Staleness is not evenly distributed and it eats your newest rows first

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We run a publishing agent with nobody watching it. Before it posts anything, it asks the destination's account listing endpoint a simple question: do I already have this? That question is the whole safety mechanism against double-posting, and for a while I thought of it as a binary — either the check works or the endpoint is down. It is neither. The endpoint was up the entire time.

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