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
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: 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.”
Brody: US high school senior dating rates fell 50% in 15 years
“In, in some of the math, you know, so the number of high school seniors in the United States who date has decreased by 50% over the last 15 years.”
Brody: Proprietary smart shower data proves the EPA's shower estimates are wrong
“Like, the EPA has been telling Americans that The shower, average shower length in the United States is eight minutes. We know that's not true anymore. Like, we actually know what the number is.”
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 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.”
Evans: Europe punches far below its weight in tech users and revenue
“Europe punches way below its weight in user base and revenue and ad revenue and e-commerce, way below the kind of base, proportionate, and it always, out of the 20 years, it's always been, you know, the same.”
Evans: Fitness is the only non-gaming use case working for Oculus
“The one thing they didn't talk about is fitness, which is interesting because VR fitness is the one thing that's other than games sort of work for Oculus.”
Benedict Evans: Veteran AI researchers disagree on whether LLMs lead to AGI
“All the people who've actually been working on this for 20 years don't agree. And most of them say we don't know.”
Benedict Evans: LLMs currently generate one completely wrong paragraph out of four
“The second question is right now, if you ask this a question and the result is three or four paragraphs, one of those paragraphs will be completely wrong.”
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: Gaming consoles capped at around 200 million active devices globally
“There's only, as it might be, two hundred million games consoles on earth, which is not nothing, but it's not smartphones. It never became a universal experience.”
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: Apple's iOS sandboxing makes it impossible for TikTok to read emails.
“TikTok can't read your email. Like on iOS, it cannot. It just can't. A third party app cannot see your email. It's sitting in a sandbox.”
Goldberg: China spent $100B to $200B on semiconductor subsidies over ten years
“And they have spent a hundred billion dollars, two hundred billion dollars over the last 10 years subsidizing the growth of their semiconductor industry.”
Goldberg: China has roughly 2,000 fabless chip design companies
“There are probably 2000 legitimate fabless design chip companies in China today.”
Goldberg: 90% of annual chip volume uses trailing-edge 80nm+ processes
“The number of chips produced every year, or the wafers produced every year, 90% of them are what we would call trailing edge processes, you know, 80 nanometer and up.”
Evans: Amazon accounts for 40% of US e-commerce, 5% of retail
“It's got sort of 40% of U.S. E-commerce, which is about five percent of U.S. Retail and yet has low prices and it uses market power such as it has to push prices down rather than push prices up.”
Evans: EU and UK competition law always looked beyond consumer prices
“Which, frankly, the rest of the world has always thought like that. It was in kind of the US that got narrowly focused on price in the EU and the UK have always kind of looked at the broader kind of context of what outcomes we want.”
Evans: 20M VR headsets sold, only 5M-10M active users
“There's like 5,000,010 million people actually using a device, so it's twenty million people, they've sold twenty million headsets, there's five or ten million people using them.”
Evans: Satya Nadella previously called Xbox non-core and non-strategic
“And there was a moment like five or six years ago when Satya Nadella was saying that Xbox was sort of non-core and non-strategic.”
Evans: 3,000 to 3,500 tech companies are founded in the US each year
“The US tech industry in total, there's like three, maybe three and a half thousand companies founded every year.”
Evans: Amazon ad revenue makes it a top-four global media owner
“And they did, I think, thirty one billion dollars last year, and they've done like 36, thirty seven billion dollars in the last 12 months which gets them to being like a top three, top four media owner. Globally. It's like Alphabet, Meta, ByteDance and then I …”
Sequoia Invested $150M in FTX Without a Board Seat
“Silicon Valley people kind of raise an eyebrow that Sequoia put a hundred and fifty million into this thing without taking a board seat, although those same Silicon Valley people would probably have done the same if they could have got into it, and they were n…”
Evans: Gaming Console Install Base Is Only 175M to 200M Units
“You know, the install base of a games console is sort of 20 or 30 minutes, is, is, is like a hundred and seventy-five million units, maybe two hundred million units, if you include Nintendo.”
Evans: Google Docs never displaced Office for analysts and lawyers
“Google Docs never unseated office or word for financial analysts or lawyers who actually needed those very, very specific sets of features.”
Evans: DTC neobanks see greater adoption in the UK than US
“DTC banking has happened a lot more in the UK than in the US, for example so-called neobanks.”
Evans: a16z invested $300M-$400M in Adam Neumann, its largest check ever
“And Andreessen Horowitz has given him, I think, the largest check they've ever written at a So three or four hundred million dollars to back this.”
Evans: No one at WeWork was charged or convicted of wrongdoing
“There's a whole bunch of argument about how the company was run, how what the ethics were, what's known as a whole bunch of accusations. Nobody's actually been convicted or even charged with anything.”
Evans: Specialized vertical software on iPads captured restaurants, not Big Tech
“That didn't get eaten by Google, or Amazon, or Apple. It's a generic iPad in a case, and then there's However many software companies, a bunch of software companies that go and solve, this is what restaurants need.”
Evans: Amazon holds 40% of e-commerce but tiny share of US retail
“It's got 40% of e-commerce and like a tiny percentage of US retail, but it has this large market share.”
Evans: Google pays roughly $15B for default search in Safari and Mozilla
“And so Google is paying something like fifteen billion dollars to be the default search engine in Mozilla and Safari and whatever else is out there, basically Mozilla and Safari.”
Evans: Meta has sold roughly 15 million VR headsets
“Facebook probably sold fifteen million. So there's maybe ten million people using one.”
Evans: Amazon spends ~$10 billion on TV content to retain Prime subscribers
“Amazon has probably a ten billion dollar budget for buying TV shows, which exists as a way to get people to keep their prime subscription and to retain the prime.”
Evans: US banking regulation makes launching challenger banks harder than in UK
“The US regulation makes it much harder to do a new bank than the UK does.”
Evans: Amazon ad revenue hit $31 billion, matching YouTube's scale
“And so Amazon did thirty-one billion dollars of advertising last year, which makes it roughly the same size as YouTube.”
Evans: $31B in Amazon ad spend mostly comes from trade marketing
“Where is the money coming from to buy that thirty one billion dollars of advertising on Amazon? Well, it's mostly coming from trade marketing. It's not coming from TV ads.”
Evans: Shein is the biggest US fast-fashion brand without physical stores
“Obviously, Shein at the Extreme doesn't have any stores, and it's the biggest fast fashion brand in the USA.”
Evans: Shein adds more SKUs every day than Zara carries in total
“Whereas Sheehan added something over 50,000 in the last seven days alone. And they add sort of seven, 8000 every single day. So they add more every day than Zara has in total.”
Evans: YouTube historically relied on watch data rather than video understanding
“Until very recently, or, you know, maybe now, YouTube doesn't know what's in the videos. They have no idea what's in the videos. They know who watched them.”
WPP launches Every Mile to compete directly against Shopify
“WPP, which is one of the world's biggest advertising networks, has just launched basically a managed Shopify competitor. Which they call Every Mile, and which has a bunch of people with tech industry backgrounds involved.”