Design has tradeoffs, and when these are considered I doubt you'd want to trade your eyes for another organism's. The human eye is a marvel of engineering, and even today the best digital cameras we design can't capture even close to the dynamic range our eyes can see (12-15 stops vs. 20-24 stops simultaneously). After adjusting to the dark, the human eye can perceive a single photon striking the retina.
> Life didn't spring up fully formed, it developed in stages.
Have these stages been observed, or are they merely a speculative story? No one has ever demonstrated life arising from non-life (a violation of the Law of Biogenesis).
What is semantically incoherent about my perspective that life was clearly designed?
We know that intricate machines are designed by smart people; they don't just happen by luck. The idea that living things, which are far more intricately organized at every level than any machine we have made, could have arisen by some unknown series of chance steps is a fairy tale. It has never been observed, and even in the most controlled of environments it cannot be replicated. To me it's far more reasonable to conclude that life was designed by a super intelligent Creator. Just as a piano implies a piano maker (even if we haven't seen them), life implies an original Life-giver.
The worst situation I've encountered is after a large conference when everyone is leaving the hotel at once. An elevator quickly fills up on the way down, but then wastes time stopping at every subsequent floor with a call, even though no one else can fit inside. At each floor the elevator stops, the doors open, the waiting people see it's already packed, the doors close, and this repeats on the next 15 floors before finally reaching the bottom where everyone gets off. If the algorithm could know an elevator is completely full and only stop at its destination floors rather than every floor along the way with a call, it would be far more efficient.
The Big Bang is an almost infinitely malleable story, contorted to comport with almost anything we observe. But how is this useful? The predictions of this theory continually fail. The farther we look, the more we see stars, galaxies, black holes, and other structures that shouldn't exist according to this model.
What if the universe doesn't have a naturalistic origin, but was created by God? How much greater would our understanding of the world be if more scientists focused on studying present phenomena rather than trying to fit stories about the past with observed data?
Instead of questioning whether the Big Bang assumption is true, astrophysicists prefer to perform endless "gymnastics" to try to make the mounting contrary data fit their theory about how the universe began.
In my petrol-powered Prius I average 52 MPG, so at the current price of gas ($2.60/gallon) I pay $0.50 to drive 10 miles - less than the listed cost to drive an electric car the same distance.
According to the timeline it took more than a week just for Filevine to respond saying they would review and fix the vulnerability. It was 24 days after initial disclosure when he confirmed the fix was in place.
Someone could be tricked into giving their npm credentials to the attacker (e.g. via a phishing email), and then the attacker publishes new versions of their packages with the malicious diff. Then when the infected packages are installed, npm runs the malicious preinstall script which harvests secrets from the new machine, and if these include an npm token the worm can see which packages it has access to publish, and infect them too to continue spreading.
One option to make it a little safer is to add ignore-scripts=true to a .npmrc file in your project root. Lifestyle scripts then won't run automatically. It's not as nice as Pnpm or Bun, though, since this also prevents your own postinstall scripts from running (not just those of dependencies), and there's no way to whitelist trusted packages.
I would expect to be able to download a package and then inspect the code before I decide to import/run any of the package files. But npm by default will run arbitrary code in the package before developers have a chance to inspect it, which can be very surprising and dangerous.
> Human cognition was basically bruteforced by evolution
This is an assumption, not a fact. Perhaps human cognition was created by God, and our minds have an essential spiritual component which cannot be reproduced by a purely physical machine.
Many people have non-JS backends and only use npm for frontend dependencies. If a postinstall script runs in a dev or build environment it could get access to a lot of things that wouldn't be available when the package is imported in a browser or other production environment.
In my experience, packages which legitimately require a postinstall script to work correctly are very rare. For the apps I maintain, esbuild is the only dependency which benefits from a postinstall script to slightly improve performance (though it still works without the script). So there's no scaling issue adding one or two packages to a whitelist if desired.
It's crazy to me that npm still executes postinstall scripts by default for all dependencies. Other package managers (Pnpm, Bun) do not run them for dependencies unless they are added to a specific allow-list. Composer never runs lifecycle scripts for dependencies.
This matters because dependencies are often installed in a build or development environment with access to things that are not available when the package is actually imported in a browser or other production environment.
It absolutely matters. Many people install packages for front-end usage which would only be imported in the browser sandbox. Additionally, a package may be installed in a dev environment for inspection/testing before deciding whether to use it in production.
To me it's quite unexpected/scary that installing a package on my dev machine can execute arbitrary code before I ever have a chance to inspect the package to see whether I want to use it.
How so? The page with the double-click prompt immediately changes the parent page behind it to the target location, and it can easily show a loading indicator for a couple seconds to wait for the target page to render before prompting the user to double-click.
What evidence would it take for more scientists to recognize that perhaps life didn't evolve through some evolutionary process, but was intentionally created? It seems like few ever consider that their starting presupposition may be wrong.
Property hooks are the headline feature, but they seem like something I'd rarely use in practice. It is nice to have the option available though, in case I need to add extra logic to a property without breaking everywhere that it's accessed.