The US TikTok Sale Might Actually Happen - DTNSB 5054

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3:08Robb Dunewood: Today, TikTok will be making a U.S.-specific version of its app ahead of a sale of its U.S. operations. Intriguing. I'm Tom Merritt. And I'm Rob Dunwood. Let's start with what you need to know with that big story. So this isn't official. It's sources talking to the information from within TikTok saying that TikTok is developing a new version of its app internally called M2 specifically for the U.S. market. That app is meant to prepare users for the effects of a potential sale of TikTok's U.S. operations as mandated by U.S. law. Now, Now, the information says the rough plan right now, which could change, but the idea right now is get that app launched September 5th and then try to get all U.S.

3:56users to download and start using that new app and then end support in the U.S. for the old app in March 2026. So in September, the old app would disappear from the U.S. store and be replaced by the new app. There'd be a big bunch of pop-ups telling you like, you're in the U.S. You need to get the other app. and then by March 2026, if you're using the old app in the U.S., it'll be like, you're in the U.S., can't use that anymore. I imagine if you travel, the old app would work outside the U.S. I don't know. Currently, it is illegal to distribute the current TikTok app or any app from TikTok for that matter in the United States, but the president has issued an executive order assuring companies that the U.S.

4:41will not enforce that law until at this point, September 17. They've kicked that ball down the road a couple of times. There are also reports that the U.S. is getting pretty close to getting the Chinese government to approve a sale of ByteDance's U.S. TikTok operations. ByteDance could sell them, but because it does business in China, China has a lot of influence over it. So getting the Chinese government on board is pretty much essential for this to happen. the report there is that a group of non-Chinese investors including Oracle are lined up to buy it now we don't know who those non-Chinese investors are however 60 percent of ByteDance's current owners are not Chinese they're in Dublin New York Tokyo Menlo Park and Singapore so it could include those current investors being able to keep a piece of their pie by transferring to the new one Oracle could be involved because Oracle currently runs cloud services and stores data for TikTok's US operations, which are all actually mostly managed by a separate company called USDS, which was set up specifically to avoid this kind of thing in the past.

5:52So I know it's all confusing, Rob, but what do you make of this mess?

5:56Robb Dunewood: I'm even more confused because what I didn't hear was anything about algorithm. You can make a new app, but is ByteDance going to give up that algorithm that makes TikTok what TikTok is? That is the big question for me. Yeah, so it would be interesting to see how this threads that needle. Could it continue to call on the ByteDance algorithm with some kind of licensing agreement that would then still be under the Chinese control, but everything else under this new US ownership, is it just a change of investors? Is it a change on paper? Or like you say, are we close enough with the way LLMs and other machine learning works that somebody feels pretty confident that they could use their own algorithm to be able to provide those recommendations?

6:47And I'll add another one on top of that, Rob. Does this interoperate? if somebody in Japan posts something on TikTok? Do the people in the US TikTok app see that?

7:00Robb Dunewood: That is a very good question. And the thing that I think about as well is that if you do have a separate algorithm, if it essentially becomes a US only application, are people going to want to use that? Because TikTok is such a global phenomenon. I mean, it's really big here, but it is really big everywhere where TikTok is. So that is a question as well, that you now have a U.S. version of TikTok that now competes with the worldwide version of TikTok. And I know how fickle people are. If it does not match up at least as good as what the current TikTok is, people will poo-poo it almost instantaneously.

7:39Yeah. And then how many, if it were to run separately, does a French restaurant have to post on both if they want to solicit people in the U.S. to come see their French restaurant? Or if they post on the worldwide version of TikTok, does it carry over? I mean, so many questions here. And obviously, all of this based on information sources. But I do think the information has a pretty good track record on this stuff. And it does indicate that TikTok has a timeline that it thinks will lead to that sale, whatever the details of that sale are.

8:16Robb Dunewood: Tom, I dare say that we will be having many, many, many more conversations about this as just more news breaks about it. Because them just coming up with a new app is not the thing. It's coming up with a new app and how does it interoperate with the old app and how do users feel about the new app? That is the biggest part for me. If and when there's a deal, which some of the reports are maybe in the next few weeks, there might be a deal. We'll have a bunch of news about that. Then we won't hear anything else about it. until September when we get close to that launch of the new app, if that September 5th date is right.

8:51And of course, the deadline for everything to be done, which is the executive order expiring on September 17th. So get ready in a few weeks to maybe have some news. And if you get news in a few weeks, then hear about this again in September.

9:05Robb Dunewood: It's going to be a busy wrap up to our summer, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's a mid-summer and end of summer milestones to keep the season in mind. DTNets is made possible by you, the listener. Thanks to Brad, Kevin Morgan, Paul Thiessen, and Kevin Sakamoto. Hey! Thanks, everybody. Episode prep gets messy when research, Slack threads, and script trackers are all in different places. That's where ChatGPT work comes in. Give it the goal and connect to the tools where work happens, like apps and files, and it can help pull the pieces into a draft you can review without without you having to re-explain the project at every step.

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12:22Well, there's non-TikTok news to get to today, so let's get right to the briefs.

12:28Robb Dunewood: StatConner reports that Windows 11 now has 50.88 % usage in the Windows market, nudging it ahead of Windows 10, which has 46.2 % that translate to about 700 million monthly active devices using Windows 11. This is a big jump since January when Windows 11 was at 36.65%. Windows 11 has been out since 2021 and support for Windows 10 ends October 14th unless you make other arrangements like paying using Microsoft reward points or backing up settings to Microsoft's cloud service. Windows 11 is available as a free upgrade if you have a properly licensed version of Windows 10 and your machine meets the system requirements.

13:05Robb Dunewood: Tom, that's the rub for me, not meeting the system requirements. I have two perfectly fine Windows 10 machines that are relatively new, like literally like bought the year that the year before devices started becoming is automatically compatible with Windows 11. So they're like seven, eight year old devices, but they do what they do for me just fine. And I'm not ready to get rid of them simply because they won't run Windows 11. Yeah. And that that is the reason that we're seeing this slow number. right? When you are at this point, three months away from end of life of an operating system, you usually have well more than 50 % of people upgrading, especially when it's a free upgrade.

13:48It is that device incompatibility that Microsoft has put out. And as the myriad of workarounds show, it's not necessary for the functioning of Windows 11. It is a policy decision from Microsoft that they say has to do with security and making sure that Windows 11 runs properly and all of that. But it does mean that a lot of folks like you, and I've got an older machine too, that I would have to replace or just stop using if I were to stop using Windows 10. So that's why Microsoft is providing these ways of paying to get extended security support. But I would say that that jump from 36.65 % to 50 % in six months implies that Microsoft's messaging on this is working.

14:34And it is causing people to either figure out how to do the workaround or buy a new machine.

14:40Robb Dunewood: I would have to imagine that a lot of the people that are upgrading in the last six months are businesses and corporations that they can't afford to run unsupported. So, okay, it's time for us to do our regular upgrade cycle. Maybe it came at the end of this year. They decided to do it at the beginning of this year. But I think that there's still a lot of people with home PCs that I've got a really, really nice HP with a built-in 27-inch monitor that will continue to sit on the same desk and do the same things. Maybe I won't go to banking sites on it and that type of thing. But as far as just browsing the Reb and looking at recipes and those kind of things that I use it for now, it will continue to do that after October 14th.

15:23Yeah. And there are a significant number of those. I'm not going to try to pretend to guess how many who are run by people who won't bother to pay or use their rewards points, if they had rewards points, to get the extended security update. They won't even bother to do the free version where you upload your security settings. They'll just keep using it and it'll be insecure. And we'll get a story from the register or somebody a year or so from now about some kind of vulnerability that takes advantage of that.

15:52Robb Dunewood: And people like us and people who are listening to this show, they'll know. But there's a lot of folks who have Windows 10 machine. They simply won't know that they're running and they're no longer supported. I mean, unless it's just continually popping up, giving you messages, which a lot of people will try to click away and go away from that message. They simply just won't know because they don't pay attention that deeply to it. It still works. It's working for me. Yeah, exactly right. Samsung is expected to announce new foldables at the Galaxy Unpacked event coming this Wednesday morning. I believe it is at 10 a.m.

16:24Eastern Time. Ahead of that event, WinFuture's Roland Quant showed off some info he says is from Samsung's promotional materials. If these are accurate, the specs show the Fold 7 to be just 0.1mm thicker than the Honor Magic V5. And at 216g, it would be the lightest book-style foldable yet. He also supports the rumor of a larger cover screen for the Flip 7, the existence of a less expensive Flip 7 FE for fan edition. And he showed some images of the Galaxy Watch 8 and the 8 Classic with the same squircle shape as the Galaxy Watch Ultra. We shall find out if those are all real on Wednesday. Meanwhile, Samsung officially announced an LLM for its SmartThings smart home platform.

17:08This lets you create routines using natural language. Samsung gave the example of turn off all the lights whenever I leave the house. Turns into a routine that goes through and does all of the implementations to make a routine to do that. Google and Amazon have a similar feature, but those are in beta and The Verge says Samsung has already launched this. So if you're a SmartThings user in South Korea and the U.S., you can take advantage of it.

17:32Robb Dunewood: I often forget that SmartThings can do a lot of home automation stuff. And the fact that you can just now use natural language is pretty cool. I have a lot of Samsung devices in the house, so I might have to jump on board and start doing some home automation routines with it. This sounds pretty cool. Huawei responded to acquisitions posted on GitHub that it had to use uncredited material from its rivals in the source code of its PanGoo large language model that was trained on Huawei's own Ascend chips. Huawei's AI lab called Noah's Ark posted, we strictly adhere to the requirements of open source licenses and we clearly mark copyright statements in the relevant source files.

18:12This is corporate espionage at its best, right? Like the domestic competitors in China obviously would have an interest in casting doubt on the Pongu platform. And certainly there are American interests who would like to cast doubt on the ability for Huawei to use its own chips instead of NVIDIA's to train a compatible model. It might be that they just didn't do their licensing work clearly enough. Hard to say.

18:41Robb Dunewood: It is kind of hard to say. And this is not going to be the last of this or other companies that are doing this. I think that the race to get your LLMs trained on data is so fierce. The folks are kind of skirting the rules a little bit. I'm not saying that's what happened here. We don't know. This is the reporting. The temptation is there. But the temptation is there for everyone. A study commissioned by the government of the Netherlands found that around three quarters of the 317 surveyed high schools reported a positive effect on student concentration after a ban on electronic devices in the classroom was instituted on January 1st, 2024 in the country.

19:20About two-thirds of those high schools noted improved social climates and a third improved academic performance.

19:28Robb Dunewood: Makes sense. You take a supercomputer out of a teen's pocket where they get dopamine hits every 56 to 74 seconds, probably helps them out a little bit. Yeah, and it would make sense to me why the academic performance is not as pronounced as the concentration and social climate, because those devices probably help the academic performance some. And so when you get rid of them, you take away the help that they give, but you improve the concentration. So it doesn't, it's a net positive essentially, but this is an interesting study. It's a little bit self-reported too, you know, reporting on concentration and social climate could be affected by people who wanted this to go in place and want it to be positive.

20:11The academic performance, on the other hand, that's strict numbers.

20:15Robb Dunewood: Apple officially filed its appeal of a 500 million euro fine violating the Digital Markets Act. It's kind of hard to keep all of these cases straight. This is one where Apple was fined in April for let developers tell users about other ways of paying for apps and app services outside of the app store. The European Commission said that there were too many restrictions and the fees it charged were too high. Apple says the European Commission is going beyond what the law requires. VentureBeat has a couple of interesting advances in large language models you might benefit from knowing about. First of all, Germany's TNG Technology Consulting released an adaptation of DeepSeek R1, which it snappily calls TNG R1T2 Chimera.

20:56And their model is about 20 % faster than DeepSeek R1 and costs less to operate with answers generated with 40 % fewer operating tokens. It uses TNG's Assembly of Experts, or AOE method, that combines the strengths of three different DeepSeq models. So you must know if you're really into that. It takes advantage of the reasoning strength of R10528, the structured thought patterns of R1, and the concise behavior of V30324. But basically, it combines those three together. Meanwhile, Japan's Sakana AI has introduced its own multi-model approach called Multi-LLM ABMCTS, where the ABMCTS stands for Adaptive Branching Monte Carlo Tree Search.

21:42If you follow this stuff, the Monte Carlo problem is one that's used by DeepSeq and others. So it's implementing that. If you know, you know. If you don't, the short version is the algorithm is good at deciding when to refine an existing solution or generate a new one. and it's good at picking which of the available models you give it are best for each part of the task. It doesn't always have to be the same model. This algorithm says what's available, I will figure out which one of them is best. So in tests that made OpenAI's 04 Mini, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and DeepSeek R1 available, it scored higher than any of those individual models and was able to solve some problems that none of those models individually could solve.

22:26The underlying algorithm has been released as an open source framework called TreeQuest under an Apache 2.0 license.

22:33Robb Dunewood: Tom, what Sakana AI is doing is the kind of AI that I'm looking for. I don't want to have to decide which one I use. Let me just ask it something or tell it to do something and it figure out what it uses. And that's where this is going. So this is really interesting tech as far as I'm concerned. Yeah. And being available in open source, a bunch of developers can take this, you know, and say, okay, I can afford to have these foundation models available. Let me put it in my app and see how I can tailor it to my particular use. The downside is that you're probably going to have to have more accounts that you sign up and pay for in order to have multiple models that you can actually access.

23:10Yes. All right.

23:12Robb Dunewood: That's enough about AI. Let's talk about the Ploopy knob. The Verge has a review of this accessory from Canada's open source peripheral maker Ploopy. The knob uses a Raspberry Pi microcontroller and a position sensor to create a dial that supports pixel by pixel level scrolling on Windows and Linux. It's not as good on Mac OS because the OS does smoothing and you can't turn it off for the input device. The Ploopy knob is available for$50 Canadian, or you can download the design files and software from Ploopy's GitHub page and make your own for free. It's not the first accessory dial, but it seems like a really good one.

23:46It's pretty sensitive, especially on Windows and Linux where it can be pixel by pixel. And the fact that you can modify it yourself. In fact, a lot of the Ploopy devices, you can actually configure yourself or ask for a DIY kit that you can assemble. You can't do that with the knob, but you can still print it yourself.

24:04Robb Dunewood: and do it all for free is pretty cool it is really cool and there are still a lot of tinkerers out there who just like i just want to make my own stuff if i can give me some instructions give me some designs and let me go see if i can make this thing and if you don't want to do that it's only 50 bucks canadian yeah uh i have a feeling it will be easy to remember the name of the company too for this one fewer people will have to consult our show notes to remember oh right ploopy uh China's instant delivery apps reported huge numbers of orders on Saturday. There is huge price war on instant delivery in China going on.

24:38Meituan set a record of more than 120 million orders. In fact, so many that at one point the system briefly crashed. There is that price war going on between JD.com, Taobao, and Meituan causing the surge in orders on Saturday.

24:53Robb Dunewood: China's a pretty big country, but 120 million orders, that is an awful lot. Yeah, it's huge. The Wall Street Journal has an article about how successful the new U.S. online passport renewal system is. The system lets applicants determine eligibility, fill out information, upload a photo, and pay all from a computer. It's been running for less than a year, but now handles nearly half of all renewals. 94 % of respondents reviewed it positively, which never happens for anything. The journal has details on the process. Yeah, I like that. The Wall Street Journal says that 94%, you don't even get that for free pizza, much less a government service, much less passport renewals.

25:31It's a really good read and worth honoring the individuals. There were hundreds of folks worked on this when the team leaders are named in it, of making something that hadn't changed since the 70s become super efficient. I'm looking forward to renewing my passport now.

25:48Robb Dunewood: I just renewed mine the year before last. Oh, no. I got, what, five years? I think I do, too. I'm going to go seven years. I got five more years before I'm going to have to do it, but we'll see how it goes. Well, what do you want to hear us talk about on the show? One way to let us know is our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at reddit.com slash r slash daily tech news show.

26:12Robb Dunewood: This message is brought to you by today's sponsor, Walden University. Set a course for change. Now is the time to make a real change in your life, career, and community. At Walden University, we give you the support and flexibility to get the W. Walden's online programs are designed for working professionals like you. You'll gain hands-on skills to take on real-world challenges and succeed. Your future is waiting, and Walden is here to help you achieve it. Take the first step to make your impact. Visit waldenu.edu. Walden University. Set a course for change. Certified to operate by Shev.

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27:21Robb Dunewood: We end every episode of DTNest with some shared wisdom. Today, Rob S. is asking me for a little bit of mine. That's right. We had a lot of folks respond to our weekend discussion that Rob and I had about his second brain. In fact, we're probably going to be able to do a follow-up, so keep those questions coming. But in the meantime, Rob S. has one of the most frequent questions. he wrote, I use Readwise, Evernote, and Notion. Didn't know about the sync and export option until you talked about it. Tried setting mine up and no articles exported from Readwise, just highlights from Kindle books. Not what I was hoping for.

27:57And Rob S says, am I holding it wrong?

28:00Robb Dunewood: So this is an area where a lot of people initially get kind of confused about what Readwise is doing. If you have articles that you've saved, it doesn't sync the entire article over, it just syncs any highlights. So let's say you're reading a Kindle book, you don't need to sync the entire book to your second brain. If there's a passage that you find insights in and you say, Oh, I like this. And I want to keep this, you highlight it in your Kindle that gets synced over into your second brain with a link back to the book. Same thing with articles. If you are using the read wise reader and you are, you know, looking at, you know, you, you may bookmark an article, but you say, here's something in the article that really stood out to me.

28:38Robb Dunewood: If you highlight that, that's what it'll get synced over. If you want to get the entire article into your second brain, it would be better to use something like Notion Clipper or Evernote Clipper, something like that, that'll just clip the entire thing and stick it in there. But be careful with that because Evernote at least is not free. And, you know, they charge you for the storage. So if you're syncing over entire articles, you'll use your storage up pretty quickly. Yeah. And if you haven't listened to that episode yet, because I I know it came over the weekend for some folks. It's worth a listen.

29:06It's good stuff. And like I said, Rob, you're up for doing a follow-up, right? Oh, definitely. Yeah.

29:12Robb Dunewood: So what are you thinking about? If you've got some insights into a story, share it with us at feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com. Big thanks to Rob S. for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You can keep us in business by becoming a patron. Get the show's ad free, too. As a bonus, all kinds of good stuff. Go check it out, patreon.com slash DTNS. Talk to you soon.

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30:19Robb Dunewood: So shop now at liquidiv.com. Liquid IV hydration that goes wherever life takes you. Is there anything better than your team bringing home a W? How about a personal W for your health? If you're 45 or older and at average risk, It's time to screen for colon cancer, now the number one cancer killer of people under 50 in the U.S. It's easy to put off when screening feels like a hassle, but Cologuard Plus makes it simple. It's non-invasive, requires no prep, can be completed at home in about 15 minutes, and is 95 % effective. Talk to your healthcare provider or request Cologuard Plus online, Rx only.