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*flashlight under chin*

It was a still, moonless night much like tonight, the darkness congealed in the sky like three-day-old top ramen, at 1 AM. A frontend developer named Chad needed just one package. No problem. He typed npm install.

EACCES: permission denied.

He scoured Stack Overflow for answers. He cleared his cache. Deleted package-lock.json, committed package-lock.json. Nuked node_modules. Nothing. The errors only got weirder... gyp ERR! stack Error: \make` failed`.

He even considered contacting his team, but it was 3:30 AM, and he already knew their answer: "It works on my machine."

In his desperation, he even tried Yarn, but the more he pulled at all the loose threads, the more frayed he got.

Then a thought occurred to him, and he laughed maniacally. "You want to play games? Let's play games!" He clacked furiously away at his keyboard. Then, as his index finger hovered over the return key, he took a pause, realizing what he was about to do. He typed the forbidden incantation. The one he swore he'd never use…

...sudo... npm install -g

He ran npm… as root.

They say he went insane, and some nights, if you leave a bowl of ramen out, you can still hear him in his office... moaning about how his laptop was haunted by malware and conflicting permissions, trying to figure out why his linter won't install.

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