March 14 2024
A dollar doesn’t go as far as used to
1 House overwhelmingly passes TikTok bill
2 FBI Director says terror threat has reached ‘Whole Other Level’
3 Dollar Tree to close 1000 stores
4 AI bot ‘Devin’ can code autonomously
3/14/1879 Albert Einstein born
see ad astra on x @greg_loving
1 House overwhelmingly passes TikTok bill
The House overwhelmingly passed a measure Wednesday to force TikTok to split from its parent company or face a national ban, a lightning offensive that materialized abruptly after years of unsuccessful negotiations over the platform’s fate. The legislation, approved 352 to 65 with 1 voting present, is a sweeping bipartisan rebuke of the popular video-sharing app — and an attempt to grapple with allegations that its China-based parent, ByteDance, presents national security risks. The House effort gained momentum last week after President Biden said he would sign the bill if Congress passed it. But its fate now rests in the Senate, where some lawmakers have expressed concern it may run afoul of the Constitution by infringing on millions of Americans’ rights to free expression and by explicitly targeting a business operating in the United States.
WaPo
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/03/13/tiktok-ban-passes-house-vote/
Fate in Senate uncertain
The bill faces a difficult road to passage in the Senate, where Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, has been noncommittal about bringing it to the floor for a vote and where some lawmakers have vowed to fight it. And even if it passes the Senate and becomes law, it is likely to face legal challenges.
NYT
TikTok will fight back
TikTok intends to exhaust all legal challenges before it considers any kind of divestiture from Chinese parent company ByteDance Ltd. if the latest US legislation targeting the app becomes law, according to people familiar with the matter. A sale of the viral video app is considered to be the last resort for ByteDance, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private matters. A divestiture would also require approval by the Chinese government, which said last year that it would firmly oppose a forced sale. No plans are final, and would depend on how the legislation progresses, the people said.
The company will continue making its case to members in the Senate, where the existing bill from the House has no co-sponsor, said one of the people familiar with the matter.
Bloomberg
2 FBI Director says terror threat has reached ‘Whole Other Level’
Terrorist threats toward the US have reached a “whole other level” from the already heightened situation before the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel and its response, FBI Director Christopher Wray said Tuesday. “You’ve seen a veritable rogue’s gallery of foreign terrorist organizations calling for terrorist attacks against us in a way that we haven’t seen in a long, long time,” the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigations told the House Intelligence Committee in an annual presentation on the biggest “worldwide threats” facing the US. Wray, speaking alongside other top US intelligence officials, said the FBI is also concerned about the risk of violent attacks by lone actors inspired by calls for violence from the Middle East. “This is a time not for panic, but for heightened vigilance given the risk,” Wray said.
Bloomberg
3 Dollar Tree to close 1000 stores
Dollar Tree, which operates roughly 16,700 locations including the Family Dollar chain, said it would close nearly 1,000 Family Dollar stores over the next few years as it battles merger indigestion, inflation and store theft. Persistent inflation and reduced government benefits are pressuring customers, particularly at the lower-income levels, at the Family Dollar chain, executives said Wednesday. Family Dollar caters to low-income shoppers selling everything from $1.25 cans of tuna to $30 air fryers.
Executives at McDonald’s on Wednesday also said cash-strapped consumers are pulling back in 2024. Lower-income consumers increasingly have spent their savings and are turning to grocery stores instead of restaurants, McDonald’s finance chief, Ian Borden, said at an investor conference. “Some of those consumers are just choosing to eat at home more often,” he said.
WSJ
4 AI bot ‘Devin’ can code autonomously
Take the case of Cognition AI Inc. You almost certainly have not heard of this startup, in part because it’s been trying to keep itself secret and in part because it didn’t even officially exist as a corporation until two months ago. And yet this very, very young company, whose 10-person staff has been splitting time between Airbnbs in Silicon Valley and home offices in New York, has raised $21 million from Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm Founders Fund and other brand-name investors, including former Twitter executive Elad Gil. They’re betting on Cognition AI’s team and its main invention, which is called Devin. Devin is a software development assistant in the vein of Copilot, which was built by GitHub, Microsoft and OpenAI, but, like, a next-level software development assistant. Instead of just offering coding suggestions and autocompleting some tasks, Devin can take on and finish an entire software project on its own. To put it to work, you give it a job—“Create a website that maps all the Italian restaurants in Sydney,” say—and the software performs a search to find the restaurants, gets their addresses and contact information, then builds and publishes a site displaying the information. As it works, Devin shows all the tasks it’s performing and finds and fixes bugs on its own as it tests the code being written.
One of the big claims Cognition AI is making with Devin is that the company has hit on a breakthrough in a computer’s ability to reason. Reasoning in AI-speak means that a system can go beyond predicting the next word in a sentence or the next snippet in a line of code, toward something more akin to thinking and rationalizing its way around problems. The argument in AI Land is that reasoning is the next big thing that will advance the industry, and lots of startups are making various boasts about their ability to do this type of work. Devin does appear to be well ahead of the other coding assistants in many respects.
Bloomberg
3/14/1879 Albert Einstein born
Thanks for reading!
