# monty (blogs) — RSS Amplifier Recent posts from the 2 feeds in the RSS Amplifier directory that cover monty. Page: Feed: --- ## [The Birthday Paradox, simulated](https://pcloadletter.dev/blog/birthday-paradox/) _2026-01-23 · pcloadletter_ I'm a fan of simulating counterintuitive statistics. I recently did this with the Monty Hall problem and I really enjoyed how it turned out. A similarly interesting statistical puzzle is the birthday paradox: you only need to get 23 people in a room a room to end up with a 50% chance of at least one birthday match amongst the group. This can, of course, be demonstrated using math . But still I… ## [Pre-agent nostalgia](https://pcloadletter.dev/blog/pre-coding-agent-nostalgia/) _2026-01-18 · pcloadletter_ Everything seems to move fast these days and apparently nostalgia is no exception. I'm not an agentic coding evangelist but I'm also a realist—coding agents are really impressive and have changed the way most of us write software. Agents can help you plan, write, and ship code more efficiently and effectively if you use them correctly. But dammit, I miss the old way. I miss the ceremony of… ## [Features for no one (AI edition)](https://pcloadletter.dev/blog/ai-features-for-no-one/) _2026-01-10 · pcloadletter_ One of the worst aspects of tech hype is the onslaught of useless features. The current AI hype train is clearly no exception. Whenever hyped tech comes up, the tech industry seems to get collective amnesia about how to validate product and feature ideas and that UX research is a thing . Instead, we just throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. They are features for no one. I recall one… ## [We might have been slower to abandon Stack Overflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole](https://pcloadletter.dev/blog/abandoning-stackoverflow/) _2026-01-07 · pcloadletter_ If you were a software developer prior to 2024, you probably used Stack Overflow. It was a reliable place to find good answers to many technical questions. If you asked any questions there, you probably also know that it was a toxic hellhole—you often got criticized for not having basic knowledge or not understanding error messages. This isn't exactly a secret. In 2018, Stack Overflow published a… ## [Cool project, will you actually maintain it?](https://pcloadletter.dev/blog/cool-project/) _2026-01-04 · pcloadletter_ I have seen a lot of cool, open source projects posted online. Helpful libraries, starter templates, frameworks. What I often don't see, however, is a plan for maintaining them. Long after the dopamine wears off from the upvotes and karma from the initial post about your project, you'll be left with a bunch of code and possibly some people now using that code in their applications. This is a… ## [Software craftsmanship is dead](https://pcloadletter.dev/blog/craftsmanship-is-dead/) _2026-01-03 · pcloadletter_ "Ship it!" "We're agile now, baby. Move fast and break things!"" "We measure our engineers by the impact they have!" Somewhere along the way, in the midst of the agilification of software, or the software engineer salary gold rush, we forgot about craftsmanship . I have been in big tech, startups, consultancies, and even government. These are all different environments with one key similarity:… ## [The Monty Hall Problem, a side-by-side simulation](https://pcloadletter.dev/blog/monty/) _2026-01-01 · pcloadletter_ I saw a cool version of the Monty Hall game here recently: https://monty.donk.systems . This is really cool! But I had an itch I wanted to scratch: rather than manually test out the probabilities, I wanted to run two games side-by-side: one where a switch happened and one where a switch didn't happen. Then, running those over and over, we should see the overall win percentages converge to 66.7%… ## [I hope generative AI does away with SEO](https://pcloadletter.dev/blog/ai-and-seo/) _2025-12-30 · pcloadletter_ Have you ever searched for something on Google and found the first one, two, or three blog posts to be utter nonsense? That's because these blog posts have been optimized not for human consumption, but rather to entertain the search engine ranking algorithms. People have figured out the right buzzwords to include in headings, how to game backlinks, and research keywords to write up blog posts… ## [npm needs an analog to pnpm's minimumReleaseAge and yarn's npmMinimalAgeGate](https://pcloadletter.dev/blog/npm-min-release-age/) _2025-12-28 · pcloadletter_ With the growing number of supply chain attacks in the npm ecosystem (for example, Shai-Hulud ), package managers like pnpm and yarn have added a very handy configuration option that prevents the install of new packages: minimumReleaseAge and npmMinimalAgeGate , respectively. These options allow developers to specify the minimum age of a dependency before it gets installed. For example, a… ## [Make your PR process resilient to AI slop](https://pcloadletter.dev/blog/pr-review-ai-slop-resilience/) _2025-12-24 · pcloadletter_ One concern I have heard from AI naysayers is that AI slop will make code reviews nearly impossible. AI churns out so much code, documentation, etc. that it's just impossible for any reviewer to keep up with it... right? Wrong! If you have good PR review processes, then reviewing AI-assisted code shouldn't be any more onerous than reviewing any other code. Here are some concerns I have heard and… ## [Home Internet From Space (Sponsored)](https://crawlproof.com/a/TT8S5b3yDQT9) _2025-12-23 · **Sponsored**_ Residential satellite internet that brings connectivity to homes beyond conventional networks ## [AI hype is excessive, but its productivity gains are real](https://pcloadletter.dev/blog/ai-hype-and-productivity/) _2025-10-19 · pcloadletter_ I'm kind of writing this to "past" me, who I assume is "current" you for a number of folks out there. For the rest of you, this might just sound like ramblings of an old fogey super late to the party. Yes, AI is over-hyped. LLMs will not solve every problem under the sun but, like with any hot new tech, companies are going to say it will solve every problem out there, especially problems in the… ## [Remember why you started](https://abhiroop.github.io/remember/) _2025-07-09 · Abhiroop Sarkar_ I think that it’s extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don’t think we… ## [On Equality](https://abhiroop.github.io/Equality/) _2025-03-19 · Abhiroop Sarkar_ One of the most fundamental notions in type theory is equality. There are various forms of equality, including propositional equality, judgmental equality, typal equality, extensional equality, intensional equality, path equality (a key concept in homotopy type theory), among others. The list goes on, and any deep exploration of the concept of equality could easily expand to book length. Instead… ## [20 Films That Inspire, Teach and Move](https://abhiroop.github.io/Films/) _2025-02-09 · Abhiroop Sarkar_ Inspired by Satyajit Ray’s Deep Focus—a compulsory reading at FTII Pune and NSD Delhi—I was struck by the depth and nuance with which Ray analyses his favourite films and directors. This led me to finally compile a list of my own 10 (+10) favourite films. However, I soon realised that rather than ranking them purely on cinematic merit, my choices were more personal—a reflection of the life lessons… ## [Square Limit by M.C. Escher](https://abhiroop.github.io/Square-Limit/) _2024-11-04 · Abhiroop Sarkar_ This is a digital rendition of M.C. Escher’s square limit artwork. The most surprising thing about this piece is that it is composed of only four basic tiles shown below: The entirety of this art is generated by taking these four tiles and using the power of Functional Programming à la function composition to create several powerful combinators that can render the infinite shapes. This technique…