I found this chart illuminating, and of course the error bars are quite large, but I think there's an element that 'normie Dem' views are what they are because they really are popular.
A lot of people had things to say about the Olympic men's basketball final. Nate Silver thinks Curry is now in the top 10 (cached) all time greatest players. Another discussion was around a moment where both KD and Lebron were wide open, but Curry shot another 3-pointer instead. He's the only person on earth for whom that's the right choice (cached).
Longer Reads
• A short thread about the large number of Chinese companies that are losing money. TL;DR: The Chinese government wants more capacity for producing manufactured goods, and now they have so much capacity that the goods are all being sold at a loss. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– China is finally generating so much solar and wind that their electricity from coal is falling. (src)(cached)
– People developing AI are more likely to say that AI is an existential threat because it makes the work they're doing seem more important. That doesn't mean it's true. (src)(cached)
– TSMC gets the best engineers in Taiwan, because nobody pays more. But in the US, the best engineers have opportunities to get paid way more to work on software. When they complain their US employees can't match the ones back in Taiwan, a big part of it is that the best engineers here just don't work in hardware. It's not that US employees don't work as hard. (src)(cached)
– An article from the National Fire Protection Association about Single Staircase revolution (src)(cached)
– The topline summary from the Marshall project analysis: if you send unarmed responders instead of police, they very rarely need to bring in the real police. (src)
– macOS is adding weekly permission prompts for any app that can 'see' your whole screen. For 'security'. This includes a ton of utilities, and is going to be very annoying, possibly reducing security due to decision fatigue similar to Windows Vista. (src)
– Democrats are suing to keep RFK off the Texas ballot, but... why? He takes votes away from Trump more than Harris! (src)(cached)
– The Caltrain has activated electric trains for existing routes starting today! (src)(cached)
– Susan Wojcicki died, after battling cancer for 2 years, she was 56. Extremely sad. Many people expressed sadness about this, but one that caught my eye was John Green mentioning that she had quietly been the single largest funder to his program supporting maternal health in Sierra Leone. I met her a few times when I first started at Google, she seemed nice. (src)(cached)
– Nate Silver says that it's hard to build into a model the fact that the Trump campaign is at least acting like they think they're going to lose. (src)(cached)
– James Cham comments: "collective intelligence goes up the more you encourage error correction and admitting you are wrong but there are great rewards to individuals who never admit mistakes even as they lead their tribe over a cliff". You should do whatever you can to encourage people to admit when they were wrong, especially if they're leaders. (src)(cached)
– A trove of Trump's emails have been stolen, and are being passed to politico and other news outlets. It's suspected to be a state actor. News outlets are saying they won't be covering it, sorta convienient (cached) for Trump that both times this happened the newspapers made the decision that helped him the most. (src)(cached)
– Project 2025 made a training video that explained how they need to make sure they don't leave a paper trail. What's wild is that news outlets are saying they plan to not publish any of it, because they've 'learned' from the Hillary emails situation. Sorta weird that in both cases they've decided to do the thing that helps Trump. Why not just treat Trump the way they treated Clinton and then move on after this election?. (src)(cached)
– Disney is working on lifesized interactive 'mirrors' that can contain interactive recordings of characters. Looks very impressive in the video, although I don't like the voice they're using for Rocket Racoon (src)
– Interesting new idea about how to measure how much an LLM is plagarizing other works. (src)(cached)