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
Half of all global air cargo moves on passenger planes
“50% of all the air cargo in the world is actually moved on passenger planes in the belly of the passenger plane.”
Petersen: Academic research ranked freight forwarding as most susceptible to automation
“There's a great paper that I read about industries that are most susceptible to automation. And freight forwarding was the number one on the list. It was like, 99% of the work should be, that would be better done by software in this, like, academic paper.”
Levy: Founders not paying themselves violates labor law but goes unenforced
“Strictly speaking, it's against the law not to pay yourselves although obviously this isn't a thing that That gets enforced.”
Zeevi: Adding butter to bread lowers blood glucose spikes for most people
“Actually, fewer people had a high response to bread and butter than to bread alone.”
Zeevi: Carbohydrate counting is a surprisingly poor predictor of glucose responses
“If you take the correlation between the carbs and the meal and the postpranding glucose response of the meal, you get a correlation and R of .38, which is not a very good correlation.”
Zeevi: Machine learning predicts blood glucose responses better than carb counting
“Overall we had the 137 features after feature selection on 40 something thousand meals, and we ran this prediction, and this prediction got us to an R of .68 compared to the previous .38, and this R of .68 is pretty close to the to the .7 that we get when we l…”
Zeevi: Tripling bread intake did not significantly change gut microbiomes
“Usual bread consumption over this cohort of the big cohort that we did and over this 20 people cohort was about 10% of daily calories came from bread. In this study, we upped Their dose to over 25, 30% of their calories. And despite this change, this significa…”
Zeevi: Travel shifts gut bacterial abundance, not presence or absence
“You get this distribution of bacteria in your gut. That even when you go someplace else, it changes in abundance, but it doesn't change in presence or absence, so it bumps us back when you get to a different place.”
Brillhart: All VR headsets are moving toward wireless volumetric movement
“All the headsets are going towards volumetric, like, you know, positionally wireless. So I imagine there being you know, a much a much more interactive, much more engaging, like you're not gonna sit there, you're gonna actually move around.”
Gil: Facebook used email scrapers and European name ads to acquire users
“So with Facebook, that was email scrapers, and it was, you know, they were literally running ads against people's names in Europe to try and acquire European users, for example.”
Gil: Google spent hundreds of millions yearly on Firefox and Adobe distribution
“And so examples where people were very aggressive about distribution with things like Google, where they were spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on things like Firefox, having Google prominently displayed on its homepage. They literally paid for, …”
João Batalha: arXiv grew linearly, not exponentially, despite huge impact
“If you look at the graph of submissions for Archive, it's completely almost linear. It's, there's no startup exponential, artistic growth. It's like, completely linear, but it's arguably one of the things that has had the most or that has impacted the making o…”
Aaronson: Snowden documents revealed NIST pseudorandom standard was NSA-backdoored
“In fact, you know, NIST did have a standard for pseudorandom bits, which we learned a few years ago because of the Snowden documents was backdoored. By most likely by the NSA, right?”
Aaronson: Set theory can only determine finitely many Busy Beaver values
“Axioms of set theory can only determine finitely many values of this function. Okay, so in some sense, beyond a certain point, you know, the standard rules of mathematics cannot even prove what are the values of this function.”
Benjamin: Quantum error-correction threshold is now around 99% fidelity
“So now the threshold is about 99%. If you've got 90, if things work correctly in your quantum computer, 99% of the time, that's the turning point.”
Benjamin: Oxford quantum researchers achieve 99.9% gate fidelity
“But 99.9, which is what the guys here in Oxford can do, is 10 times better than the threshold.”
Benjamin: Kitaev surface code is the go-to quantum computer architecture
“Especially something called the Kataev surface code, which is, at the moment, the go-to solution for how we would build a quantum computer.”
Benjamin: Oxford Holds World Record for Ion Trap Quantum Control
“But the one that I mentioned that we have the world record for the best control, is this thing called an ion trap, which sounds very technical.”
Benjamin: Trapped-ion qubits achieve 50-second to 10-minute coherence times
“So for the superconducting qubits that many researchers are excited, and we do do work on that here in Oxford as well the decay time, the amount of time that can go by before the wonderful zero one superposition just degrades, is the tiniest fraction of a seco…”
Preskill: Nuclear-spin quantum sensors can exceed existing spatial resolution limits
“And again, using this technology of Nuclear spins, which I mentioned you can do it at room temperature, potentially. You can make a pretty good sensor, and it can potentially achieve higher sensitivity and spatial resolution. You look, look at things on shorte…”
Schönlieb: Deep neural networks outperform handcrafted methods in image denoising
“Image denoising nowadays, I think the best image denoising approaches are actually coming from deep neural networks. So, you know, these handcrafted methods get more and more beaten in terms of performance. By some of these neural network approaches.”
Mitchell: Saturated new development in New York City drives up rental concessions
“New York, In particular is very interesting because of the saturation of new development. Has forced a meaningful increase in the concessions that landlords have to offer in order to get their units leased.”
Xie: Crypto adoption will take off in unbanked and inflationary countries first
“I think it's gonna be in countries where people don't have bank accounts primarily, and they now need a method of actually storing their own funds or countries where the currency is just getting inflated away, and so the currency is not valuable.”
Puzzle game 2048 cloned Threes and became the ubiquitous version
“They basically got cloned, and 20 48 became the sort of ubiquitous version of their game, basically.”
Brundage: Offense generally defeats defense in adversarial machine learning competitions
“If you look at the, like, offense and defense and competitions on adversarial examples, like, the offense generally wins. Like, we don't really know how to make neural nets robust against deliberate or even unintentional things that could mess them up.”
McDonnell: Research shows women and minorities get less credit and more blame
“So there's a lot of research that shows that women and people of color get less credit for their accomplishments and get blamed more or sort of It's the things they screw up are remembered more.”
Ravisankar: Most developers will learn to code before driving by 2028
“If you just extrapolate the trend line, I think this will be two and four or three and four developers will learn to code before they drive in the next decade or so.”
Ravisankar: Startups care more about open source portfolios than big companies
“The one thing that the startups or the execs cared about the most, because at least in a startup, you may be, you might have a recruiter or not, but most likely you're doing the recruiting on your own. They care more about your contributions or your open sourc…”
Ravisankar: Work-life balance beats office perks in developer appeal
“And one of the things that we learned was how work-life balance Beats all of the different perks that people offer, whether that's free food or we have a ping-pong tournament every week or things along those lines.”
Ravisankar: Surveyed CS graduates report learning significantly from YouTube
“Even though you had a CS degree, a lot of developers said they actually learned a lot from YouTube over books or sites like HackerRank.”
Watts: All 20 trial participants preferred psilocybin over previous depression treatments
“So of our 20 well, the first thing to say is that they all said that they would prefer it to any other treatment they tried.”
Watts: Meditation and psychedelics similarly deactivate default mode network
“Meditation does that too. It quietens down that mental control. The monkey mind. It's quieting the monkey mind. That's all I would say really we're doing with psychedelics and with meditation.”
Bromberg: European ICOs have raised as much capital as US ICOs
“Right now, it is a very global phenomenon, so about as much money has been raised by ICOs based in Europe as based in the United States”
Bromberg: Crypto and Venture Capital Will See Much More Lobbying
“I think, especially given the attention given to regulation in the space, we will see way more lobbying happening in crypto and in venture capital over the coming years.”
Buchheit: GM Acquired Cruise for ~$1 Billion, Generating a 50x Return
“GM bought them for like a billion, which was about a 50 extra turn.”
Altman: YC's top single company accounts for nearly one-third of portfolio value
“YC has funded, I think around 1600 companies, maybe 1700. Our top five companies represent about two thirds of the value that we've created. And our top one company represents about one third. So this is like a, or nearly one third.”
Chaudhary: ClassDojo is in 90% of US K-8 schools
“So in the US we're in like, 90% of K through eight schools in the country now. Okay. Which is about a 100,000 schools or so.”
Sparks: Smart scales will provide personalized dietary advice within five years
“Five years, we'll probably have a scale that'll be like, oh, you know, should probably cut out eating this, or you should eat more of this, or something like that. I think we'll see some pretty interesting consumer technologies come out of, you know, weird pot…”
Slavin: Roughly 15 US Universities Go Bankrupt Each Year
“We talked about this a little bit earlier, but there, it's basically 15 universities a year that go bankrupt in the United States.”
Robin Sloan: Sourdough is first audiobook with machine learning creative output
“And to my knowledge, it's the first time that like the creative output of a machine learning system has been included in an audio book.”
Brockman: OpenAI character-prediction model learned state-of-the-art sentiment classification
“At OpenAI, we see this sometimes, for example, we had a paper on this unsupervised learning where you train a language model You train a model to predict the next character in Amazon reviews, and just by learning to predict the next character in Amazon reviews…”
Altman: AI PhD not required to work at OpenAI
“Everyone thinks they have to be an AI PhD. Not true. Neither of these guys are.”
Kuo: 1960s critics accused E.A.T. of complicity with the military
“So they actually came under a lot of flack. I mean, there are articles actually written in Artforum as well as elsewhere that essentially accused EAT of being complicit with you know, the military and taking that as far as you might even go.”
Choksi: Connie Chan's a16z WeChat piece won a 2015 Sydney Award
“In the New York Times, David Brooks does these annual Sydney Awards, and it was chosen in the 2015 Sydney Awards as one of the best pieces of long-form writing, and the best part is, it was the first time a non-media outlet had been included in it”
Adhikari: LIGO stabilizes lasers ten million times beyond commercial models
“So we take the best laser in the world that we can find, and then we stabilize it and make it about ten million times more stable than what you can buy, and then it's kind of just barely good enough, and we're gonna have to do better if we want to do better.”
Adhikari: Laser radiation pressure physically moves LIGO's 40-kilogram mirrors
“There's so much laser power that when you, it's weird to think about, but there's so much laser power when we hit the mirror, it moves the mirror. And the mirror, if you, to imagine it, is about this big. And it is 40 kilograms”
Iorns: Postdocs face a severe shortage of academic faculty jobs
“And there's this pretty well-known phenomenon called the postdocalypse that Ethan Pilstein came up with, which is this concept that there's so many postdocs now and no jobs for them. So there's just nowhere for them to go in terms of staying as An assistant pr…”
Iorns: All marketed drugs require commercial industry to reach patients
“Because the reality is, you know, all innovations that come to market are through industry. So, you know, you don't see drugs on the market that came from academia. They were all, many of them discovered in the earliest phases, the basic research was done in a…”