I think we found the constituency that led to the present sorry situation.

That's rather rude.

If you're referring to my packages on npm, I joined way late to that game. This was also ~15 years ago.

One wonders if Microsoft/npm.js should allow new packages to be published immediately following an account email address change? I mean changes to email address are already recognized as potential attack vectors, so emails are sent to the old address warning of potential account take over. But this seems to have been done at night, so the warning email would not be seen yet. Even so a new package could be published and served to the world immediately. Unless I misunderstand something about the facts this would indicate an extreme lack of imagination in the people at Microsoft who already went through several cycles of hardening the service against supply chain poisoning attacks.

Lest you wanted to know what happens if the right campaign contributions aren't made.

At some point he who pays the piper was going to call the tune...

Quick note that "devalued dollar" is inflation, not a cause of inflation.

Inflation is about what goes on inside the country. So you can have inflation internally while the domestic currency strengthens against foreign currencies, and vice versa.

If your currency is falling against foreign currencies but prices are also dropping domestically, you get deflation. This was happening in China a couple of years ago, and they were exporting this deflation to other countries.

Ironically tfa is festooned with ads.

Over 1.5 trillion news articles have ads injected into them by the company's commerce team!

Sure, but the source blogpost isn't.

Plausible, and likely similar.

I think you have it backwards. The brain doesn't "know" what's supposed to be sensitive or pleasurable. It boots up with no training data after all. It machine learns what's sensitive due to a combination of nerve density and other factors. We haven't figured out all the other factors yet. But that's why there's a correlation between nerve density and sensitivity: density means sensitivity.

This is just wrong. The brain does instinctively know that some things are good and bad.

But it doesn't.

I mean: "audiophile" is a word defined as "person who wastes money on audio equipment".

It's a shame isn't it, because I define it as someone who listens carefully and is critical in sonic arrangement on recordings, relative to the recording medium and playback equipment.

It always seems to be used disparagingly or as a slur and perhaps some of it is deserved: I used to work with a guy who had a Naim CD player and would talk about how it had some balancing system for no jitter during data transfer from the laser read process, but was obviously clueless on the error-correction inherent in CDs anyway, making this mechanism redundant for the most part. He seemed to think it made the CDs sound better when in reality the original recording engineer, the mixing engineer, the mastering engineer and the pressing plant played more of a part that any of the CD player nonsense; I think he also used gold-plated cables, as if electrons somehow degraded when passed along copper wires...

Utter nonsense. As for me, I just learned to listen critically and identify mixing artefacts and compression oddities etc. which are more apparent on non-lowend audio equipment. Bluetooth speakers are the worst because they use acoustic coupling for harmonic reproduction and just generally sound unbalanced and bad.