Hi there. My name is Matei Stanca and I make websites and stuff.
Featured project
Neurocracy
Project media
Neurocracy is a project conceived by Joannes Truyens, Younès Rabii, and myself, featuring visual direction and illustrations by Alice Duke and Ollie Tarbuck in addition to a range of futurist stories from contributing writers Leigh Alexander, Io Black, Holly Nielsen, Malka Older, Edward Smith, Axel Hassen Taiari, and Yudhanjaya Wijeratne. It aims to be equal parts interactive fiction and cautionary tale about the intersection of surveillance capitalism, big data, and authoritarianism.
Latest snippets
JavaScript template literal as object property name
This will throw an error in every JavaScript engine:
Code language: JavaScript
{
`mouseenter.${eventNamespace}`: handler,
}
Why? Because template literals are not actually literals, confusingly. However, it is possible to (ab)use JavaScript’s zany, vibes-based type coercion to make this valid by wrapping the template literal in an array like so:
Code language: JavaScript
{
[`mouseenter.${eventNamespace}`]: handler,
}
Callback hell
Asynchronous JavaScript, or JavaScript that uses callbacks, is hard to get right intuitively. A lot of code ends up looking like this:
Code language: JavaScript
fs.readdir(source, function (err, files) {
if (err) {
console.log('Error finding files: ' + err)
} else {
files.forEach(function (filename, fileIndex) {
console.log(filename)
gm(source + filename).size(function (err, values) {
if (err) {
console.log('Error identifying file size: ' + err)
} else {
console.log(filename + ' : ' + values)
aspect = (values.width / values.height)
widths.forEach(function (width, widthIndex) {
height = Math.round(width / aspect)
console.log('resizing ' + filename + 'to ' + height + 'x' + height)
this.resize(width, height).write(dest + 'w' + width + '_' + filename, function(err) {
if (err) console.log('Error writing file: ' + err)
})
}.bind(this))
}
})
})
}
})
See the pyramid shape and all the
})at the end? Eek! This is affectionately known as callback hell.
Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face
If you think [LLM] crawlers respect robots.txt then you are several assumptions of good faith removed from reality. These bots crawl everything they can find, robots.txt be damned, including expensive endpoints like git blame, every page of every git log, and every commit in every repo, and they do so using random User-Agents that overlap with end-users and come from tens of thousands of IP addresses – mostly residential, in unrelated subnets, each one making no more than one HTTP request over any time period we tried to measure – actively and maliciously adapting and blending in with end-user traffic and avoiding attempts to characterize their behavior or block their traffic.
We are experiencing dozens of brief outages per week, and I have to review our mitigations several times per day to keep that number from getting any higher. When I do have time to work on something else, often I have to drop it when all of our alarms go off because our current set of mitigations stopped working. Several high-priority tasks at SourceHut have been delayed weeks or even months because we keep being interrupted to deal with these bots, and many users have been negatively affected because our mitigations can’t always reliably distinguish users from bots.
All of my sysadmin friends are dealing with the same problems. I was asking one of them for feedback on a draft of this article and our discussion was interrupted to go deal with a new wave of LLM bots on their own server.
[…]
Please stop legitimizing LLMs or AI image generators or GitHub Copilot or any of this garbage. I am begging you to stop using them, stop talking about them, stop making new ones, just stop. If blasting CO2 into the air and ruining all of our freshwater and traumatizing cheap laborers and making every sysadmin you know miserable and ripping off code and books and art at scale and ruining our fucking democracy isn’t enough for you to leave this shit alone, what is?