  Recently, arguments for a refined de Sitter conjecture were put forward in
arXiv:1810.05506. Using the large distance conjecture of arXiv:hep-th/0605264,
the authors provide evidence for this dS conjecture in asymptotic regimes of
field space, where the parametric control of string theory becomes arbitrarily
good. Their main tool is Bousso's covariant entropy bound arXiv:hep-th/9905177.
Here, we present a simpler way to reach a similar conclusion. The argument is
based on the fact that the cutoff of an effective theory with gravity decreases
as the number of species grows. We then discuss a loophole in this argument and
its possible counterpart in the assumptions underlying the entropy-based
derivation. The idea is to consider potentials which, while they remain below
an exponentially falling bound, have small oscillations leading locally to
relatively flat regions or even to an infinite series of dS minima.
