u/drakeblood4

I noticed this post while doing my last-minute voting research on the regent race. Considering it was about political agents sockpuppeting, and that the OP was doing some weird and broadly-disliked replying in the comments, I decided to look into his post history.

It turns out it's a 2 week old account specifically for the purposes of dragging Hooton and trying to ensure that as many votors as possible pried away from Hooton ended up in the Lachlandi camp instead of the Murray camp. Moreover, it's also a real name, tied to a real guy with a real linkedin, Aquiles La Grave. The guy seems to be pretty AI fixated, posting op eds about it to the boulder reporting lab. That said, he seems to be havev the "AI will kill all our jobs" sort of AI-myopia, rather than the "AI is God" or "AI will kill all of us" kind. He also seems to be using pretty clearly AI assisted writing, a recent article of his used both an em-dash and the "It's not X it's Y" motif in the title, and a cursory read through the body of it with the Wikipedia editor's guide to spotting AI writing open doesn't paint a very flattering picture.

I wasn't able to see any overt political connection between this dude and Lalchandani, although in all apparentcy Aquiles seems to know the guy personally through some combination of being in the Boulder political sphere and being a tech dude Lalchandani would be likely to hit up. I can't really criticize someone too hard for advocating for someone they know personally, I've recommended Kenny Van Nguyen to people and know him from CU so it'd be hypocritical to say that that's disqualifying on its own.

What I can say is that it's a really weird hang to be coming in and doing all this in the specific context of responding to campaign sockpuppeting allegations. Aquiles at the very least blurs the line a bit between concerned citizen and either a politician trying to pick a winner or a tech-bro who views a lawyer for tech-bros as an ideological ally. All of that seems like it's probably important to disclose.

Finally, let me just say that across the board AI boosters and doomers are weird. Whether they're nuke data centers weird or just "random reddit reply guy trying to put his finger on the scale" weird, it's not awesome. If you've already voted, congrats on not being a chronic procrastinator like me. Otherwise, maybe take that into mind and vote for one of the two candidates this guy isn't trying to subtly pressure folks into voting for?

Here's the github link.

Some folks in a pauper community organizing discord that I'm a part of brought up that it's pretty hard for local game stores to get their hands on pauper cards. Other people had a pretty good grasp on drafting up pick lists for pauper cards out of semi-sorted bulk, but I wanted to put something out for a buylist.

For me, Cardsphere has been pretty good for buylisting. Because Cardsphere is offer based as opposed to listing based, the highest offers are whittled away, as opposed to the cheapest listings. By default, that means that if you have a big list of okay offers on a wide variety of cards you can be the surviving listing and eventually get the card. What's a big list of okay offers? A buylist.

Cardsphere also recently got much better mtgjson and scryfall integration, which made it much easier to use those IDs to make a buylist csv without having to do a bunch of piecemeal pairing up of cards. I already had good chunks of this code written for personal projects, so it was relatively trivial to build out.

What does this do?

This tool downloads two mtgjson files: AllIdentifiers and AllPricesToday. AllIdentifiers is basically every printing of every card. AllPricesToday is, well, exactly what it says on the tin, all prices for the given day. It then scrapes MTGGoldfish metagame info for either just metagame staples, or for all cards used in the broader meta.

Based on the data it gets out from those files, it spits out a buylist that can be uploaded to Cardsphere's Wants page that offers a percentage of TCGPlayer market on all found cards.

It also has a settings file and the ability to add settings when running from the terminal. You can set the minimum price to add to the buylist, minimum printing price to look at the card at all, offer percentage of TCGPlayer, and specific cards to ignore.

Hopefully this should make it significantly easier for stores to stock Pauper singles.