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Arguments grounded in systems I have built, operated, measured, or contributed to.

Changing a specification is mostly a migration problem

The NIP-54 format migration shows how an implementation tool can address a reviewer's compatibility concern and make a specification change easier to adopt.

A duplicate can be an observation

BigBrotr's earlier PostgreSQL schema separates event identity from relay observations, showing why deduplication must preserve where a record was seen.

An index must preserve the specification's distinctions

A Nostr storage backend returned the wrong rows because its index kept tag values but discarded tag keys, collapsing a distinction required by the protocol.

A failed crawl is not an empty result

A measurement pipeline has to preserve three different states: observed, absent, and unavailable. Collapsing them produces confident findings from data the collector never saw.