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
Language models don't "know" anything
Training data are construction materials for a language models. A language model can never be inspired. It is itself a cultural artefact derived from other cultural artefacts.
The machine learning process is loosely based on decades-old grossly simplified models of how brains work.
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It’s important to remember this so that we don’t fall for marketing claims that constantly imply that these tools are fully functioning assistants.
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Who was the first man on the moon?
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What you’re likely to get back from that prompt would be something like:
On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first human to step on the moon.
This is NASA’s own phrasing. Most answers on the web are likely to be variations on this, so the answer from a language model is likely to be so too.
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The prompt we provided is strongly associated in the training data set with other sentences that are all variations of NASA’s phrasing of the answer. The model won’t answer with just “Neil Armstrong” because it isn’t actually answering the question, it’s responding with the text that correlates with the question. It doesn’t “know” anything.
Why using language models for programming is a bad idea
A core aspect of the theory-building model of software development is code that developers don’t understand is a liability. It means your mental model of the software is inaccurate which will lead you to create bugs as you modify it or add other components that interact with pieces you don’t understand.
Language model tools for software development are specifically designed to create large volumes of code that the programmer doesn’t understand. They are liability engines for all but the most experienced developer. You can’t solve this problem by having the “AI” understand the codebase and how its various components interact with each other because a language model isn’t a mind. It can’t have a mental model of anything. It only works through correlation.
How I experience the web today
Truly a living nightmare.
A great interactive demo showcasing just about all the major obnoxious dark patterns a lot of larger websites use to make our lives miserable. Not the dystopian future we were promised.