Hi there. My name is Matei Stanca and I make websites and stuff.
Featured project
Neurocracy
Project media
Neurocracy aims to be equal parts interactive fiction and cautionary tale about the intersection of surveillance capitalism, big data, and authoritarianism. This is conveyed through the medium of a futuristic equivalent of Wikipedia known as Omnipedia, in which the reader is presented with articles and information in a familiar format so that they may piece together the history and events of the year 2049.
Latest snippets
AI does not exist but it will ruin everything anyway
Angela Collier nailed exactly how the big tech hype and misleading claims would go when she posted this in 2023.
LLMs don't do what they're usually presented as doing
LLMs, the technology underpinning the current AI hype wave, don’t do what they’re usually presented as doing. They have no innate understanding, they do not think or reason, and they have no way of knowing if a response they provide is truthful or, indeed, harmful. They work based on statistical continuation of token streams, and everything else is a user-facing patch on top.
JavaScript template literal as object property name
This will throw an error in every JavaScript engine:
Code language: JavaScript
{
`mouseenter.${eventNamespace}`: handler,
}
Why? Because template literals are not actually literals, as confusing as that name is - they’re expressions. However, it is possible to (ab)use JavaScript’s zany, vibes-based type coercion to make this valid by wrapping the template literal in an array like so:
Code language: JavaScript
{
[`mouseenter.${eventNamespace}`]: handler,
}
This causes the JavaScript engine to evaluate the template literal into a string, then it coerces the array containing that one string into a string, which is then valid as the property name.