Linked List: May 25, 2026

Monday, 25 May 2026

Awarding Jay Haynes His Being Right Points for Predicting Apple Hitting $3 Trillion in Market Cap 

Here’s a fun one. Back in 2014 I linked to a post by Jay Haynes in which he projected that with a very reasonable level of annual growth, Apple ought to reach a $3 trillion market cap within 10 years. At the time of his writing, Apple’s market cap was “just” $450 billion, and no company had hit the $1 trillion market. So projecting a $3 trillion valuation in 10 years was a bold prediction.

Apple hit $3 trillion in just 8 years.

Haynes’s original blog went belly-up, alas, but he republished the piece on Medium, with a bit of additional commentary up front, in 2016. Re-reading Haynes’s piece today, it holds up extremely well, including his case that the iPhone and iPad are almost textbook examples of Clayton Christensen’s disruption theory (yet Christensen himself got it wrong).

(Thanks to Nathan Peretic, longtime DF reader and owner of a perfect personal homepage, for prompting me to revisit this and award Haynes his well-earned Being Right Points.)

Thieves Are Texting Threats to Victims of iPhone Theft in London 

Lizzie Dearden and Amelia Nierenberg, reporting for The New York Times (gift link):

The crime Alex Pikula reported to the police was one they had heard before: An e-bike rider had zoomed past as Mr. Pikula left a theater in London’s West End, ripping his phone from his hands. It was frustrating, Mr. Pikula thought, but that was that.

He was wrong.

His mother soon started receiving strange texts, claiming to have her son’s emails and bank information. Then she received a video of a man brandishing a gun. Then came threats of sexual assault and death.

“I know who you are and where you live,” read one, full of obscenities and typos. “I’ve killed or [sic] far less than a phone before,” it went on. “We will see if you value your life over this phone.”

All of the messages wanted her to do one thing: unlink her son’s Apple ID from his stolen phone.

The story only mentions the word iPhone twice, but phone appears over 30 times. “Apple ID” appears four times. There’s zero mention of Android or Google. It’s just implicitly assumed that the only phones worth stealing or threatening victims about are iPhones. The story makes no mention of Apple’s Stolen Device Protection, which Apple recently began turning on by default when users install iOS 26.4.

Dearden and Nierenberg filed a previous report in October about organized iPhone crime rings in London. And in November I linked to a story where a thief, after stealing an Android phone, turned around and handed it back, explaining to the victim, “Don’t want no Samsung.”

Trump Mobile Website Exposed the Number of Pre-Orders – Both Completed and Abandoned – and the Associated Customer Information 

Catie McLeod, The Guardian:

Trump Mobile said in a statement that it was investigating the issue — “with the assistance of independent cybersecurity professionals” — in which the full names, addresses and phone numbers of people who filled out preorder forms appeared to be exposed. [...]

Jonathan Soma, a programmer and professor at New York’s Columbia University, reviewed the code that the Australian had uncovered and copied from the Trump Mobile website. Soma said the website used a common e-commerce model, in which every potential order added another “1” to a list, the total of which had reached 27,224 possible pre-orders on the available information.

But he said the code reflected the last step before payment, meaning those who didn’t proceed with the purchase were also recorded in the data, even those people who have abandoned their carts without paying the deposit, so the true number of preorders was likely to be even lower.

“I probably started three phone purchases and didn’t buy any of them,” he said.

Auric Goldfinger is surely rolling over in his grave.

The History of ‘OK’ 

Merriam-Webster:

The 1820s and 1830s shared another linguistic fad with today: an appreciation for deliberate misspellings. (Kewl, rite?) This trend, which had humorists adopting now-cringey bumpkin personas with ignorance manifested in uneducated spellings, turned no go into know go and no use into know yuse (lol). Abbreviations were not immune, and no go became K.G.. So too all right became O.W., as an abbreviation for oll wright. And all correct became o.k., as an abbreviation for oll korrect.

Although OK became one of the more commonly used initialisms, it might have passed into oblivion when the linguistic fad had passed if not for the presidential election of 1840, when Martin Van Buren was given the nickname of “Old Kinderhook” because of his hometown of Kinderhook, NY. The Van Buren stans who joined “OK Clubs” nationwide were themselves, they proclaimed, “OK.” Their campaign was memorable enough to have both popularized the word and to have hijacked the story of its origin: there are today still those who believe that “Old Kinderhook” is the original meaning of OK.

I have a strong preference for OK (perhaps infused by the classic Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines’s adamance on the spelling). Okay is OK in prose, but never as a UI button label. Ok and ok are not OK.

WorkOS: ‘Agents Need Context. Ship the Integrations That Give It to Them.’ 

My thanks to WorkOS for once again sponsoring DF last week. The context that actually matters isn’t in your database. It’s in the tools your users live in every day. Multi-stage agents stall the moment they hit a step they can’t see. And every missing integration is a different OAuth flow, a different token lifecycle, weeks of plumbing before the agent reads a single record.

WorkOS Pipes connects your agent to the tools your users live in. Pre-built connectors for GitHub, Slack, Salesforce, Google Drive, and more. Pipes handles OAuth, token refresh, and credential storage. You call the real provider API with a fresh token, every time. Your agent pulls context at every step, for as long as the task runs.

Give your agent context.