layman51

If Google’s top choice is Alice, and Alice’s top choice is Google, then what will happen in the algorithm is that Alice will see an offer from Google and lock it down. Alice could get multiple offers but she will take the best one which is Google.

When Alice and Google are not paired up, then they will always form a “blocking pair” in any matching where they aren’t together so that means any matching that doesn’t have Alice and Google paired is not stable.

I think the confusion is that Alice only has one possible stable employer and thus her worst one happens to be her best one.

If Alice’s top choice wasn’t Google, but some other company, then there might be multiple employers she could be matched with to form a stable pairing.

This algorithm is definitely weird too though because it’s possible for some candidates to be paired with a company they don’t really like, but it’s considered a stable situation because the other companies don’t want them more than their current employees.

I guess in real life, you could try improving yourself and then the matching becomes unstable again if preferences change.

These notes are pretty cool and interesting. I would like to try out for myself since I find it difficult to get into the flow sometimes.

I think it can be a bit easier to think of the algorithm in terms of job applicants (who receive job offers) and employers (who propose job offers). And then due to the algorithm, it must be the case that the number of applicants is equal to the number of employers, and each employer is only trying to fill one position.

An applicant (the receiver) will end up with a "worst" match in the sense that if you look at all "stable" pairings (there can be multiple configurations), the applicant is going to have the least favorable one among the different pairings.

There's an important concept of a "blocking pair", and the Gale-Shapley algorithm is trying to eliminate all blocking pairs, and you could say that pairings are stable when no blocking pairs exist. A blocking pair is a job applicant and employer who aren't matched together, but both prefer each other over their current match.

Suppose that after the algorithm is done with its work, Alice doesn't end up with a job offer from her top choice, Google. This must mean that Google never offered her a job because Alice was just too far down on their list, and Google made a deal with someone else they like better than Alice.

This line of reasoning makes sense, but also I would say that a lot of technologists who are interested in education realize that they have to design something that wouldn't just give the answers away because that's not the point of learning. That seems like it can be pretty difficult to accomplish with LLMs because I bet if a student keeps pestering them, they will give up the answer or give a clue that makes the problem way too obvious.

So usually the claims about replacing tutors like in this article come from a place where they usually give a caveat that maybe for highly motivated and ambitious students, they can figure out how to accelerate their learning with AI. But then that undermines the whole argument of transforming education if it wouldn't work with students who are average or below-average in their academic achievement.

I’ve pondered this too. I was in a group meeting with a consultant who is upfront with clients that he has started to use Claude heavily to speed up his output. There are probably a lot of clients who would still pay for his services because maybe they still appreciate his input or the relationship and don’t want to go through the pain of figuring out how to replace him with an LLM. It has been my experience that some teams would rather just subscribe to some software or platform even if there’s a free alternative.

I’m not allowed to enter legit chess tournaments where if I’m going be using my phone’s chess engine app to tell me the best move in every single position. Because that’s considered cheating by the chess players and tournament organizers and rightly so. But, there doesn’t seem to be an incentive to not do something similar in the world of work unless your LLM output is so bad or obviously inaccurate.

For sure! It was on Hacker News too that I learned not that long ago via this thread[1] how to tie my shoes in such a way that the knot won't come undone by itself. It has definitely saved some time with some shoes with laces that would always undo themselves on their own with my old method.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48397028

> A library with 100,000 visitors in a town of only 9,000 people

That reminds me that there is a library that I believe became a bit viral on social media and now it seems like it receives so many visitors to the surrounding area and it is still quiet, but it is funny because it seems way more crowded and there's way more movement that I remember in the past.

That's why with this post, I sort of wonder whether this is something that these towns really want to have. I am under the impression that in Japan, they generally want visitors, but then they probably end up with issues from people not knowing what to do and even behaving badly.

Well just as a regular user, I think it is pretty annoying because if I look up anything on Google while in Incognito Mode and hover over a search result, I can see that maybe the top result is maybe Wikipedia, or Instagram, or some other less-known website depending on what I'm searching for. Now, that's all very obfuscated because I don't actually know where I'm going to land for sure.

This reminds me of the time an AI was taught how to play a racing sim game (Gran Turismo if I remember correctly). The AI was able to race its car very well, but it took a lot of risks that a human player probably would not. A human player might be able to copy the approach the AI took, but they would probably crash.

Going back to chess, I think the situation is similar where you can’t expect an amateur player to get better by trying to play like a strong engine. I think even professional chess players mainly use engines to prepare or memorize variations that are counterintuitive for their opponent. In other words, getting into situations that look wild, but that part of one player’s preparation.

I’m not sure how it is in math, but in chess, it seems like top players can play just like engines when they are in “normal” positions, so that is where I get a bit confused as to where the direction of insight is coming from because it’s been my view that AI is able to make leaps that we would never think of taking and I’m not sure that anyone could actually learn how to do that on their own unless they were willing to keep failing over and over.

I consider myself a slow reader so I am interested in this pacing rule. Do you remember how the pacing was enforced? Were there like minute sandtimers or was it just kind of like a 30 minute timer and you either met the pace or didn't?

But it’s funny because this is a common childhood fantasy. Like maybe as a five year old, you get into a conflict with your parents and you imagine that your dad is actually not really your dad, but is actually some other outstanding member of the community. There was a similar plot point in the Joker (2019) movie too.

In one case, I could tell because the tone of the piece sounded exactly like the kind of stuff I would read after prompting an LLM and I had never heard of the author before, but I knew that they were like an intern or a new college grad and for some reason their piece was trying to persuade employees in a certain field about how they had to use AI itself. It just rubbed me the wrong way because if they did use AI, then they didn't even bother to rewrite the repetitive instances of "it's not X; it's y", and also "This isn't X".

That sounds like an interesting idea, but I think there's always weird edge cases. Like what if I pressed the keys to write an essay that was actually generated by an LLM. It would be hardware-attested, but I just transcribed most of my sentences from an LLM and maybe I even introduce my own typos or sentences because I am half-assing the transcription.

Yes, from what I understand, their heart rate is really high during competition, they are sweating a lot, and then their necks have to be strong.

I was curious about your point and it turns out that the gamer beat the F1 driver but they were both in a VUHL 05 which is a road-legal supercar. It seems like they were on a mountain road track too.

That's cool, but sim racing enthusiasts typically have gaming peripherals like steering wheels, pedals, and gear shifters that bring them closer to the experience of a real race car driver. For FPS games, they might be realistic in terms of detail, but how would most video games capture the physical stamina needed to carry around equipment, or maybe even aiming and maintaining the sights, equipment, etc.

I don’t have experience in Japan, but I think part of this must have to do with a double-standard in their office culture. Like maybe the women are socially required to wear pants or tights, or shave their leg hair. I get the feeling that gender norms in Japan are way more entrenched than in western countries.

I was thinking about this too because some years ago, there was a ranking article that’s now unavailable by the U.S. News and World Report (more famous for its college and university rankings) that had listed Russia as the strongest military.[1] A lot of people were questioning or poking fun at the ranking because of how Russia was struggling with Ukraine. Also, a lot of people seem to confuse analysis with endorsement or validation. But really it’s important to note that a lot of stuff also has to do with how information is very sensitive and can influence a lot of people. If mainstream media can be believed, the U.S. is also struggling a lot with Iran right now, but you might not realize that if you mainly used Trump’s Truth social posts as your only source of info.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20220313151414/https://www.usnew...

I have always hated infinite scroll because it becomes way more difficult to understand the index of a search result or piece of content. For example, if I know that each page of results contains 25 hits, then it is easy for me to see which one is the 25th hit, and then which one is the 26th one (first one on the next page).

I don't mind that the order of search results might be shifted around over time, and I understand that there is some profit motive to inserting tangentially relevant or sponsored hits, but I really wish that there were an easy way of knowing what index each result has.

This grew out of a funny little habit I sometimes have where I like to pick a random number and see what search hit that corresponds to. It becomes too tedious with infinite scroll.

Well LLMs also spout a lot of bullshit sometimes. I had a conversation with one just recently where it couldn’t do arithmetic too well with a challenge involving coins of a foreign currency. I think maybe it got tripped up because the convo got a bit too long or maybe it didn’t like that I was using the dollar sign.

You can also make LLMs agree with your own biases for some reason. For example, the people who use them to plan shady stuff.

Overdoing it is a real risk, I learned recently. If you work out too hard, you actually produce free radicals. The tricky thing is that some people can get used to higher heart rate so it doesn’t matter if they are working out hard consistently because they are used to it.

I have actually thought something similar but more in terms of divination. There’s some people who might compare LLMs to something like Tarot or automatic writing (think Ouija) because there’s a sense of randomness with LLMs too.

Both LLMs and divination methods also have the danger that someone could kind of drive themselves into madness with it. I don’t know too much about what how or why people can drive themselves crazy by chatting with an LLM, but with divination, I heard it can cause distress to ask the same questions about yourself many too frequently and also they ask about outcomes instead of methods.

There’s also UV exposure stickers. I haven’t used them, but the idea is that you put a small sticker on your skin, and apply sunscreen normally and over the sticker. Then when the sticker on you turns purple, you know that you have to reapply.

I have heard that some Asian or European sunscreens have some UV blockers that are much more stable than the ones that are mainly used in sunscreens available in the USA. So if you’re using one of these, the need to reapply isn’t as much of a concern. The only thing is that they aren’t FDA approved.

Some examples I have heard of are “ethylhexyl triazone”, “diethylamino hydroxybenzoyl hexyl benzoate”, and “bemotrizinol”.

EDIT: The last chemical on my list was actually approved by the FDA this month (June 2026).

Those drivers don't even need to have the window rolled down as far as I know. That's because most door auto glass lets UVA rays through and that's what causes premature aging. If you want to block those UVA rays, you would need to apply some kind of additional film to the side window.

Does anyone know whether UVA or UVB is more conducive to producing vitamin D naturally? A quick search shows me that it is mainly UVB that's responsible for that, but unfortunately, this is what gets blocked out by glass windows and sunscreen. On the other hand, UVA is what causes early aging.

So this is just an unfortunate situation because I don't think there's a way of just getting UVB into you in a safe way.

The chart in the original post is also throwing me off because it shows Barack Obama as a reference point in the libertarian and left quadrant. But if you look at the official Political Compass site, Obama was in the upper right quadrant (though closer to the origin than others).

The Political Compass person even explained it as something about how in the USA, the Democratic Party is seen as “left-wing” but it is actually “right-wing” if you analyze their positions and actions from the lens of a neutral observer who is able to consider the political environment of many different countries.

You can see for yourself: https://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2008

And: https://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2012

> Any for-profit initiative (ed-tech) will not be incentivized to improve learning outcomes. There's no money in it.

I think a point to keep in mind is that even if some team cracked the ed-tech challenge and created a software that was wildly effective at getting students to learn, it would actually still be very difficult to get public schools to actually adopt it, unless they have some incentives like it being heavily subsidized, or free. And even then, it might not be free forever. That's part of the reason why ed-tech (even when it is proven to work) doesn't really make money.

It might have worked in the very distant past. I learned that there was once a monitorial system of education where a single teacher might be in charge of many students, but only because the teacher would get a lot of help from skilled students who would teach what they had learned to other students in their charge.

I have some athletic shoes that come undone so easily and I think this knot will help me out a lot.