Linked List: October 19, 2026

Monday, 19 October 2026

Barack Obama on the Trump Administration’s Intimidation Campaign Against Congresswoman Ilhan Omar 

Barack Obama, in a 430-word essay:

It is a basic principle of American democracy that the government can’t selectively target individuals simply because of their political beliefs or what they say. But that’s exactly what the Trump Administration is doing to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. [...]

The fact that any president, or any administration, is willing to engage in such transparent efforts to intimidate someone should outrage all Americans, regardless of how they feel about Congresswoman Omar’s political views. Because if this becomes the new normal, there’s no reason to believe it will stop with her — or that future presidents, in either party, won’t do the same.

Thoughtful, sharp, and eloquent as ever.

But Obama posted this essay on X, which, I have been told in the past week, shows that he in fact is a Nazi sympathizer, a fascist, a pedophile, and unconcerned about racism. As surprised as I was to learn those things about myself, I’m equally surprised to learn them about President Obama, whom I heretofore considered a thoughtful statesman and moral compass.

Either that, or, Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon have relegated themselves into irrelevance by allowing their discourse to be dominated by a fringe of unhinged kooks who want to be angry and want everyone else to be angry.

From the DF Archive: Should a CEO Be a Nerd About Their Company’s Products? 

Back in 2022, I quoted from an interesting post by Ben Schlappig at One Mile at a Time, where he wrote:

I’ve had the opportunity to interact with quite a few senior airline executives over the years, and I find that their knowledge about competitors is typically one extreme or the other:

  • Some airline executives literally couldn’t tell you the first thing about their competitors, and have no knowledge of their passenger experience, fleet, etc.
  • Some airline executives know literally everything about their competitors, down to being able to tell you how many seats competitors have on specific planes

I find there are very few executives who are just kind of in the middle, as it’s pretty polarizing. Either they know virtually everything about competitors, or nearly nothing. Without naming any names, I’ll say that generally speaking there’s a high correlation between airlines that have a great passenger experience, and airlines that have executives that keep very close tabs on the competition.

And I wrote:

If the CEO’s primary perspective on the company is via spreadsheets — if it’s all just P&L to them — that company is not going to excel at quality. Or if they do excel at quality, they won’t for long.

I think Tim Cook was truly an exception in this regard. He’s not a product guy, and never pretended to be. He is a spreadsheet guy. But he clearly realized that about himself, and he understood that Apple’s entire point is delivering great products and experiences. But I think Ternus is a breath of fresh air in this regard. Apple didn’t immediately switch to decision-making by quantifiable numbers under Cook, but incrementally, year-by-year, decision-making by quantifiable numbers took over.

You simply cannot assign numeric values to everything, and some of those things that cannot be quantified are the most important things. Apple needs a CEO who makes some major product decisions by gut alone.

Apple Event, in Los Angeles, Next Week: ‘Pro and Tell’ 

Greg Joswiak, on X:

Can’t wait to pro and tell next week.

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Rumors suggest Apple is planning to debut the new MacBook Pro with an OLED touchscreen display, an M6 entry-level MacBook Pro, an M6 iMac, an iPad mini with an OLED display.

Netflix Shitcanned Film Chief Dan Lin Too 

Anthony D’Alessandro, reporting for Deadline:

Dan Lin is out as film boss at Netflix in a move that has been largely speculated for weeks. Insiders at the streamer have denied that Lin and even Bela Bajaria were on the chopping block, but here we are.

Lin is meeting with his feature staff Monday morning for a post-mortem after the news. Per sources close to the situation, a successor to Lin won’t be named until the arrival of Peter Rice, who is taking over Netflix’s Chief Content Officer role from Bajaria.

Netflix’s movies are worse than their series, which also mostly stink. (As opposed to Apple TV, which somehow makes terrible movies while making the best series in the business.)

Mike Isaac, on X:

it has long been understood that, qualitatively, a “netflix movie” exists in the liminal space between theatrical release and Lifetime production

with some notable exceptions, even the biggest budget productions feel cheap, strange and worst of all, unmemorable

Ex-Apple Employee Fred Potter on HomeView 

Fred Potter, on LinkedIn:

So if you ever meet someone who tells you, “At Apple, I’m the one who did this,” take it with a grain of salt. They were probably part of the team that made it happen, and that’s already something to be proud of.

Sometimes, when the final product finally comes out, you can recognize a few of the personal touches you contributed along the way. And that, in itself, is immensely rewarding.

Wishing HomeView every success!

Potter’s LinkedIn bio lists his time at Apple as July 2021 through June 2024, and describes it only as “Worked on HomeView”. (Via Christophe Laporte at iGeneration.)

Netflix Lays Off 6 Percent of Staff 

Joe Flint and Jessica Toonkel, reporting for The Wall Street Journal last week:

Netflix is cutting 6% of its staff, or roughly 1,000 positions globally, its biggest round of layoffs since 2022, as it struggles with slowing growth and customer engagement. Co-Chief Executives Greg Peters and Ted Sarandos said in an email to employees Wednesday morning that the bulk of the cuts would be in the streaming giant’s product, tech, legal and human-resources teams.

The layoffs may have hit those teams (including some of the talent that created the excellent Duo support for Netflix’s iOS app), but Peters and Sarandos seem to know where the fundamental problem lies: Netflix has peaked and their content blows.

Flint, in a follow-up report the next day, “Netflix Replaces Content Chief as It Struggles to Engage Viewers”:

Netflix’s Chief Content Officer Bela Bajaria is leaving the company, as it struggles with slowing growth and falling customer engagement.

Yours truly, back in August: “Netflix Has Peaked”.

Time Magazine Profiles John Ternus 

Andrew Chow, writing for Time:

Just below the broad smile he’s been wearing all morning, John Ternus’ hands are shaking.

On this September day in Silicon Valley, Apple’s new CEO is surrounded by celebrities, tech enthusiasts, and reporters who have flocked to Apple Park from around the world to catch a glimpse of the company’s new and long-awaited foldable phone, the Duo. After Ternus takes a few photos with the device, an Apple PR rep pulls the influencer known as IShowSpeed out of the crowd to meet him. Winning over the 21-year-old isn’t exactly the toughest assignment Ternus has faced in his 25-year Apple career: Speed barks when he sees the phone and then gleefully springs into a backflip.

But IShowSpeed also happens to be livestreaming the encounter to his 61 million subscribers on YouTube. And as Ternus thumbs through the $1,999-and-up phone, attempting to drag a photo into a text-message box, eagle-eyed viewers notice his hands quivering. Ternus later explains that he didn’t sleep much the night before. “I was on such a moment of adrenaline and caffeine and excitement for the day,” he tells Time.

There’s only a glimpse of Ternus’s personality revealed here. To date he’s more of a cipher than even Cook. He’s Apple’s San Francisco sans serif typeface brought to life. Handsome, distinctive, decidedly “Apple” — but plain. That, surely, is not the real John Ternus.

So it’s fitting that his ascension coincided with the announcement of the Duo, Apple’s most radical design change to the iPhone since its 2007 release. Apple has been exploring the concept for years. In 2011, when many people still carried around flip phones, Ternus and five other engineers filed a patent application for foldable electronic devices, exploring what kind of batteries and circuit boards might be needed for such an idea. “It felt clear that we were going to eventually get to a place where OLED displays were going to be flexible,” Ternus says.

The Ternus profile is the cover story for Time’s “Best Inventions of 2026”, which is led by the iPhone Duo. Let us not forget that this esteemed accolade was awarded to Humane’s AI Pin in 2023.

At the end of September, Apple was conspicuously absent when President Donald Trump hosted a luncheon for AI power players like SpaceX’s Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Google’s Sundar Pichai, who lobbied him on their visions for America’s tech future.

But Ternus and other Apple executives say they aren’t concerned. In the midst of a populist AI backlash, they contend that they are building a modest but personalized and privacy-preserving form of AI that will actually help ordinary people as opposed to merely dazzling Silicon Valley’s “lunatic fringe,” as Greg Joswiak, senior vice president of worldwide marketing, puts it. And besides, Ternus argues, even if other companies succeed in their mission of building super-intelligence, users will still want to talk to it on Apple devices.

This is, I’m convinced, the correct strategy for Apple. They’re smart not even to be ankle-deep in the wild capex spending pool that has all of their peer companies way out in the deep end, where their feet no longer touch the bottom. But this is a bet, and bets carry risk.

Also, I’d bet my bottom dollar that Joswiak is, in fact, a decades-long fan of Lunatic Fringe.