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 295 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: Shein surpassed Zara and H&M combined in US sales
“No, Ernest, which is this company that does credit card, aggregates credit card bills, sort of said it's now the same size as Zara and H&M, and now, at the end of last year, it's bigger than Zara and H&M combined in US purchasing”
Evans: Shein raised at a $100B valuation, surpassing Zara and H&M combined
“And Sheehan raised this week at a hundred billion dollars, which Company we talked about before and is now bigger than Zara and H&M combined globally.”
Evans: TSMC manufactures roughly 75% of current-generation semiconductor chips
“TSMC Really in the last five years moved from being one of many players in chips to dominating cutting into chip. So, you know, current generation chips are, I forget the number, three quarters TSMC.”
Evans: Leading-edge chip fab capex will climb from $20B to $40B
“Which is why Intel had this, you know, this capital project to build new chip capability in the US, and it was twenty billion dollars. And that's just this generation. And there's going to be 40, it's going to be forty billion dollars next year. And the number…”
Evans: China regulates algorithmic feeds while US and EU lag far behind
“So like, you know, very, very detailed thing on how algorithmic content moderation should work, and how algorithmic content feeds should work, which the EU and the US have not anywhere close to having. Like, now here's a law on how the news feed should work.”
Evans: 0.5% of iPhone users generate half of App Store spending
“Second observation is we know from the disclosures in the Epic trial that about 80% so Apple did fifteen billion dollars. Apple gives a number. They did fifteen billion dollars in App Store commission. 65, sixty-five billion dollars, I think, of total money sp…”
Evans: 0.5% of App Store Accounts Generated 54% of Billings in 2016
“Not .5% of accounts spent over 450 dollars in the quarter. Not sure if this is quarter or month, I have to go and check. Same point, really. And those users were 54% of total App Store billings.”
Li: Chinese platform fines targeted exclusive vendor lock-in agreements
“So if you're a supplier to Alibaba, you can't go on Pinduoduo or JD. They would sometimes make you sign an inclusive, exclusive agreement with them, which would be very, you know, anti-competitive in most parts of the world. But they've managed to sort of have…”
Evans: The claim that Facebook sells user data is factually untrue
“I think the phrase Facebook sells your data is fascinating here, not primarily because it's just factually untrue, but because it's sort of an attempt to come up with a clearer way of describing what somebody thinks the problem is.”
Evans: US advertising as a share of GDP dropped 33% since 2000
“The chart that I've done of long-term US advertising since 1950, I did as a share of GDP, mainly as a way to adjust for inflation. But the interesting thing that it shows, it suggests, is that US advertising as a share of GDP has gone down by about a third sin…”
Evans: US text bot hype was fueled by false WeChat narratives
“And there was a moment three and four years ago when everyone in America was very excited about bots, text bots, and there was this whole narrative, well, that's how WeChat works, and WeChat's got hundreds of millions of users, so this must be a thing. It turn…”
Evans: Ben Thompson is wrong, email open rates depend on algorithms
“I love Ben Thompson, but he keeps saying there's no algorithm in email, like, Ben, have you looked at your open rates? Because I've looked at mine, and yeah, there is a fucking algorithm.”
Evans: FTC seeks contradictory consent decrees on Facebook data APIs
“Today's FTC is demanding a consent decree that says Facebook has to open up Data APIs. And two years ago, they got another consent decree that said Facebook has to close down its data APIs.”
Evans: Covid pandemic compressed five years of e-commerce growth into two quarters
“We've had, you know, three, four, five years worth of growth happen in like two quarters.”
Cowan-Brown: There is no global definition of hate speech
“I mean, when I used to work at nation builder, we had also such a hard time of defining. And again, it's a little bit different there because it's not a platform that amplifies I'll come back to that in a second, but it's not a platform. You don't go there to …”
Evans: Typical large companies run 400 to 500 SaaS applications
“The typical big company today has four to 500 SaaS apps, and many of those are bought bottom up.”
Evans: Accountant jobs grew every decade last century despite successive automation
“So the number of accountants basically went up every decade in the 20th century, even as we've had successive waves of automation going through accounting because the job changed when you automated it.”
Evans: Uber's TAM Was Far Bigger Than the Taxi Market
“There was a valuation professor who notoriously did an analysis of Uber kind of 10 years ago, where he said, you know, the valuation of Uber should be based on the fact that its TAM is the size of the taxi market, and this is, I'm going to work out the size of…”
Evans: Sora usage dropped off the charts as the novelty faded
“Of course, it might also be Sora which is obviously an open AI attempt to solve this, or now Sora has now dropped off the charts as the novelty wore off.”
Evans: Shopify CEO mandated employees report their AI usage
“I remember a while ago, the CEO of Shopify said, you know, it was like an HR requirement that everyone had to report how much AI they were using.”
Evans: Big Tech funds AI capex out of cash flow, unlike OpenAI
“Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta are funding it out of cash flow, Meta less so than the others, whereas OpenAI has to do these innovative funding structures because it has no cash flow, and Oracle is basically going to borrow a hundred percent of revenue to…”
Evans: Online dating now accounts for around 60% of new relationships
“And today, dating, online dating is now like, 60% of new relationships.”
Evans: Perplexity gets buzz but struggles to crack App Store top 100
“Perplexity gets all this buzz and struggles to break into the top hundred on the App Store.”
Evans: Cloud computing accounts for only 30% of enterprise workflows
“All these kind of basic procurement, IT procurement questions, which are why IT, why cloud is still only sort of 30% of enterprise workflows.”
Catton-Brown: Formula 1 audience averages age 32 and 41% female
“Most big sports would absolutely love to have everyone's audience right now, which is 41% female, 32 years of age, which I think when you look at the NBA or the NFL, we're talking fifty-year. Years of age on average or 45 years of age on average, and it's a ma…”
Evans: 33% to 50% tried ChatGPT, but daily active users are 1% to 5%
“And the top line is basically that in a bunch of developed world countries, something between a third to a half of people have already tried ChatGPT.
And so that's a very glass half full kind of statement.
On the other hand, the number of people you've turned …”
Evans: ChatGPT traffic dropped over summer 2023 because students went on break
“This is the reason why ChatGPT traffic fell off last summer, because all the kids went home from school.”
Evans: Spotify is twice as large as Apple Music in the EU
“Spotify, of course, is still twice as big as Apple Music or anything else in the EU, so they've done just fine despite this rule.”
Evans: US TikTok Bill Structures Ban Around Foreign Adversary Powers
“And so this, the kind of the rule, this, you know, the latest piece of proposed legislation is that the, you know, the president would be able to designate specific
Social media apps as national security risks
and require them not to be controlled by a foreign…”
Brown: Biden Administration Enlisted 70 Creators For the State of the Union
“Just ahead of the State of the Union, they went out and found 70 creators, I think about half of them, TikTokers, to sort of spread awareness about the State of the Union and spread the message of Biden”
Evans: TikTok Displayed In-App Prompts Urging Americans to Call Congress
“TikTok put up a banner every time when any American opened the app this week that said call your congressman.”
Brown: TikTok Has Stricter Political Ad Rules Than Meta
“And they also have the strictest policy when it comes to political advertising, much more stricter than Meta”
Brown: Stable Diffusion generated 7% female doctors, compared to 39% in reality
“And with the doctors one, the reality was that 39% of doctors in America are women, but in the stable diffusion results, it was only seven percent.”
Evans: Google, AWS, and Microsoft Cloud Capex Will Near $100B in 2023
“Google AWS, Microsoft probably spent, will probably spend a hundred billion dollars on cloud capex this year.”
Evans: Most Excel spreadsheets are just tables without formulas
“Old observation that most spreadsheets don't have any formula. Most people use Excel to make tables, not to make, not for financial calculations.”
Evans: Most Excel spreadsheets do not contain formulas
“Actually most Excel spreadsheets don't have formulas. Most Excel spreadsheets are actually tables or they're schedules or they're lists. They're not actually spreadsheets.”
Evans: Dating apps will integrate LLMs for flirty message generation
“The next thing will be dating apps, like why all the dating apps don't have an LLM for like, write me something quirky and slightly flirtatious based on this profile. Go. Clearly that's like the next use case.”
Evans gets more likes on Threads with 12K followers than Twitter
“And, but the point is like, I've got like almost 400,000 followers. And I think I've got like 10 or 12,000 followers on, on threads. I get more likes on threads than I do.”
Benedict Evans: AI model training costs will drop as efficiency improves
“And those are all, those points on that plot, all of like historically have gone up and to the right, but now they're going to start going down because the models get more efficient and people work out better ways of training them when you optimize all the ind…”
Evans: BuzzFeed News never made any money
“BuzzFeed News did a lot of great stuff.
They won Pulitzer Prizes.
People like to sort of sneer at it.
It was a great journalism organization.
it never made any money.”
Evans: News is a low single-digit share of social platform posts
“And for them, news is a very small and peripheral thing.
You know, it's whatever it is.
It's low single digit shares, even all the posts that have links, nevermind all the posts that don't have links.”
Evans: UMG is demanding streaming platforms block AI training on music catalogs
“UMG are saying to streaming music platforms, you can't, you have to stop people straining or training on the library. You can't Let someone train a music generation AI on the Spotify corpus.”
Evans: Google did not invent search advertising
“Search advertising wasn't invented by Google, it was invented by somebody else, and they presented, I think it was at a TED talk, and everyone started booing, and they thought this was evil, like, you're corrupting search results. You're letting pay to people …”
Evans: If Apple launches a $3,000 headset, it will sell negligible volume
“And if it is 3000 dollars, well, they're not going to shift any volume of that this year, so it will remain, like, very early.”
Evans: No optical AR technology currently achieves workable outdoor depth and occlusion
“No one has actually got to a point where you have a good field of view, it has depth of field, it works in the outdoors, it can occlude bright objects.”
Evans: Stable Diffusion occasionally reproduces Getty Images watermarks
“There was a thing in stable diffusion where every now and then you'd see like something that like a Getty image is watermark appear on the image.”
Cairn-Brown: Works lacking human creative input are not copyrightable
“Without the human creative input, that work isn't entitled to copyright protection.”
Evans: Running image generation models locally on phones is months or years away
“You know, we're going, quickly going to go to a model in which you can run stable diffusion on the journey yourself on your computer or on your phone. That's like months or years away. It's not decades away. That's close.”