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 1,444 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
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: 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: 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.…”
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…”
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.”
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: 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…”
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.”
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 …”
Kevins: Google is the new Microsoft and Salesforce is the new Oracle
“Google has become the new Microsoft. I think that's pretty obvious to everyone. Google is the new Microsoft. And Salesforce is the new Oracle.”
Evans: ARM architecture has overtaken Intel's x86 architecture
“Arm began a sort of low power chip architecture for very small devices and PDAs and so on, but it's grown to the point that it's now overtaken the x-ay six architecture that Intel are using.”
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: 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: 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…”
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: Amazon fails at discovery because shoppers must already know what they want
“The problem with Amazon is you have to know what you want before you go there. You can't go to Amazon and think, I want a book, or I want a lamp. You can't go to the search box and put lamps in, at least only if you want some like kind of pure commodity, but i…”
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…”
The bear case for VR is becoming a 150-million-user console subset
“The bear case for VR has been if you had seen a modern games console, 30 years ago, you would have said, oh my God, this is amazing. It's part of the future. Turns out that's one hundred and fifty million people. Which is a big business. It's great, but it's n…”
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: 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: Calling companies 'AI-enabled' resembles 'internet-enabled' branding in 1998
“Or the end of the day is saying that we're an AI-enabled XYZ, kind of like saying we're, you know, we're an internet-enabled law firm in, like, 1998.”
Evans: Incumbent industrial firms will not be displaced by AI-accounting startups
“Saint-Gobain is a big French gloss company. They're going to be destroyed by a new glass company that's using Claw to do its accounting. You know, it's a reductive absurd, but of course we'll do this absurd.”
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.”
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: Claims that prompt engineering is obsolete are 'bullshit'
“People say prompt engineering is gone. Bullshit. Like, the underlying challenge is, how do I work out how I would tell the model how I want to do this? And that's not, it's not like you have to say clever things to understand. Get the model to work in a differ…”
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…”
Evans: AI infrastructure is built behind demand, unlike dot-com fiber
“The narrow problem with that, of course, is that that was built out ahead of demand, whereas this is being built out behind demand.”
Evans: Telco stocks were flat for 20 years while apps captured value
“Giant industry, trillion dollars of revenue, two hundred billion dollars a year of CapEx stocks have gone nowhere in 20 years, and all the value is built by other people.”
Evans: Google Search Network Effects Will Defeat Microsoft's Spending
“Google search has network effects, so Microsoft can spend, doesn't matter how much money Microsoft spends, so Google search is still better.”
Evans: AI code generation found PMF, driving 10x compute surge
“Writing software with AI really in the last six months has suddenly found product market fit. And suddenly everyone is You know, using 10 times more capacity, more compute than they thought they were going to use at the beginning of the year. And the tech indu…”
Evans: Anthropic and OpenAI job exposure scores are self-deception
“Because Anthropic does this thing, and OpenAI have done these things based on sort of US census data where they try and put like a numeric score job by job of exposure to AI. Which seems to me just absolutely ludicrous as an exercise in sort of self-deception …”