📈 The Peak on Sunday

Good morning. Overwhelmed by best-of lists this time of year? We stumbled upon a resource that compiles all of them in a consistent, simple format on one website, fittingly located at yearendlists.com. It’s even assembled the year’s best-of lists for poetry.

—Lucas Arender

🤖 Anthropic’s vending machine went rogue. The Wall Street Journal office tested out the company’s AI vending machine, and it wasn’t exactly seamless. It gave away almost all of its inventory for free (including a PlayStation 5), ordered a live fish and offered to buy customers stun guns and pepper spray. 

🐻‍❄️ Canadian researchers found a very rare case of polar bear adoption. A team of researchers discovered that a female polar bear has adopted a seemingly abandoned cub and taken it under her wing alongside her own. It’s kind of like an Arctic version of The Blind Side (without the football and controversy). 

💊 AI chatbots now have their own drugs. A very real business called Pharmaicy has begun selling lines of code that — when plugged into a chatbot — supposedly simulate the experience of being high on drugs. As if these things weren’t hallucinating enough, now we need to feed them drugs?

🧑‍💻 LinkedIn Wrapped is a bit more grim than Spotify’s. Instead of recapping your favourite songs of the year, LinkedIn’s spin on the feature included how many jobs all of your friends landed. One user shared a screenshot showing 865 of their connections started new gigs. A pretty uncalled-for slap in the face for active job hunters, honestly. 

🥚 Whole Foods wants to turn food scraps into eggs. The grocery chain is planning to trial a new kind of food recycling machine that can turn spent fruit and veggies into chicken feed, which it will use to help produce its own in-house eggs. It’s 2025, so even the produce aisle is under pressure to leverage AI.

Forget coupons, soon you’ll be able to buy the dip on bananas during non-peak grocery hours. 

Driving the news: Instacart is being investigated in the U.S. for allegedly charging some of its customers up to 23% more for the same product as their peers — potentially the result of an AI-powered dynamic pricing system. 

Why it matters: Whatever you want to call it, rapidly fluctuating prices have become increasingly common, especially for online businesses. One consumer trend analyst told Fortune, “The era of 'fair' pricing is over. The price you see is the price the algorithm thinks you’ll accept.”

Zoom out: Retailers in Canada and the U.S. are starting to roll out electronic price tags in stores, and while companies argue they are designed to speed up the process of changing prices, lawmakers and consumer advocacy groups fear it could lead stores to charge more during peak periods of demand.—LA

An experimental stretch of highway modified by Purdue University engineers wirelessly charged an electric heavy-duty transport truck as it was driving at normal speeds, the first successful demonstration of the technology. The engineers built a dedicated lane along a nearly half-kilometre stretch of highway with buried transmitter coils that send power to receivers on the truck’s underside.

Why it matters: Purdue says the experiment shows that wireless charging of large trucks could be a scalable technology. As more self-driving electric transport trucks are rolled out, charging them wirelessly as they drive certainly sounds like an elegant solution. Still, the big question mark is how much more these roads cost to build — something the researchers didn’t reveal.

🌎 Hint: This coastal city is home to dramatic cliffs, floating icebergs, and a street that happens to have the most bars per square foot of anywhere on the continent. Local delicacies include cod tongue and screech rum, which plays a pivotal role in the ‘screeching in’ ceremony for visitors (it also involves kissing a fish).

Think you recognize this place? Lock in your guess here.

Say hello to the Sunday Sudoku!