never writing the code.”
Evans: AI works best where critics are angriest about it
“The fields where AI is actually works best right now are the fields where people are really angry about it and sure it's useless. ... Whereas the fields where it doesn't, really doesn't quite work, or needs an awful lot of other stuff around it, The fields whe…”
Evans: Memory in AI chatbots creates stickiness, not network effects
“Memory is a feature and a stickiness, not network effect.”
Evans: Heavy LLM users are atypical, creating a paradox for AI developers
“If you're using this all day, every day, you're not a typical user. It's like the paradox. Normally you would say if you're only using this once a week, you don't, you shouldn't be working on it. You should only be working on it if you're using it every day. T…”