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 441 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
Li: Chinese internet and mobile user growth has plateaued
“They've realized that internet penetration and mobile penetration has slowed down massively in the last few years, so they're kind of dealing with the fact of, oh, the market that, that's been growing for the past few years because of new users, that's coming …”
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: Epic discovered sideloading is a geek activity, unviable for mainstream consumers
“Sideloading is a geek. Activity. So that doesn't, if you're worried, if you actually want to reach consumers, side loading isn't an option. This is what Epic discovered.”
Evans: Apple's market share legally constrains its freedom to impose platform rules
“On any of these sorts of legal tests, Apple has sufficiently large market share that they are no longer completely free to do whatever they want. And you can think that that shouldn't be the case, but that is the case. You know, that's, that is where the law i…”
Evans: Game streaming is the first major consumer product Apple has blocked
“Now we have this very specific set of things around streaming games, but now you actually have like a, for the first time, like a real big tangible product that people would like to buy that Apple's blocking”
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…”
Cowan-Brown: UK Has More CCTV Cameras Than Rest of Europe Combined
“The UK, the utter refusal of having ID cards and yet it's the country with the most CCTV cameras by far, I think you, if you put together all of the CCTV cameras of everyone else in Europe, the UK still has more.”
Evans: The Great Depression Happened Due to Unregulated Money
“And so we regulate money in ways that we didn't in the twenties and thirties, which is why we had a great depression because we didn't regulate money.”
Evans: Top Substack writers built their audiences in journalism decades ago
“Look at all the people on the leaderboard on Substack. You know, they're all well-established big brand, big names. Yeah, all white men, which is basically because they all entered journalism 30 years ago. So they're all people who have a pre-existing audience…”
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.”
Virtual Reality Has Found No Consumer Use Cases Outside Gaming
“VR seems to be stuck as a subset of the games industry. And no one has managed to do anything on VR that anyone actually uses that isn't a game other than kind of niche, like medical and industrial applications.”
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.”
Kevins: Outside Silicon Valley, everyone uses Microsoft Office
“Outside Silicon Valley, everybody uses Office, and actually a lot of people use those features, or everyone uses some of those features.”
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.”
Evans: Only 50 to 100 million global workers need heavy PC software
“There's probably 50 to a hundred million people whose actual job is doing that kind of thing. And everybody else have a PC to run email and SAP.”
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 …”
Apple has likely kept VR headset prototypes in labs for years
“And you know, you can be completely certain that Apple has a VR headset in the lab. They've had a VR headset in the lab for five years, maybe 10 years, and they make it, because of course they do.”
Evans: UK is two to three years ahead of US in tech adoption
“The UK is probably two or three years ahead of the USA on average in adoption of technology in things like adoption of smartphones, adoption of social media, particular adoption of e-commerce. Now that's the USA as an, it may not be ahead of California, but it…”
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: Agentic Coding Has Driven Token Demand Up Multiple Orders of Magnitude
“And as hopefully everyone listening to this will understand, like in the last six months or so, the sudden product market fit of agentic coding means that demand for tokens has gone up by many orders of magnitude, and the model labs have been sort of scramblin…”
Evans: Non-coding generative AI apps show stagnating daily active user ratios
“You see sort of something like 10 to 15% of people are daily active users, and 40, 50, 60% of people are weekly or monthly active users, and those numbers that are getting further away, not closing. So more and more people are trying this and finding it useful…”
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: Average corporate audit costs have remained flat since 2003
“What I was wondering is, is there data on what the average company pays for an audit? And it turns out it is, there is, and it hasn't changed since about 2003.”
Evans: Half of Grok's founders left within two months
“We saw like half of Grok's founders have just left in the last month or two for a whole bunch of different reasons.”
Evans: Big Four tech capex will jump from $400B to $650B
“The big four companies, platform companies, spent four hundred billion dollars on capex last year. This year, they've said they'll spend 650, more or less. Microsoft hasn't been given full year guidance. But Meta and Google and Amazon have more or less doubled…”
Evans: Cloud accounts for only a third of enterprise workflows
“It's still only sort of a third of enterprise workflows. So it takes a long time to re-platform.”
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: Streaming Services Cut Content Budgets by 10% to 20% Recently
“What's happened in the last two years is streaming companies having ramped up spending on, on TV by something like 10 or 20 times in the last decade, Have pulled back by kind of something like 20 or so to 10, 20% in the last year or two, as they decided they'd…”
Evans: 90% of Y Combinator startups build enterprise SaaS AI
“Look at Y Combinator, 90% of the startups are basically doing AI as enterprise SaaS.”
Evans: Only 2% to 4% of developed-world consumers use generative AI daily
“Every consumer has tried this, but well, a very large portion of consumers, something like a third to a half of all consumers in the developed world have now tried this, but only like two, three, four percent of people are using it every day.”
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: Only 2% to 3% of Americans trust ChatGPT output
“So a third of people haven't heard of it and two or three percent would trust what it says.”
Evans: Generative AI had four primary use cases in 2023
“It seems to me that there were sort of four use cases. Use case one is coding. Secondly, brainstorming and suggesting ideas. Thirdly, and this is more like a corporate thing, knowledge management pointed at an internal corpus of thousands of documents or PDFs …”
Brown: Generative AI Cuts Movie Trailer Production to Weeks
“One of my good friends is a filmmaker, and AI has completely shifted the way that she can create, for example, the trailer. It used to, you know, you'd used to need, what, a million in budget and a couple of months to create a good trailer for a movie? She can…”
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”