The price of coffee and cocoa has more than doubled in the past year: you might see the effect soon. CC-licensed photo by stephenrwalli on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Energised. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Broadcom, TSMC eye possible Intel deals that would split storied chip maker • WSJ via MSN
Asa Fitch, Lauren Thomas and Yang Jie:
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Intel’s rivals Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Broadcom are each eyeing potential deals that would break the American chipmaking icon in two.
Broadcom has been closely examining Intel’s chip-design and marketing business, according to people familiar with the matter. It has informally discussed with its advisers making a bid but would likely only do so if it finds a partner for Intel’s manufacturing business, the people said.
Nothing has been submitted to Intel, the people cautioned, and Broadcom could decide not to seek a deal.
Separately, TSMC has studied controlling some or all of Intel’s chip plants, potentially as part of an investor consortium or other structure, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Broadcom and TSMC aren’t working together, and all of the talks so far are preliminary and largely informal.
But the potential deals would have been unthinkable until Intel’s recent struggles made it an acquisition target. The end result could be a breakup of Intel after the American icon spent many decades dominating the business of making central processors for both personal computers and data centers.
Splitting the company would also bring it in line with an industrial shift in recent decades toward specializing in either manufacturing or designing chips, but not both.
Frank Yeary, the interim executive chairman of Intel, has been leading the discussions with possible suitors and Trump administration officials, who are concerned about the fate of a company seen as critical to national security, people familiar with the matter said. Yeary has been telling individuals close to him that he is most focused on maximizing value for Intel shareholders, the people said.
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“Nothing has been submitted to Intel”? Then again, if TSMC makes a move for the plants, the other parts would obviously be up for sale. And “maximising value for shareholders” is one of those doom-laden phrases on a par with a football club chairman expressing confidence in the manager. The manager’s exit swiftly follows.
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Zypher’s speech model can clone your voice with five seconds of audio • The Register
Tobias Mann:
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Palo Alto-based AI startup Zyphra unveiled a pair of open text-to-speech (TTS) models this week said to be capable of cloning your voice with as little as five seconds of sample audio. In our testing, we generated realistic results with less than half a minute of recorded speech.
Founded in 2021 by Danny Martinelli and Krithik Puthalath, the startup aims to build a multimodal agent system called MaiaOS. To date, these efforts have seen the release of its Zamba family of small language models, optimizations such as tree attention, and now the release of its Zonos TTS models.
Measuring at 1.6 billion parameters in size each, the models were trained on more than 200,000 hours of speech data, which includes both neutral-toned speech such as audiobook narration, and “highly expressive” speech. According to the upstart’s release notes for Zonos, the majority of its data was in English but there were “substantial” quantities of Chinese, Japanese, French, Spanish, and German. Zyphra tells El Reg this data was acquired from the web and was not obtained from data brokers.
The results are actually two Zonos models: One that uses a fully transformer-based architecture, and the other, a hybrid that combines transformer and Mamba state space model (SSM) architectures. The latter, Zyphra claims, makes it the first TTS model to use this arch. While transformer-based models are without a doubt the most commonly used in generative AI today, alternative architectures like Mamba are gaining traction.
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This is one of those “we built it because we can, rather than because we thought of the consequences” products.§
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How Diablo hackers uncovered a speedrun scandal – Ars Technica
Kyle Orland:
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For years, Maciej “Groobo” Maselewski stood as the undisputed champion of Diablo speedrunning. His 3-minute, 12-second Sorcerer run looked all but unbeatable thanks to a combination of powerful (and allowable) glitch exploits along with what seemed like some unbelievable luck in the game’s randomly generated dungeon.
But when a team of other speedrunners started trying and failing to replicate that luck using outside software and analysis tools, the story behind Groobo’s run began to fall apart. As the inconsistencies in the run started to mount, that team would conduct an automated search through billions of legitimate Diablo dungeons to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Groobo’s game couldn’t have taken place in any of them.
“We just had a lot of curiosity and resentment that drove us to dig even deeper,” team member Staphen told Ars Technica of their investigation. “Betrayal might be another way to describe it,” team member AJenbo added. “To find out that this had been done illegitimately… and the person had both gotten and taken a lot of praise for their achievement.”
If you have any familiarity with Diablo or speedrunning, watching Groobo’s run feels like watching someone win the lottery. First, there’s the dungeon itself, which features a sequence of stairways that appear just steps from each other, forming a quick and enemy-free path down to the dungeon’s deeper levels. Then there’s Groobo’s lucky find of Naj’s Puzzler on level 9, a unique item that enables the teleporting necessary for many of the run’s late-game maneuvers.
“It seemed very unusual that we would have so many levels with the upstairs and the downstairs right next to each other,” Allan “DwangoAC” Cecil told Ars Technica. “We wanted to find some way of replicating this.”
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What is fascinating about this is the burning sense of unfairness that the other speedrunners clearly felt, and then the incredible lengths they went to in search of the answer that would salve their anger.
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Extreme weather expected to cause food price volatility in 2025 after cost of cocoa and coffee doubles • The Guardian
Damien Gayle:
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Extreme weather events are expected to lead to volatile food prices throughout 2025, supply chain analysts have said, after cocoa and coffee prices more than doubled over the past year.
In an apparent confirmation of warnings that climate breakdown could lead to food shortages, research by the consultancy Inverto found steep rises in the prices of a number of food commodities in the year to January that correlated with unexpected weather.
Several authorities declared 2024 the hottest year on record, a trend towards higher temperatures that seems to be continuing into 2025. Inverto said a long-term trend towards more extreme weather events would continue to hit regional crop yields, causing price spikes.
The highest price rises were for cocoa and coffee, up 163% and 103% respectively, due to a combination of higher than average rainfall and temperatures in producing regions, according to the research.
Sunflower oil prices increased by 56% after drought caused poor crop yields in Bulgaria and Ukraine, which also continued to be affected by the Russian invasion. Other food commodities with sharp year-on-year price rises included orange juice and butter, both up by more than a third, and beef, up by just over a quarter.
“Food manufacturers and retailers should diversify their supply chains and sourcing strategies to reduce over-reliance on any one region affected by crop failures,” Katharina Erfort, of Inverto, said.
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The rising cost of coffee probably won’t put coffee shops out of business – other costs are far bigger factors – but they might have to raise them marginally, and people may notice that.
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Our sleep, brain aging, and waste clearance • Ground Truths
Eric Topol:
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Sleep is the principal driver of glymphatic flow and waste clearance, occurring during the NREM phase of sleep (which includes deep sleep, slow-wave, known as stage N3). Indeed, the totality of evidence backs sleep’s major function as waste clearance of the brain through glymphatics. Clearance of toxic proteins, like β-amyloid, are critical to brain health.
Back in 2018, PET scanning was used to show that one night of sleep deprivation resulted in substantial increase in β-amyloid accumulation, in regions of the brain linked to Alzheimer’s disease. On a chronic basis, several studies have shown that poor sleep is prospectively linked to the risk and progression of Alzheimer’s disease. For example, in nearly 8,000 participants with 25-year follow-up, people aged less than 50 or 60 years with six hours of sleep or less had a more than 20% increased risk of developing late-onset dementia.
It’s also notable that clearance of toxic proteins interacts with our brain immune system (as I reviewed in a recent Ground Truths, Guardians of the Brain), invoking another mechanism by which waste induces harm.
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A quote in this piece says that sleep is “like turning on the dishwasher before you go to bed and waking up with a clean brain”. This is a very detailed piece, with very detailed diagrams, but one other point to take away is that Ambien (aka zolpidem) reduces glymphatic flow (the cleaning mechanism). Avoid that too if possible.
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Three observations • Sam Altman
The head of OpenAI would like you to know the following:
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In a decade, perhaps everyone on earth will be capable of accomplishing more than the most impactful person can today.
We continue to see rapid progress with AI development. Here are three observations about the economics of AI:
1. The intelligence of an AI model roughly equals the log of the resources used to train and run it. These resources are chiefly training compute, data, and inference compute. It appears that you can spend arbitrary amounts of money and get continuous and predictable gains; the scaling laws that predict this are accurate over many orders of magnitude.
2. The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use. You can see this in the token cost from GPT-4 in early 2023 to GPT-4o in mid-2024, where the price per token dropped about 150x in that time period. Moore’s law changed the world at 2x every 18 months; this is unbelievably stronger.
3. The socioeconomic value of linearly increasing intelligence is super-exponential in nature. A consequence of this is that we see no reason for exponentially increasing investment to stop in the near future.
If these three observations continue to hold true, the impacts on society will be significant.
We are now starting to roll out AI agents, which will eventually feel like virtual co-workers.
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Personally, I don’t think “perhaps everyone” will be able to do more than the most impactful person today. The people sifting piles of waste in India will probably still be there, and it seems unlikely they’ll be more impactful than the most impactful person today. (They might be getting a little help from AI on their phone, though.)
At the same time, the AI systems we see now are the worst they’ll ever be. A lot is going to change. But I do like Altman’s insistence that we need to keep pouring money into his company/nonprofit/wallet.
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When Did They Die? The celebrity death date quiz game
Does what it says on the tin: offers a quiz for you to try to get right. Mine were: Hemingway, Stalin, John Paul 1, Mary Tyler Moore, Coolio. Score: 3,332. Enjoy beating it.
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Key bird flu lab threatens to strike as California cases and egg prices climb • POLITICO
Rachel Bluth:
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Workers at a key lab for testing animal disease are threatening to go on strike, raising concerns about California’s ability to respond to the growing outbreak of bird flu that has sent the price of eggs soaring nationwide.
Technicians at the California Animal Health and Food Safety Lab at the University of California, Davis, have been sounding the alarm for months, alleging staffing shortages and strains as their union has been in contentious negotiations with the University of California system. The University Professional and Technical Employees are set to finish voting Thursday on whether to strike, arguing their demands haven’t been met systemwide.
The lab is the only one in the state able to handle the most dangerous cases of avian flu, which has swept through dozens of poultry and hundreds of dairy farms in California’s agricultural heartland with no clear end in sight.
Getting a positive, timely test result is vital for dairy farmers to make a decision on isolating or culling infected animals, but also to qualify for supplemental payments from the USDA to help combat an outbreak.Lab technicians say the workload and stress of the bird flu outbreak are leading to injuries and burnout — especially within the current staff of just three fully trained workers, and two more who can only work on avian flu testing under the supervision of other staff.
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Surely nothing to worry about that a bird flu testing site might shut down. And the workers did vote to strike.
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“Download and Transfer” for Kindle books discontinued from Feb 26 • Good E-Reader
Michael Kozlowski:
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Amazon will cease the ability to download and transfer options for the Kindle e-reader on February 26th, 2025. No Kindle can use this functionality once the due date rolls around. Only the 12th generation Kindles never had this ability to begin with, but now no other model will either. Why is Amazon doing this? It’s a feature not many people use and those who do, commit e-book piracy.
Amazon said:
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Starting February 26, 2025, the “Download & Transfer via USB” option will no longer be available. You can still send Kindle books to your Wi-Fi enabled devices by selecting the “Deliver or Remove from Device” option.
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…Download and Transfer via USB was launched over ten years ago and was created at a time, when WIFI was not prevalent, so this feature was the only way to send e-books to the Kindle.
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The problem is that if the ebook content is on a USB it can be transferred to a computer, and there the DRM can be broken and the book can be pirated and uploaded to a torrent and then downloaded by Meta to train its next AI. Funny how these things go.
| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 