stream · october 2026

"…what is so wonderful about being big? It is often said that the world is suffering from the ills of bigness, and we now have some clinical examples in our large cities. Many cities are probably past the point of good government because too many things are wrong. Should we not rather ask whether we need cities? With modern systems of communication and transportation, businesses do not need to be within walking or taxicab distances of each other, and how many people must one be near in order to live a happy life? People who flock to cities looking for jobs and more interesting lives will flock back again if jobs and more interesting lives are to be found where they came from. It has been suggested that, with modern systems of communication, the America of the future may be simply a network of small towns."

—B.F. Skinner, Walden Two Revisited (1976)

starting Skinner’s Walden Two (1948). by this 1976 preface, he was already predicting comms would dismantle mega-cities into a network of small towns. (he sure did get remote-work logistics right decades early 😅)

since his work is known for out-engineering friction + trading human messiness for predictability, I'm curious to see if his behavioural utopia misunderstood why people still crave the chaos of the city, as I sometimes do/often don't 🤹‍♀️

Eric C. So in his recently released book, The Collision: What AI Does to Us, uses a great analogy to describe AI.

So, a Professor of Global Economics and Behavioral Science at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, draws from Steve Jobs' 1980 analogy that technology is "a bicycle for the mind" (itself based on Stuart S. Wilson's 1973 Scientific American study, Bicycle Technology—a fascinating read!—on the energy efficiency of movement between different species and machines that put the salmon in first place, topped only by a human on a bicycle).

AI, So argues, is a motorcycle for the mind, stating, "…motorcycles come with warnings that bicycles don’t. When power increases, so does risk. They’re harder to hold steady and require more skill to operate safely. You wouldn’t hand one to a child without serious training. When things go wrong on a motorcycle, they go wrong at speeds that multiply the consequences."

AI, he reminds us, comes with important caveats:

"An amplifier of human intention, one so powerful that it qualitatively changes the relationship between human and machine. A tool that can take you places you couldn’t reach before. But one that can also take you off a cliff if you don’t know what you’re doing. Like a motorcycle, AI isn’t inherently good or bad. It depends entirely on how you use it."

copies of popular WordPress plugin, Rank Math SEO PRO v3.0.123, downloaded between Oct 15 (20:02 UTC) + Oct 16 (07:12 UTC), 2026, shipped with active malware that created backdoors connecting to rank1cdn[.]com (via Wordfence)

⚠️ deactivating/updating alone won't clean the Trojan injection ⚠️

handing total site execution privileges to opaque, multi-megabyte plugin suites just to output <head> tags is a massive supply-chain risk ☠️

full-blown SEO suites install persistent background processes + scheduled cron tasks + external API hooks + custom auto-updaters… all for basic markup you can write directly in your theme

👎 fragile, proprietary mega-plugins controlling your site

👍 lightweight, auditable templates for Microformats (h-entry, h-card), OpenGraph, and JSON-LD

outputting basic HTML meta tags should NOT be compromising your entire website!

ngl, been fantasising about this ever since (I didn't even mention it in) James' Food Questions challenge.

so today I had me some north Indian curry with button mushrooms, green peas, onion-and-tomato masala, and fenugreek 🇮🇳👌

wonder what my taste buds will compel me to revisit next on my foodie list… 🍴

how does a photographer's personal perspectives and preconceptions influence their presentation of their subject?

I hate having my photo taken, yet seeing myself through my partner's lens almost always makes me feel like a work of art. witchcraft? or another example of applied quantum physics in the form of the observer effect?

Canon did a fascinating experiment that drives this point home. THE LAB: DECOY tasked six different photographers with different (fabricated) back stories on the same man and given ten mins to capture the "essence" of their subject.

ranging from self-made millionaire, ex-convict, commercial fisherman, psychic, recovering alcoholic, and a lifesaver, each portrait then goes on to eerily capture the proposed identity as if that narrative were indeed the case. great demonstration of a self-fulfilling prophecy, aka the Pygmalion effect!

one of the many fascinating cognitive gymnastics about humans is our ability to see the collective future (macro issues like economic decline, war, climate crisis, etc.) as disastrous while simultaneously excluding expectations of our own individual futures from that projected reality.

this mental time travel differentiates between personal future thinking and a related optimism bias, and collective future thinking (chronic pessimism bias).

interesting new research paper in the Applied Cognitive Psychology journal studied the breakdown of this psychological firewall and how temporal distance acts as a psychological buffer against collective pessimism:

• near-term vulnerability (0–5 years):

  • reality check works; we lose our rose-coloured glasses once we realise global problems will spill into our everyday lives, impacting our optimism for the future.

• distant-future insulation (10–15 years):

  • optimism bounces back; we imagine our far-off lives will be fine and feel little emotional distress about it (it does, though, dial it down a notch from "amazing" to "good"); our brain turns it into a movie of sorts, able to suspend disbelief long enough to imagine grim consequences for others while believing ourselves shielded from it.

paper: Exposure to Negative Information About the Collective Future Eliminates the Positivity Bias for the Personal Events in the Near Future by Şule Gülpınar Çiftkaya, Esra Konan Ay, and Simay Ikier.

the sky's being wizardy again

and we're LIIIIIIVE! 'tis one giant leap for Nadjakind 🌐🌕

small post-social test from my phone: writing here, publishing on my site to /stream 💪

update: round-trip woooorks! 🥳

hello world from the other side of the social media hell-hole :)