Discord has revealed its most popular games for July 17–23, based on player activity and streaming trends. Palworld took the #1# spot, with plays up 25% and streams up 21% compared to the previous week. The rest of the top 10 includes: - Fortnite (#2#) - Strikers Club (#3#) - Super Battle Golf (#4#) - Battlefield 6 (#5#) - Funnel Runners (#6#) - Zenless Zone Zero (#7#) - Arknights: Endfield (#8#) - Guildrun (#9#) - Shift at Midnight (#10#) Some of the biggest surprises were Super Battle Golf, with 309% more plays and 451% more streams, and Funnel Runners, which exploded with 121,743% more plays and 77,871% more streams.

“But the Nazis weren’t socialists because they crushed labor unions!” It wasn’t until 1980 that the first independent union was legalized in the Soviet bloc. “Solidarity” in Poland reached 10 million members in a year which was absolutely terrible for the commies. So in 1981, the Communist Party declared martial law. They sent their tanks into the streets, shot protesting miners, and jailed tens of thousands just to keep their grip on Poland. Jaruzelski cut the phones, sealed the borders, banned the union, and imprisoned the their leader Lech Wałęsa for 11 months. 3 days after that, riot police stormed the Wujek mine and killed 9 strikers who refused to accept the crackdown. Internments, censorship, and surveillance continued for years afterward.

NEWS: Tesla has won its nearly three-year fight with Sweden's IF Metall. After 1,021 days, the union is ending all strike action against Tesla in Sweden, effective August 19. Tesla never signed a collective agreement, so it outlasted the strike without giving in. The union says it is stopping because there are no strikers left. It says Tesla "bought out" all of its striking members, leaving the strike with no effect. IF Metall also accused Tesla of strikebreaking, while Tesla has long said its Swedish workers already get pay and benefits as good as a union deal and that it rejects collective agreements on principle. Union chair Marie Nilsson still called the strikers "union heroes" and said IF Metall stays "prepared to take up the fight." Source: IF Metall statement, August 2026

Cognitive reward shapes in sports and career Sports are amazing environments to learn. When you play a sport for thousands of hours, you start to see the world through that sport. It is a simple fact—your biological neural network is being conditioned to respond to the behavior incentivized by the rules of the sport. The funny thing is that most people choose their sports for accidental reasons such as parents, geography, or school programs. People rarely think about how the particular sport you play influences how your brain thinks more generally. Going a step further, playing the right sport may even benefit your career. My two favorite sports are tennis and soccer. Tennis is one of the best sports for teaching consistency. In tennis, there are hundreds of points in a match, and each point is worth exactly one unit, regardless of whether your opponent made an unforced error or if you constructed the most beautiful point ending with a winner. Tennis is low-variance optimization—you win by reducing unforced errors, playing percentages, and grinding out small advantages. Tennis is also an individual sport, which teaches you to rely on yourself consistently. Tennis has a similar cognitive reward shape to professions like being a surgeon or a pilot. Surgery and aviation require consistency, self-accountability, and deep focus. And similar to how you can only win one point at a time in tennis no matter how spectacular it was, there is no extra credit for the best appendectomy or the smoothest SFO-JFK flight. Your craft is to provide consistency with very low tolerance for error. On the other hand, the tennis mindset transfers relatively little to entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is a high-variance, team game where failure is tolerated and occasional creativity gets rewarded exponentially. Minimizing unforced errors in tennis is a totally different mindset from deciding whether to make a moonshot business move that will likely fail but could potentially net a billion dollars. Obviously I am not saying that tennis players cannot be great entrepreneurs, but I do think it is a totally different cognitive reward shape. Being a forward in soccer has a much closer reward shape for entrepreneurship. What a forward in soccer learns is to create many small chances. It is a fact that most of the game, you are not scoring—even if you look at all the times that Mbappe got on the ball in one of his best games, most of those led to nothing! But all that matters is creating enough chances to score once (or a few times) and win the game. If you break down a 90-minute game for a forward, almost all the time is failure or noise, a few minutes will be leverage, and a few seconds will determine the fate of the game. I have not played soccer for thousands of hours, but I can imagine that being a lifetime forward in soccer would teach you to be comfortable with failure and asymmetric returns. In summary, I am claiming that there can be substantial value when the cognitive reward shape of your sport mirrors that of your career. I’ll admit that I’ve done some cherry-picking for illustration purposes—entrepreneurship also requires consistency and error avoidance; and goalies in soccer have reward shapes that are very different from strikers. But I think the point stands. If sports shape how we perceive risk, effort, and reward, then we should choose them wisely.

Strikes on Iranian power plants and infrastructure are among the options being weighed, along with further attacks on nuclear sites to bury the enriched uranium stockpile deeper underground, officials tell Ynet.