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 22 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
Ball: Quantum Computing Will Be Solved Within Our Lifetime
“The field of quantum computing is one of those other areas where we think in terms of fantastical ideas, this is a Jetsons thing, it's not a human thing, but there's increasing consensus that that technological problem will solve within our lifetime, in which …”
Ball: Build Compelling Social Products First, Not Consumer Computing Platforms
“We have this ongoing lesson that trying to build the next big platform in computing, especially on the consumer side, less so on the enterprise side, you shouldn't seek to do it.
And by that, I mean, there's this classic example of we've always known that a qu…”
Ball: Metaverse will exacerbate existing internet harms like disinformation and platform power
“I think we can fairly look at the state of the internet today and identify many problems, mis and disinformation, radicalization, toxicity, harassment, abuse. Data rights, data security, data literacy, platform power, platform regulation. And we can understand…”
Ball: Virtual world developers should pioneer 3D tools, not reinvent governance
“The enormity of what we want to build requires extraordinary trust in the system, extraordinary investment, and we actually have these frameworks we need not reinvent. We can iterate on, but even there, we should pioneer on the three D tools, not the societal …”
Ball: Web3 will supplement the future, not replace TCP/IP
“I'm not one of the revisionists that believes that we're going to strip out TCP IP and replace it with web three. But I do believe and am quite optimistic that parts of our future are going to be supplemented by these technologies. But I do think it's still a …”
Ball: Humanity Will Reach Mars Before Building a True Metaverse
“I think to not cheat your answer, I think we'll hit Mars first, and I certainly hope that's the case.”
Ball: Dystopian Sci-Fi Negatively Colors Public Perceptions of the Metaverse
“Does it have a negative effect? Absolutely. And certainly if you are suffering from some form of confirmation bias, it reiterates that confirmation or that bias.”
Ball: Real Virtual Worlds Foster Creation and Collaboration
“Second Life, the text-based worlds of the sixties and seventies, Roblox, Fortnite, they are not designed on subjugation. But self-expression, collaboration, creation.”
Ball: Network effects economically justify accessibility hardware without direct product ROI
“And if you believe in network effects, one of the most potent discoveries of the digital era, you believe actually we may not have a direct business case for producing and distributing this device relative to what they can pay us and what we can charge for it.…”
Ball Defines Metaverse as Massively Scaled, Synchronous 3D Virtual Network
“I mean this because I'm going to describe the metaverse, not define it. And that is a massively scaled and interoperable network of three D rendered real time virtual worlds, which can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited n…”
Ball: Fortnite's Travis Scott Concert Ran Across 250,000 Separate Simulations
“There were over 250,000 simultaneous simulations of that concert, none of which were precisely in synchronization. I mean, some of them probably were, but think of them as being 20, 50, 80 milliseconds separated, a minute separated. And each of those simulatio…”
Ball: Current Tech Cannot Support 200 People in Rich Virtual Worlds
“And that's because we don't have the technology required for even 200 people really to be in what we call a richly rendered virtual environment.”
Ball: Persistent Metaverse Requires a 1,000x Increase in Computing Power
“In strict technical terms, the general consensus advocated by folks at Intel and Meta is a thousand factor increase in computing power. We are up about a hundred since 2000. So we need a thousand on top of that.”
Ball: 2014-2016 GPU advances enabled high-concurrency battle royale games
“It was really around 2014 to 20 16 that we had graphical processing units, GPUs, that were powerful enough and widely deployed enough into standard consumer hardware to support what we call high concurrency games. That's large numbers of people in the same sha…”
Ball: Top Five Battle Royales Dwarf Traditional Gaming Audience Size
“The entire traditional gaming industry has about 250 to three hundred million people in it. And yet the top five battle royales were reaching several hundred million people per day, many of whom had never participated.”
Ball: Best Technical Founders Are Frustrated Corporate Veterans
“My favorite entrepreneur are those who have spent a decade trying to solve these problems with a lot of backing, but a company that was never going to see it through because they come away with it.
Firstly, having basically financed one of the world's rarest e…”
Ball: 75% of Children Aged 9 to 12 Regularly Use Roblox
“Three-quarters of those between nine and 12 use Roblox regularly.”
Ball: US Military Built Top-25 Supercomputer Using 1,700 Networked PlayStation 3s
“Late last decade,
The 25th most powerful computer owned by the US military was 1700 PlayStation threes.
And by the way, they said that by using PlayStation threes interconnected de-shelled, they used 95% less energy to operate it and spent 10% of the alternati…”
Ball: Most Successful Essays Require Revisiting After a Year
“I've always found that my most successful essays are by far those that I've taken a second pass at, usually a year, year and a half later.”