Taste the rainbow

Good morning Staker! Here’s what’s cookin’ today. Wholesale prices accelerate past economist expectations; What kind of pineapple costs hundreds of dollars; and Facebook is under the microscope with film sequel…🔬

But first, our weekly poll!

In 2024, a ruby-coloured pineapple was made available for sale in China, and almost immediately, there were more people looking to buy one than its producer could handle. And so a wait list was started.

A year later, it made its way to North America, where the craze reached levels of pure absurdity. People were lining up, begging Fresh Del Monte to take their $395 and give them one of those “ultra premium designer items.”

Like most luxury goods, they take a long time to make (two years growing in the rain forests of Costa Rica), and only a few thousand are produced annually, creating the scarcity required to convince anyone a pineapple is worth nearly $400.

Called the Rubyglow, it’s just one of several premium pineapples on the market these days, including one made by Dole, and another produced by Colada Royale.

“Retailers are looking to revitalize what is kind of a mature [pineapple] category. There hasn’t really been, up until probably the last couple of years, a lot of new development,” said Bil Goldfield, director of corporate communications at Dole. “There is a gap in the market and we’re looking to fill it.”

A study published in PNAS Nexus ran several AI models through an experiment involving what’s called the “Stroop task,” and found AI has problems focusing and paying attention for long stretches.

The Stroop task is a psychological brain test designed to evaluate a person’s ability to concentrate and remain productive under such circumstances.

It involves presenting the participant with words for colours, such as “red” or “blue” or “yellow.” The words will sometimes appear in the colour they’re referring to, and other times they’ll appear in a different colour (i.e. the word “red” is printed in blue).

The researchers found most large language models performed well when asked to list the ink colour of five words rather than read the words. ChatGPT scored 91% correct, for example, but when the list grew to ten words, its performance plummeted to 57%, and then again down to 15% when tasked with 40 words.

Similar patterns were observed in other LLMs, and when the ink colour of one word was actually written as another word in the same task, performance deteriorated even further.

Ultimately, the researchers concluded the models were unable to “consistently suppress the responses they’d been most heavily trained to produce,” displaying difficulties focusing and paying attention during a cognitively challenging exercise.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) officially declared the arrival of El Niño the other day, and warned it could shatter records.

El Niño is a cyclical warming of the surface of the Pacific Ocean. It’s the largest climate event of its kind on earth, and has a tremendous impact on global climate and weather patterns.

The NOAA said there’s a 63% chance it could significantly intensify between November and January, creating conditions that lead to “record-shattering temperatures, supercharged storms, regional droughts, wildfires, or floods, and global food shortages.”

The agency said should it become a “super” El Niño event, it could build to a strength not seen in the 76 years since climatologists have been tracking it.

“Starting soon all months will be the warmest on record once El Niño kicks into high gear,” Jeff Berardelli, chief meteorologist and climate specialist for WFLA Tampa Bay, posted on X yesterday. “Biggest impacts on global temp will be later this year into next year. It will set a new precedent…for a couple of years…until it’s broken again.”

Sony Pictures released the trailer for Aaron Sorkin’s follow up to the 2010 Oscar-winning Facebook origin story, The Social Network.

The sequel, entitled The Social Reckoning, covers the events of 2021, when former Facebook engineer Francis Haugen leaked thousands of internal company documents to the SEC and Wall Street Journal in an effort to expose the platform’s prioritization of profits over the mental wellbeing of young people.

Mikey Madison plays the role of Haugen, who at the time violated her non-disclosure agreement and shared the documents with WSJ reporter Jeff Horwitz (played by Jeremy Allen White).

Jeremy Strong—who previously worked with Sorkin in Molly’s Game and The Trial of the Chicago 7—takes up the role of Mark Zuckerberg, whose portrayal in the preview resembles a mad king more than a computer programmer who created a social networking platform in a college dorm.

16 years after The Social Network told the tale of how Facebook began, Sorkin aims to tell the tale of its descent—no longer a platform for social networking, but a tool that can be hijacked for cultural manipulation and profiteering at the expense of its users’ health.

“There isn’t a life that Facebook’s algorithm hasn’t touched, and that influence has shaped everything. So it’s time to say more.”

You can watch the preview here.

Quizmaster’s choice

We’ve got a little bit of this and a little bit of that, because today is another Friday, and that means it’s another round of à la carte for today’s trivia 🥳