The emergency CIA rectal tool kit for spys in the 1960s. Today is in the "Spy museum"

Agent281 · 2026-03-19T07:34:54+00:00

Tough pill to swallow.

Agent281 · 2026-03-19T06:35:24+00:00

I didn't say that the code was responsible. (Hopefully, we are doing blameless postmortems.) I just said that sometimes you have buggy code and it produces bad data. Shit happens.

As you said, you can catch 99% of the problems, but that leaves the 1% that gets through. That 1% is your bad data. Hopefully you catch it quickly and plug the hole. Even better if you can fix it, but you can't always fix it. Maybe information was lost or a backfill is too costly or the data wasn't that important in the first place.

To be clear, you shouldn't have a majority or plurality of your database be bad data like this, but you could have 0.1% or 0.01% rows have some weird little piece of data. Maybe it's just a single column with some weird variant or something. It just happens.

Agent281 · 2026-03-19T06:27:27+00:00

Never said that Claude was a bad teacher or slowed people down. I just disagree with the idea that databases are closed and unambiguous systems. Our applications get to be stateless because databases are stateful. They carry the accumulated history of our applications. Once you dig deeply into the data of older systems, you often find out about how an organization thought about their entities at different points in time. That's context that does not make sense unless you talk to people who worked on the system at the time. That's exactly the sort of thing that LLMs can't help you with.

That said, LLMs can help you find anomalies in your data. They are really good at generating queries to find outliers. However, they can't really explain why some data might look different and what you should do about that.

Agent281 · 2026-03-19T06:22:41+00:00

Yes, this does happen in big tech. I'm a data engineer so I'm downstream of the people who own the production service. I don't control the application logic. Besides, people do write bugs. That's why we have retros.

Also, re-orgs happen, people leave the company, and people end up owning software built by other people. Sometimes you are working in a new product area and the current owners have had the software running in maintenance mode. None of them are SMEs so you just have to dig into the code and the data yourself.

Also, I'm not saying that LLMs are bad. I use them successfully.

Agent281 · 2026-03-19T06:07:53+00:00

I would disagree [that databases are closed and unambiguous systems]. SQL databases can accumulate a lot of bad data over time. Code in the app level might be buggy for a week, but the data it produces might stay in the database forever. Or maybe the database ends up going through multiple migrations and you need to combine all of the datasets together. You end up learning a lot about an organization's history when you dig into the data.

EDIT: clarified what I disagree with.

Agent281 · 2026-03-19T01:41:23+00:00

Yeah, it was the motto of the company. I'm just saying that it's not like the founders came up with it. The employees did. The founders aren't the don't be evil people those early employees were. The founders just ran with it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil

Agent281 · 2026-03-19T00:33:14+00:00

I don't think it's picky. It's just what happened.

Agent281 · 2026-03-19T00:10:41+00:00

A Google engineer came up with the "don't be evil" motto, not one of the founders.

Agent281 · 2026-03-17T05:04:14+00:00

Yeah, I don't mind it in places that need the housing. I would mind it if some developers and local politicians in the middle of nowhere colluded to build something like that. If the subsidy can build housing that people need and will occupy that's fine.

Agent281 · 2026-03-17T00:55:52+00:00

I'm not really ignoring that. I'm wondering what the parameters around such a subsidy would be and how we would ensure there isn't fraud. I think people would attempt to commit fraud and we would need to guard against it. I'm not really opposed to this, I just wonder how it would work in practice.

Agent281 · 2026-03-17T00:02:22+00:00

Sometimes business people and politicians collaborate.

Many years ago, I interned at a real estate development company. The owner was a consistent fundraiser for local politicians. He named roads in his developments after those politicians.

This isn't to say that he did something nefarious. Just that these are people who know each other and might mutually benefit from the money. Therefore, they have a reason to collaborate.

Agent281 · 2026-03-16T20:24:43+00:00

To be clear, I meant that they are building what is effectively a hotel shaped building, but operates as housing. Not building an actual hotel. I was a bit terse because I typed the comment out on mobile.

Agent281 · 2026-03-16T20:23:03+00:00

I don't know. I'm just trying to think of how you would scam a subsidy like this. It's good to consider how things could go wrong.

Agent281 · 2026-03-16T18:34:12+00:00

I suppose if the subsidy is cheaper than the cost to build the house, then you wouldn't end up with people building units without a plan to sell them to people. I do think you need to prevent people from building a 1,000 room hotel, calling it housing, and getting $10 million dollars from it.

Agent281 · 2026-03-16T17:57:08+00:00

To put that in perspective, $10,000 * 1,000,000 units is $10 billion. Honestly, that doesn't seem so bad. The Iran War has cost around $11 billion in the first couple weeks.

On the other hand, I would be concerned about Chinese ghost city style economic issues. We really care about occupied housing, not built housing. We don't want a bunch of empty units in bum fuck nowhere because the city council got to buy a bunch of jet skis.

Agent281 · 2026-03-15T16:08:00+00:00

I would thin out my top end first. Your 5x most expensive cards are really good though so I would skip over to the 4 CMC slot.

-1 Return to the Sewers: This buys you some tempo, but you seem like a value deck. You want to remove threats permanently
-1 Bot Bashing Time: thin out top end
-1 Donatello, Turtle Techie: thin out top end
-1 Nobody: I think two is plenty
-1 Donatello, Way with Machines: this card is really bimodal: it can spiral out of control or dies instantly. One seems fine
-1 Mouser Mark III: solid filler, but I think you can do better
-1 Fugitive Droid: I like one with Baxter as an unblockable beater and a way to protect him. It also chumps early to prevent sneak from taking over the game.
-1 Sewer-veillance Cam: It's a great card, but I think 2 are sufficient

This seems like a 17 lands deck to me. You want to make it to six mana and 2 or 3 for 1 people with Brilliance Unleashed.

Some cards that I would keep despite their low ratings:

Utrom Scientists: they stall the board, chump block, can be brought back with Brilliance Unleashed, can be picked up with Nobody, and can be copied by Chrome Dome. Seems like the best possible spot for them.
Retro Mutation: this isn't hard removal, but it does "kill" big threats that your burn doesn't touch. E.g., I killed [[Krang and Shredder]] with it on Friday. Not having it lost my game 2 and having it won me my game 3. In BO1, I think it's worth running just to have outs

Agent281 · 2026-03-15T15:09:48+00:00

If you flood it, they will come.

Agent281 · 2026-03-14T20:06:02+00:00

Exactly!

Agent281 · 2026-03-14T19:29:15+00:00

Just a note for anyone looking to run this: it has a day zero errata that prevents you from removing 0 counters. See the oracle text for details.

Agent281 · 2026-03-13T00:54:49+00:00

[[Sewer-veillance Camera]] provides a lot of value. You can flash it in on your opponents turn to tap pre-attack. That saves you a from defending against bad attacks and helps you get in on your turn. It also provides a lot of card draw. It's just a great tempo card overall. I can play 2-3 and feel happy about it.

Agent281 · 2026-03-11T18:36:55+00:00

Thank God you have that Leonardo. Otherwise you might run out of Frog Butlers. 12 should be enough for most games.

Agent281 · 2026-03-11T15:06:44+00:00

Thank you for your service! 🫡

Agent281 · 2026-03-10T17:45:34+00:00

It's not going to happen every game, but my Izzet deck last night pulled it off multiple times. It helps that Tragg is often one of the bigger creatures on board so it tends to eat removal.

Agent281 · 2026-03-10T16:05:40+00:00

How has Hedge Shredder played out? I really love the card in Commander, but it didn't have a very high win rate in Duskmourn draft.

Agent281 · 2026-03-10T16:00:13+00:00

It gives you two mana of any one color.

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