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 684 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
Gill: Chinese professors quit to make millions podcasting
“There's been, ah, basically professors that have quit their teaching positions to be full-time podcasters because they quite literally make millions of dollars podcasting.”
Fines: The Narrative That YC Lacks Women and Black People is False
“This misconception of there are no women at YC. There are no black people at YC. There's no, you know, there's all these things, and it's like when I'm working around with all these different people, it's like, it's definitely very diverse, and we're doing eve…”
Susskind: Classical computers can never simulate 100 entangled qubits
“Classical computers can never be built big enough to explore more than 400, more than actually more than Probably a hundred qubits. A hundred qubits doesn't seem like very much. No classical computer can do the calculation of following what a hundred qubits do…”
Hua: Proposed rules allow cannabis delivery into locally banned California cities
“And in that this iteration, there was a proposed reg on allowing delivery operators to deliver anywhere into the state, even in prohibited areas, which is in contention with the chiefs of police, the league of cities that California definitely prides itself on…”
Ning: Compliance forced dispensaries to video-record destroying millions in cannabis
“Well, because for compliance, you have to record yourself disposing of the product, whether you burn it or smash it or whatever. There's videos of dispensaries just like as evidence, just like damaging all their products and just basically having this huge dem…”
Zeevi: Gut microbes metabolize red meat carnitine into atherosclerosis-causing TMAO
“They looked at carnitine, which is a compound that is found in red meat. This carnitine is metabolized by the microbiome to form TMA. It's a compound. TMA is then oxidized in the liver to form TMAO, and TMAO causes a reduce in reverse cholesterol transport and…”
Zeevi: Mice receiving obese twin microbiomes become obese on identical diets
“They took pairs of twins that were discordant for obesity. One twin obese and one twin was... And they transplanted their microbiome into germ-free mice. Germ-free mice are mice that are born and raised in sterile conditions, and they don't have a gut microbio…”
Zeevi: Obesity surged exactly when federal guidelines pushed carbs over dietary fat
“And if you look at their stats, you can see that people did consume more carbs and less fat. And just when they started consuming more carbs and less fat, did this epidemic of obesity and diabetes begin?”
Zeevi: Algorithmically personalized diets successfully normalized blood glucose peaks in clinical trials
“In the bad week, we saw huge glucose peaks for most people. Some that if you were a physician, you would look at and you would say this person is a pre-diabetic, and these peaks completely normalized during the good week. And for some people, the difference be…”
Aaronson: Differential privacy and quantum shadow tomography share a mathematical connection
“There's a, you know, precise mathematical connection between these two problems. You can prove it. You know, it goes in both directions, and then we were actually able to use it to, you know, take work that's been done in differential privacy by people who don…”
Aaronson: Holographic bulk-boundary mapping is a quantum error-correcting code
“The mapping between the bulk theory and the boundary theory in recent years, people realize that it is literally an example of one of these quantum error correcting codes that I talked, told you about before.”
Benjamin: 50-qubit supremacy devices will launch within a year but lack practical utility
“On the other hand, what we believe is about to happen in the coming year is that people will start to bring out qubits, ah, sorry quantum devices that are at or just a little bit over the quantum supremacy threshold. This number, a lot of people are racing to …”
Benjamin: Quantum hardware will soon reach behaviors impossible to classically simulate
“We are now getting on the verge of getting machines that will behave in ways that cannot be predicted, cannot be simulated. We'll be in the regime where we're genuinely discovering how the machine behaves by having one.”
Preskill: 50-to-100 qubit quantum computers will arrive in a couple years
“We think in a couple of years we'll have devices with about 50 qubits to a hundred, and we'll be able to control them pretty well, and that's an interesting range, because even though it's only 50 to a hundred qubits, doesn't sound like that big a deal, but th…”
Preskill: Quantum computers will enable tabletop toy spacetime in decades
“And in particular, what we're going to be doing with quantum computers and, you know, the other quantum technologies that are Becoming increasingly sophisticated in the next couple of decades is we'll be able to control very well, highly entangled, complex qua…”
Medical AI models trained on one scanner brand fail on others
“Also the type of scanner you're using, are you using a G or a Siemens or Toshiba or whatever they have different settings, And they have different ways of going from the measurements to an image. And so, you know, if you train an algorithm, for instance, a neu…”
Brundage: AI will achieve superhuman performance in StarCraft within three years
“Yeah, I think there will be Superhuman, Starcraft and Dota too, probably in that time horizon. I said in, I think early 2017 that it would be the end of, that I gave like 50% chance by the end of 2018. So this gives me more runway. I'll say, yeah, like, 70% co…”
Watts: David Nutt was fired after stating MDMA is safer than horseriding
“He was, he worked for the government he was the drug czar, so he informed them or advised them about the scientific harms of different drugs and how they should be scheduled or, you know, where they should be in the schedule of illegal drugs, and he was sacked…”
Watts: Psilocybin deactivates brain regions driving negative rumination loops
“And the key finding was that psilocybin seems to deactivate the part of your mind or brain that is responsible for ruminating, for negative thinking on a loop.”
Watts: Depression returned after three months without active post-psychedelic integration
“If you just give someone a psychedelic and you don't encourage them to make the most of the window of opportunity, then what we found with our participants is that the depression came back after three months or so.”
Watts: Psilocybin trial left 6 of 20 patients depression-free at six months
“So six of them, they were still well after six months. Three of them, it didn't work. And then for 11 of them, and this is, ah, yes, the majority of them, they were really well for three months, depression-free or very mild symptoms of depression. But then aft…”
Watts: Psilocybin study participants made major job and relationship changes
“And in our sample of 20 people, people did make changes, new jobs, did things I'd been frightened of for a long time, changed relationships. People did make big life changes”
OpenAI Dota bot learned baiting behavior without explicit reward incentives
“It was like one of the major examples, one of the major examples of the things that we kind of didn't have explicit incentive for, and yet the bot actually learned them.”
Iorns: Specific circulating factors driving young blood rejuvenation remain unreproduced
“What hasn't been very successful is trying to figure out what causes the effect. So when people have tried to analyze the blood of young mice and old mice and say, what is the growth factor or the hormone or what is it that's causing this? There's been controv…”
McCarthy: Facebook 2014 Study Proved News Feed Content Influences User Moods
“Facebook is like, did this study about mood manipulation where they were showing people either positive or more negative content, and then showing that this would cause the person themselves to make more positive or negative posts with the conclusion that they…”
Eck: Untrained listeners rated Magenta compositions as more Bach-like than Bach
“When we put these tunes out for, like, untrained listeners to listen to, they sometimes voted them as sounding more Bach-y”
Eck: As of 2017, AI cannot generate a single coherent text paragraph
“So, so everybody understands that's listening or watching, you know, we can, we can't generate a coherent paragraph, right? So, I don't mean we, magenta. I mean, kind of we, humanity.”
Baker: Uber used a WeChat bot to onboard Chinese drivers until blocked
“One of the engineers on our China growth team built a WeChat bot. WeChat's, you know, like a mess, the messaging app, or the Facebook of, sorry, the Facebook, and also the Internet of China, really. And so we built this WeChat bot, Where, as a driver, you coul…”
Hwang: GDPR introduces a potential right to explanation for automated decisions
“So, one of the most interesting aspects of the GDPR, which is a new privacy regulation in Europe, is the potential for this, what they call kind of a right to explanation. So the idea is, for certain kinds of automated decision making, it might be so significa…”
Zaremba: ImageNet error dropped to 3%, achieving superhuman vision performance
“Within several years, people got down, I believe, to three percent error, and that's essentially superhuman performance.”
Altman: All top 20 most valuable YC companies have co-founders
“That for the top 20 most valuable YC companies all of them have at least two founders.”
Musk in 2016: OpenAI is structured as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit
“OpenAI is structured as see a five one C three nonprofit but, you know, many nonprofits do not have a sense of urgency.”
Jeff Dean: Google built a neural simulator 300,000x faster than full DFT
“Take a bunch of output from those simulation runs, the input molecule configurations and the outputs of that. The extensive simulator and then use it to train a neural approximation to the simulator. So this is now a validation device, but instead of it taking…”
Chaubard: Inference stacks split between Nvidia for pre-fill and Cerebras for decode
“We already do see it a little bit on where a lot of the stack peep for inference. People will go to Nvidia for pre-fill and then they'll go to cerebris for decode engine.”
Stuart: GPU networking can consume up to 50% of LLaMA pre-fill runtime
“For example, networking can still consume up to 50% of total runtime for workloads like Lama's MDB pre-fill.”
Stuart: Single NVLink domains will soon scale to hundreds of GPUs
“And you also have a scale of architectures like NBL-L-Seventy-Two, which packs 72 GPUs inside a single NVLink domain, and soon this is going to extend to hundreds of GPUs.”
Stuart: Cursor uses ParallelKittens on tens of thousands of Blackwell GPUs
“For example, Cursor is using it to train Composer on tens of thousands of Blackwell GPUs.”
Scholl: Lockheed Takes Over Two Years to Build a Patriot Interceptor
“It now takes Lockheed more than two years to build a new Patriot missile interceptor.”
Scholl: US never progressed past supersonic airliner mock-ups before Boom
“Prior to boom, the closest the America ever got to a supersonic airliner was a mock-up.”
Scholl: Boom's XB-1 is the first independently developed supersonic jet
“Last year, XB-One became the first independently developed jet to break the sound barrier, more than a decade after founding the company.”
Scholl: Supersonic flight legalization passed the US House unanimously
“After the executive order, a bill dropped in the House and the Senate to make the supersonic legalization permanent. It passed the House Unanimously. And just last week, it got out of the Senate Commerce Committee again with a unanimous vote.”
Scholl: Boom conducted the first supersonic Starlink livestream
“This was the first supersonic installation of Starlink, the first supersonic air-to-air livestream”
Ries: Anthropic created a perpetual purpose trust at Series C
“I think it was a series C when they finally established this thing called the long-term benefit trust, which is not a nonprofit foundation. It's actually what's called a perpetual purpose trust, which is a different legal category, but the same idea outside tr…”
Chauvard: Chain of thought makes LLMs Turing complete at test time
“And so it's completely true that at test time, they are turn complete. And you can simulate all turn computable functions at test time.”
Chaubard: Recursive models tested on one step retain nearly full performance
“If you actually train on 16, and you test on only one, you get, like, seven eighths of the performance, or, like, almost all the performance. So it's actually quite interesting that this is just overdone, too much compute, and it doesn't actually help you all …”
Chaubard: MLP outperformed attention on Sudoku but scored zero on mazes
“Yeah, on Sudoku, MLP actually outperformed the attention, It was it scored zero on the maze, ah, the MLP scored zero on the maze, and so there's, it's not clear, it's not obvious that, ah, the transformer is always better.”
Gupta: Current TRMs and HRMs are task-specific, not general-purpose
“One of the things that's really interesting about these TRMs and HRMs is they're not general purpose models, right? These were Task specific models, right? The model trained to do Sudoku cannot do ArcPrize inherently. It has to be trained on the ArcPrize set t…”