Yeah, but… I think if you’re bombing a child’s school because of bad intel, the deaths are on you either way. We’re not going to be like “oh, this war was necessary, which means it’s no biggie that you accidentally killed two hundred children because you didn’t do your DD”
The US attacked Iran because Israel was going to do so anyway. If they didn't attack, that missile wouldn't have killed 150 schoolgirls. Sure, the target was a mistake, but mistakes happen when you shoot thousands of missiles and drop thousands of bombs. If they had not attacked, the girls would be alive.
If Iran hadn't funded and supplied Hamas who then attacked and killed how many people (how many were little girls who were murdered and raped by Hamas?) then Israel wouldn't have had to bomb Iran.
You can go back and forth on who did what first but it ultimately accomplishes nothing in this scenario.
If Israel wants to bomb Iran, whatever, that's Israel's problem. The fact that we (the United States) continue to give unquestioning support to Israel is the problem. If Israel want's America's help, they should need to heel to America's interests, and I completely fail to see how fucking up the global oil trade benefits us.
I don't think it's quite that simple. Of course you know the isolationist point of view goes many directions. If Russia wants to bomb Ukraine, whatever, that's Ukraine and Russia's problem, &c. (I believe in engagement in both conflicts myself). Israel alone can't really stop Iran anyway besides their "mowing the grass" strategy but how long will that work?
But you have to think about the future state. What does an Iran that continues to:
- Build and supply drones and drone technology to Russia
- Build and purchase missiles and missile launchers
- Continue to pursue a nuclear weapons
- Continue to fund groups recognized as terrorist organizations by the United States, European Union, and others
.... look like?
Well, if they have 1,000 missiles today and that's giving us a problem (I'm not sure the true extent to which it is a problem really) and then they have 5,000 missiles tomorrow maybe sprinkle in some Chinese hypersonic missiles just to see if they can take out an American aircraft carrier or other sensitive military equipment, and now when Iran decides to close the Straight or tax the Gulf States or whatever other crazy idea they get in their heads we're facing a much, much bigger problem. It's like having a North Korea in the Middle East. We can't have that. We have seen that movie already and it does not turn out great.
And that's excluding nuclear weapons or an arms race in the Middle East. You can certainly see how easy it would be for the Gulf States to decide Iran is such a threat that they start loading up on missiles and maybe everyone decides they need a nuclear deterrent and now we've got maybe 2-3 countries including Iran with nuclear weapons and there's nothing we can do about it.
Folks like to paint this as an Israel problem, and yea they've done some bad stuff too but this isn't just an Israel problem nor is it just an America problem. It's just that unfortunately the United States is the one that yet again has to go be involved to try and deal with some chaos now to prevent an untenable situation later.
I think it's certainly worthwhile to debate various assumptions, capabilities, &c. but at the end of the day it's important to actually take a look at many aspects of this situation and to try peace together what's really driving this conflict. If your frame of reference is just "what are we doing there?" I'm afraid it puts you at a real disadvantage in terms of understanding the conflict and its repercussions.
I firmly believe a nuclear-armed Iran would be a net positive for world stability. It's not an ideal state of being, but with the existence of a nuclear armed Israel destabilizing the entire region, there needs to be a check against them. But that's besides the point, because by all accounts except on odd-numbered days the Whitehouse's, Iran was responsibly following the non-proliferation agreements that we had made with them under the Obama administration. Either way "Iran might make nukes" is bad reason to start a war.
If "Iran is aiding Russia against Ukraine" was a good reason to start this war, then we should be a lot less wishy-washy about our support of Ukraine themselves. The fact that we keep playing "will they won't they" with ongoing support to Ukraine is in no small part why that war is still ongoing.
And Israel is, absolutely, unequivocally, America's problem. They exist because we decided they should exist, we armed them to keep them existing, and we get involved in absolute quagmires in the Middle East every time that they do something stupid. Every time Israel does some fucked up shit, the UN goes "wow, we should acknowledge that was some fucked up shit", and the only country that consistently backs Israel is the United States.
I am not an isolationist. I fully recognize, and appreciate, the US's (potentially soon to be former) place as global hegemon. But we achieved that position by leveraging soft power, while maintaining the capability to absolute smite parties that won't play ball. And that worked. It worked great. It's why backing Ukraine was a great play: No American lives at risk, we pay a few bucks, Ukraine damages Russia, we remind our allies just how great it is to be under America's umbrella.
But Israel bombing Iran is not the same thing. Israel and the United States are the aggressors in this conflict, plain and simple. We had half-normal relations with Iran, then because Israel decided they weren't content being one of two regional powers, we decided to kick off another damn war in the Middle East.
> Either way "Iran might make nukes" is bad reason to start a war.
I think we disagree here, but that's because I believe in nuclear non-proliferation. More countries have them, more likely they are to be used. If Iran gets them, well maybe South Korea, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Brazil... the list goes on. Is that a better and safer world? I doubt it. Not only are arms races probably bad, they take up resources that could be used for making the lives of everyone better.
> If "Iran is aiding Russia against Ukraine" was a good reason to start this war, then we should be a lot less wishy-washy about our support of Ukraine themselves.
I think it's a contributing factor, but not the sole reason to start (or depending on your perspective, continue) a war here.
> And Israel is, absolutely, unequivocally, America's problem. They exist because we decided they should exist, we armed them to keep them existing, and we get involved in absolute quagmires in the Middle East every time that they do something stupid.
I don't follow this line of reasoning. Israel has existed long before the United States. Admittedly the modern state of Israel as we know it today was carved out in the last century, but the fault there lies primarily with European countries who created empires and then failed to maintain them. But you sort of seem to be justifying things like October 7th or other aggressive actions perpetrated by Iran and its proxies as though Israel existing is just somehow a problem. Last I checked Iran is its own country. What justification does it have to bomb Israel in any way?
> But Israel bombing Iran is not the same thing. Israel and the United States are the aggressors in this conflict, plain and simple. We had half-normal relations with Iran, then because Israel decided they weren't content being one of two regional powers, we decided to kick off another damn war in the Middle East.
Don't recall the US being in a state of war prior to October 7th. Iran overplayed their hand, Israel absolutely fucked up Hamas and Hezbollah with little effort, and then we found out Iran was pretty weak and so we did something about it before they accumulate so much military power that stopping them from effectively taking over the Middle East is untenable. I'm not sure your cause-effect reasoning here makes a lot of sense. We haven't had half-normal or normal relations with Iran for a long time - like 50 years.
> I am not an isolationist. I fully recognize, and appreciate, the US's (potentially soon to be former) place as global hegemon. But we achieved that position by leveraging soft power, while maintaining the capability to absolute smite parties that won't play ball. And that worked. It worked great.
It seems that you're cherry-picking here. The US attacking Iran can just be another case of smiting parties that won't play ball. Same with Iraq, or Vietnam, or Korea.
> It's why backing Ukraine was a great play: No American lives at risk, we pay a few bucks, Ukraine damages Russia, we remind our allies just how great it is to be under America's umbrella.
I generally agree and watching Russia's military be absolutely humiliated was exhilarating, but providing money alone isn't enough to win or stop that war it seems.
The US is still helping, but for some reason when it comes to Iran actually selling and supplying drones that kill Ukrainians it's all of a sudden well that's not a good reason to go to war, Iran isn't the aggressor, Trump is bad, how dare the US stop Venezuela from evading US and EU sanctions, blah blah blah. You're twisting yourself into circles trying to defend Iran for some reason when they're murdering their own population for protesting, helping Russia bomb Ukrainians, and starting wars and destabilizing Yemen, Lebanon, and more. Speaking of the UN, weren't they supposed to stop Hezbollah from indiscriminately launching rockets into Israel? Now Israel is there cleaning house and all of a sudden well that's Americans problem, Israel is America's problem, how can Israel do this? Who cares about the UN in today's world?
Are you unfamiliar with the October 7th attack? This alone proves the point, never mind we can get into details of the Middle East slave trade, general violence perpetrated by Hamas, and well, of course Hezbollah, Iran, &c.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched the largest-ever terrorist attack on Israeli soil. The Palestinian organisation, considered a terrorist group by the EU and the US, stormed through the security fence separating Gaza and Israel in the early morning, killing 1,189 people, including 815 civilians, wounding 7,500 and taking 251 hostage.
Not an embellishment, though you are right that the tragedy alone proves my point.
Anyway back to Iran - those are the bad guys.
Their regime killed by many estimates 30,000 of their own people for peacefully protesting already. They're conscripting child soldiers [1], attacking apartment buildings in neighboring Gulf States, and are hanging people as young as 19 for protesting [2]. They're actively helping Russia prosecute their war against Ukraine by selling drones and other technology. They're responsible for funding and inciting terrorist groups as recognized by the United States and European Union (Hezbollah, Hamas, and more) which have indiscriminately attacked civilians in many countries and continue to threaten international shipping even prior to American attacks on their military infrastructure. They're doing all of this while pursuing a nuclear weapon, which will of course be a catastrophe for nuclear non-proliferation as the Gulf States will certainly work to acquire their own, and they've been ramping up and deploying extensive missile capabilities so that they can force Gulf States to acquiesce to any of their demands, else they attack and shut down oil shipments. Tehran ran out of water because the money the regime has was spent on military forces and funding destabilizing proxy military groups for no good reason.
Ok I'm "spreading debunked Israeli lies" - they were only murdered, not raped and murdered. At least what the US did was an accident, unlike what Hamas did.
What point are you trying to make here? We're talking about the atrocities that Iran has committed and how it is responsible for so much death and destruction.
No, the free software movement wants that the source code of the software you use be available to you to modify it if you wish. AI does not necessarily do that.
AI makes the entirety of the software engineering profession available to you. All you have to do is ask the right way, and you can build in days what once took months or years.
Decompiling and re-engineering proprietary code has never been easier. You almost don't even need the source code anymore. The object code can be examined by your LLM, and binary patches applied.
Closed source is no longer the moat it was, and so keeping the source code to yourself is only going to hurt you as people pass you over for companies who realize this, and strive to make it easier for your LLM to figure their systems out.
> Decompiling and re-engineering proprietary code has never been easier. You almost don't even need the source code anymore. The object code can be examined by your LLM, and binary patches applied.
Jesus christ.
"The people who wanted everyone to have a home should be happy with the invention of the lockpick. You can just find a nice house and open the lock and move in. Ignore the lockpick company charging essentially whatver they want for lockpicks or how they got accesss to everyones keyfob, or the danger of someone breaking into your house"
That is basically your argument. Like AI is a copyright theft machine, with companies owning the entire stack and being able to take away at will, and comitting crimes like decompiling source code instead of clean room is not a selling point either...
The open source community wants people to upskill, people become tech literate, free solutions that grow organically out of people who care, features the community needs and wants and people having the freedom to modify that code to solve their own circumstances.
> That is basically your argument. Like AI is a copyright theft machine, with companies owning the entire stack and being able to take away at will, and comitting crimes like decompiling source code instead of clean room is not a selling point either...
Stop trying to make this into some abstract argument. It's not an argument anymore. It's already happened.
How one might choose to characterize the reality, is irrelevant. A vast (and growing) amount of source code is more open, for better or worse. Granted, this is to the chagrin of subgroups that had been pushing different strategies.
> Stop trying to make this into some abstract argument.
As you mentioned, it's not an abstract argument. It's statements of fact.
> A vast (and growing) amount of source code is more open...
No, not at all.
1) If you honestly believe that major tech companies will permit both copyright- and license-washing of their most important proprietary code simply because someone ran it through an LLM, you're quite the fool. If someone "trained" an LLM on -say- both Windows 11 and ReactOS, and then used that to produce "ReactDoze" while being honest about how it was produced, Microsoft would permanently nail them to the wall.
2) The LLMs that were trained on the entirety of The Internet are very, very much not open. If "Open"AI and Anthropic were making available the input data, the programs and procedures used to process that data, and all the other software, input data, and procedures required to reproduce their work, then one could reasonably entertain the claim that the system produced was open.
This is looking at the current situation through the old lens.
That ship has sailed. The revolution is happening. We live in a new reality now, one where we're still trying to figure out what rules should even be.
And there will be winners and losers, and copyright and patent law will be modified in an attempt to tame the chaos, with mixed results because of all of the powerful players on both ends.
You can live on the front of it for high risk/reward, or at the back for safety. But either way, you're going to exist in this new reality and you need to decide your risk appetite.
Your set of statements and their surrounding context reminds me very much of the mass grave scene in Kubrick's Vietnam War movie Full Metal Jacket: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=670Y3ehmU74>
> Stop trying to make this into some abstract argument. It's not an argument anymore. It's already happened.
yes and lockpicks also exist. Promotting the ability to break into homes when people are talking about the housing crisis is a crazy, short sighted and frankly embarrasing position to take.
And mischaracterising the people in the open source community as belonging to that ideology is insulting.
> A vast (and growing) amount of source code is more open
You are missusing the word open here, for accesible. Having an open house, and breaking into someone's home are not the same thing, even if the door ends up open either way.
> Granted, this is to the chagrin of subgroups that had been pushing different strategies.
Taking unethical shortcuts that ultimately lead to an even worse outcome is not a cause of chagrin, its a cause of deep and utter terror and embarrasment.
Wanting people to own their skills and tech stack and be informed, smart and engaged is a goal that "just ask the robot you dont control to break into a corporate codebase and copy it" is not even remotely close to helping get close to.
This argument commits the same fallacy as the argument against piracy; copying is not stealing, because the original still remains. A lockpicked and squatted house means someone else does not have that house, it's a zero sum game which information which is freely copyable does not align with.
That only works if you assume that the exclusive value is in the object and not the labour.
The reproduction of the object is essentially free in the internet, but the labour to produce it isn't.
If I spent 3 years making my codebase, and you copy paste the git repo, yeah your access to the information is not going to replace the original. But your labour cost is 0 and you can undercut the 3 years of expense, loans or debt I adquired to produce it.
Btw the FBI murdered Aaron Swartz for attempting to open access to research papers, Mark Zuckemberg admitted to stealing those ssame papers through libgen and showed off the results of Llama and his stock price went up.
I think the piracy argument falls apart when the class warfare and 2 tier justce system is openly weaponised towards open access
Labor doesn't have value inherently, it's about what is produced by said labor. These days even the labor to create something falls to zero via LLMs so I'm not sure the point is valid these days.
Almost nothing does. Value is largely subjective. You deciding it is irrelevant to you is as inherently worthless as the marxist ideal that labour is the maximal value of society.
The non subjective opinion is that there is a necesary amount of work/energy requiered to create things and that the created things can be consumed/used by others.
LLMs do not reduce labor to 0, the energy to power the GPU, the labor to create the gpus, the labor to train the models is all there, as well as all the labor to produce the original material the LLM is trained on. Even if the subjective experience of someone consuming the created thing is the same.
The Voodoo was fast but also expensive, and you needed an additional VGA card. I think it was around USD 300 back then, that's more than USD 600 today and you'll still need another card.
You are only thinking about people and creativity in the workplace. Creativity can be applied anywhere: cooking, a new route on your way to somewhere, read some random paragraphs in a book that spawns new thoughts, a new game with a child, optimize the way you paint the walls on your house, choose the plants in your garden (and how you'll water them), do a doodle, try or buy a new outfit, typing this paragraph in response to your message (kinda LLM-y maybe).
Lego was always expensive, you can compare prices adjusted for inflation. For example, the 1979 Galaxy Explorer <https://brickset.com/sets/497-1> was around $32, that's $144 today. The reimagined set from 2023 <https://brickset.com/sets/10497-1> was sold at $99, $106 today. Not only it is cheaper, but much larger and with many more pieces.
Yes, they have kept up with inflation, and that is the problem. Manufactured goods like Lego bricks should fall in price through innovation in processes, scale, etc. What does raise higher than the average inflation should be be labor-intensive products/services. In other words, it feels much stranger today how expensive Legos are compared to 47 years ago.
Lego is branding, curation and quality bar, though. They're the Apple of bricks (weird sentence).
There's tons of lego-knockoffs and of not even such lesser quality that the difference can be perceived by casual inspection. The set-to-set quality bar is really where it is, especially among their set lines not targeted at children or low-end of market.
But none of those sets have any kind of staying power. There's Expert/Creator/Modular sets from 20 years ago that sell for $500-1000 _opened and pre-built/re-disassembled_. That's all brand power.
So they're less about $/brick (though i know people scrutinize it) and more about price point and brand. Phrased differently, having your brick company race to the bottom sounds like a losing strategy.
Yeah I don't know what this person is on about. Lego is obviously premium and ... charges premium prices because ... they're a business. People (consumers) who want premium products ... pay the premium.
I would be much more frustrated if they became cheaper and reduced the quality of the product.
There is a prevalent view of economy that insists businesses sell their products at the minimum price they can still make a profit at (but not lower or you are dumping.) A Marxist view of economy, if I must.
Whenever I meet one of these people, I ask if they are willing to negotiate a wage reduction with his HR. My logic is simple. If you think it is wrong for a business to sell a product at the maximum price they can demonstrably get away with like Lego does, then why is it right for you, a professional worker selling your labor, to sell your labor at a price higher than what is necessary for subsistence?
> There is a prevalent view of economy that insists businesses sell their products at the minimum price they can still make a profit at [...] A Marxist view of economy, if I must.
That's actually how competition is supposed to work in capitalism. If you sell your products at much higher than the minimum price, someone else can make a profit by selling slightly cheaper and taking over your market share.
That's contingent on the competition offering a similar experience and quality, at a smaller price point. As a parent comment pointed out, no LEGO knockoff has been able to provide the same experience as LEGO.
I think what the commenter is getting at is that it's not even about competition. People get mad when companies charge more than is necessary to make what they deem a reasonable profit.
Of course, as you mention, in capitalism, a competitor is free to go in and undercut the leading brand, but they have to be able to sell why they're better AND cheaper.
Interestingly that's one of the Marxist critiques. The market simply is not efficient enough to work fully. The effort to get Lego2 off the ground is simply too high and Lego gets an effective monopoly in their market segment (premium blocks).
If Lego was nationalized then the excess earnings that go into the owners' pockets as dividends or asset value would be realized by the people. But that of course leads to different inefficiencies (investors don't invest, etc...).
imo it's not just that other brands are of similar quality but often of way higher quality than lego. you get so much more for less money from other brands, while lego sets are becoming kind of a joke. using stickers everywhere and randomly colored bricks on the internal sides of the set
Prices are constrained by demand moreso than by cost of production. Lego pieces are expensive because they can be, they still sell, and this is largely due to the quality. As long as the quality moat persists, they can charge as much as people will pay, and--good for them!
That you personally would prefer lower prices does not mean they "should" be lower. Those lower costs of production, to Lego company, "should" mean higher profits, not lower prices, and again--good for them!
The risk Lego faces is that they don't actually have a quality moat any longer. You can get non-lego sets with no stickers, plenty of prints, LED lighting, at a cheaper price, and with the exact same piece quality. I purchased this set: https://www.lumibricks.com/collections/steampunk-world/produ... over Christmas, and I paid $105 because it was on sale. The pieces were indistinguishable from Lego in quality, and the lights and lack of stickers was a quality increase from what Lego offers.
What moat Lego has is: brand recognition and licenses. Which aren't nothing, but don't offer much protection.
Not disagreeing with you, but at least when I hear "lego knockoff" I think of the shitty ones, because I've never seen a Lego knockoff that wasn't shitty.
Lumibricks seems like a promising brand, but I've never heard of them, possibly because they don't spend as much on marketing as lego. And if they did spend more in order to compete with Lego, they might need to increase price!
> but I've never heard of them, possibly because they don't spend as much on marketing as lego
It’s a newer brand—they changed their name to it some time last year. But they seemed to spend a lot on advertising last Christmas—at least on YouTube, it seemed like tons of reviewers were talking about their sets. That’s how I found out about them, at any rate. And I’ll say—the one I got came together nicely, and looks great. The tons of lights are just, really neat.
> when I hear "lego knockoff" I think of the shitty ones, because I've never seen a Lego knockoff that wasn't shitty.
The cheap-o ones you get like at the dollar store, absolutely. But Chinese manufacturers have been making good quality knockoffs for a while. A decade at least? I bought my first knock-off technic set around 10 years ago, and it was 90% the quality of Lego at 25% the price. But the quality has only gotten better since, and is now totally on par with Lego. Admittedly, the price has gone up, too.
Interesting. Gotta check those out! Not that my family needs more LEGO... The remains of our Millennium Falcon after my nieces came over glare at me everytime I look at a new LEGO set.
I don't want to sound like a shill, because I don't know them at all, and I still spend enough money on actual Lego. But I am really happy with it. Pieces were great, quality was great, I love the lights, I hate Lego's stickers. And the piece count was 2x or 2.5x what I'd get from Lego at the same price. And I love steampunk, and Lego doesn't have a steampunk line. I'll absolutely buy more from them, so (for me at least) their big Youtuber push last year worked.
No but I appreciate your recommendation. I find that product recommendation on HN tend to be higher quality and/or more relevant to me than generic lists (I added so many books and games to my backlog from HN comments because many HNers have really good taste).
Maybe I'm saying the quiet part out loud. I hope no one tries to advertise on HN after this.
A reputation moat is still a moat. It seems to me that Lego prices will drop as soon as they are forced to by competition, and not before, and this is fine.
It is, absolutely, but it’s a lot more shallow a moat than having a product quality moat.
> Lego prices will drop as soon as they are forced to by competition, and not before, and this is fine.
I agree, they’ll survive quite well. But the large profit margin they’ve grown accustomed to might disappear, and that probably doesn’t bode well for their management.
And heck, maybe they’ll stop shipping stickers on expensive sets, too. That would be nice.
I've seen enough reviews of recent Lego sets to doubt this. Sets with a brick or two where the color is off, sets where the final model falls apart if you look at it wrong, and when there's fan designed alternatives which are more solid and better looking it's clear it wasn't a physical limitation.
Not to mention sets that indeed just feel like a ripoff, like the pyramid of giza which costs $130 and is actually just half of a pyramid, but the backside of the model has slots that let you connect it with another half if you buy two of them. And they even admit in the marketing it's an incomplete product with "Complete the pyramid - This model comes with clear instructions and can be connected to a second model (sold separately) to create a full pyramid", of course only visible after scrolling or looking at more product pictures.
They are. I should have added that Lego’s designers are a bit better still. You can get botanical sets from a lot of manufacturers, but the Lego ones are just nicer.
Anything that has only kept up with inflation over the last 50 years is cheaper today than it was 50 years ago relative to people's incomes, which is the relevant definition of "cheaper".
Not sure exactly how Lego prices have evolved but, as others have said, Lego is a brand and is unique. Their sale prices have little to do with their costs.
For most people anything that has only kept up with inflation over the last 50 years is more expense today than it was 50 years ago because wages have stagnated while prices have soared.
For instance, the median household income in the United States in 1976 was $12,686. That's $72,857.55 today based on inflation (Google/Census Bureau Data + online inflation calculator).
However, Google's AI overview says "As of early 2026, the median household income in the United States is estimated to be approximately $84,000."
So the the median household income in the US today is about $11,000 ahead of inflation since 1976. People in the US are richer now that they were then.
I remember reading in a personal finance book, it's not about what you earn, it's about what you keep. I think the concept applies here too, even if the context is slightly different.
Ok, but, what about median household size? Shouldn't we calculate the "richness" based not on how much each household makes but how much each member of a household gets from it? My guess is that households are smaller these days, but don't know.
I'd be curious to know if in '76, most households were dual income or single. My intuition is that many families could afford to have a parent stay at home with the kids back then.
Additionally, let's not ignore the fact that housing appears to have gotten more expensive disproportionately to income rising. And if two parents are working they often have to pay $1000+ for daycare
Most replies don't like my comment because it hurts the narrative that people want to believe even after I quoted hard data. Especially since the 70s in the US were rife with economic and social issues. Very interesting how the mind works.
I wouldn't say people didn't like your comment. You don't seem to have been downvoted as far as I can tell. You did cite hard data but multiple other commenters explained why the data you provided doesn't tell the whole story. Just because people disagree with you doesn't mean they don't like your comment. They're just trying to understand more.
It has almost 4 times the number of pieces, but is only about 50% longer and wider - there's just way more smaller pieces. Price per piece is very misleading when comparing older and newer sets. The newer ones have more details, look slicker, but have a lot less "meat". Which is not that great for creative play.
I bought a set recently which was definitely padding its piece counts. The interior structure of a solid shape was constructed out of dozens of small 1x2s and could easily have been a handful of much larger pieces with no downside. I didn't consider the "more pieces = more perceived value" logic until this comment.
For a while the complaint was that Lego was making too many big, specialized pieces, so I'm amused that the current complaint seems to be that they're using too many small generic ones.
I had a weird build recently with the Luxo Jr model. There are a couple of cavities in the model that are partially filled in with very small parts. These parts don't connect in a way that makes then structural. I'm still puzzled why these parts are there.
I always charitably assumed that they designed models to utilize surplus pieces for the internal structures, pieces that might be hard to use elsewhere.
They may do that (designers have a "part budget" they can spend in various ways) but the real reason for weird colors inside models is to make it easier to build; especially since many of the models consist entirely of various shades of grey and black.
Various piece size also makes it easier to see if you got the wrong piece.
Definitely agree on the reduced usefulness for creative play. My kids got a lot of Lego sets as gifts when they were younger. Which is great, I love them playing with Legos. But once they're done with the instructions that's just kinda it. A Star Wars or Frozen or Minecraft themed kit ends up being all weird one-off specialty pieces. They are necessary to make an extremely detailed replica of the Millenium Falcon. But they have no place if you just want to grab a handful of bricks and start building whatever your imagination comes up with. We have a tub full of thousands of pieces and it never gets used. I think it's a bummer that they've pivoted to pushing these intricate $120 kits to adults rather than designs featuring more reusable components. You need to go out of your way to buy tranches of generic bricks if you want to have free play.
The Creator 3-in-1 sets are basically what you're looking for, they just don't get advertised much. A lot of them are more generified and rebuildable, sometimes even more refined versions of more expensive sets or parts of more expensive sets. Maybe the most obvious are the 3-in-1 dragon and dinosaur sets, which to me feel obviously like more generic reworks of D&D and Jurassic Park builds respectively, and have a lot more in the way of generic tiles and bricks than the licensed sets they're derived from.
A 50% increase in dimensions doesn't directly transform in a 50% increase in volume.
>The newer ones have more details, look slicker, but have a lot less "meat"
I presume that the 2022 model has as target audience nostalgic adults, but otherwise I agree, the new sets seem far more fragile then the ones released a decade ago. I think this is due to a recent focus towards adults from LEGO.
It's the other way around - because pieces cost roughly based on their size (amount of material) modern Lego sets are "denser" and heavier on average than similar sized sets of the past, because as piece count (and detail) goes up, piece size has been going down.
The discussion is about price, not cost. Lego is keeping the price per piece somewhat stable because they know people look at that, but as pieces get smaller (and thus cost less to make), their margins go up, and sets get smaller for the same price.
I have the re-release secondhand unopened and I think I paid about that much, so even in a collector's market, not terrible at all. An expensive toy to be sure but a deeply satisfying experience if you like that kind of thing.
Buying buckets of used bricks is pretty cheap, too. I bought an adult's old lifetime collection for $30 CAD. My 2 year old son and I are still sorting them.
Sorting Lego is such a pain in the ass. I have like a huge stash from when I was a kid. Back then we just had it all in a few tubs and dug to find a part. But somehow now I feel I must sort them… but the “right way” is ill defined and kind of sucks the joy out of playing (especially disassembling)
And there is no “right way” that I’ve even found. Sort by color and now the little pieces fall to the bottom and are hard to dig for. The best I can see is part type and size… maybe… even then it sucks out the fun. I want to build cool shit with my daughter not spend every moment of Lego time sorting. There is no joy in sorting…
Maybe I just revert back to the “big tub” approach.
I dunno. Thanks for listening to my TED talk I guess.
Yeah go for it! I'll add a comment though, now we are working on automated shifting bins with stacks of different size grids to filter the littles to the bottom and still easily pick up the top bigs to see them. There was been a discussion (by my children) about something involving a Lego vacuum they saw online.
Why sort by color if human eyes (unless colorblind) are great at recognizing different colors? Back when I was a kid, I used the big tub approach (with the Spyrius base octant as my shovel).
Build with what pieces you can find, rather than plan the perfect structure ahead. Improvising keeps the creativity going! Wheres fun if sorting legos sucks all the Joy from it
> Build with what pieces you can find, rather than plan the perfect structure ahead. Improvising keeps the creativity going!
That's a valid perspective. It can be a lot of fun to dig through the bricks and build freely, letting things take shape.
But it's also valid to have a design phase, where designs are crafted (perhaps even very precisely) and to enjoy that part -- perhaps even using some manner of LEGO-oriented CAD. (Or SolidWorks; I won't judge.)
And then: It's OK to find pleasure in following a plan to build a tangible thing in reality. This concept is strongly reinforced by the fact that LEGO sets come with instructions that are organized into simple steps.
One of the joys of LEGO is that it's very inclusively all fine.
I feel like I’ve seen essentially this same comment every time a Lego thread comes up but there doesn’t seem to be unanimous agreement on which brick toys are better. Sure, some people have good experiences with brand X but others will say they’ve had bad luck with the construction. Someone else will talk up Brand Y and someone else will point out how terrible the instructions are. Are there any brands that actually do consistently deliver a Lego-quality experience without the Lego price?
I guess it depends on what a "Lego-quality experience" means to you.
I grew up with the mid 80s to mid 90s kits, mostly castles and pirate ships, a few space sets. I think it's a very different experience compared to the nightmares I read about building the Mould King Eclipse-class Star Destroyer ( https://www.reddit.com/r/lepin/comments/1pdfx5y/mould_king_e... ). The concept of "bad luck with construction" is foreign to me, because most of the kits I remember building as a child were comparatively simple.
I'm working on this house with my 5yo daughter now: ( https://ja.aliexpress.com/item/1005006068361257.html ). Costs ~$20, we work on it about 30-45 minutes several times a week, so it takes months to finish. If she tears it apart 6 months from now to build something from her imagination, mission accomplished.
I hear people rave about this Cyberpunk-style kit, maybe this is closer to what you expect? https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/_a_a4b2bvISsP6pyjkSxLw (Chinese language review) I plan to buy it at some point....for myself, not for my kids!
If you want to spend some time looking at critiques from someone with experience, I find JANG's Youtube reviews of both LEGO and non-LEGO brick toys to be well-balanced. We have differing opinions, but he has decent rationales for most of his opinions.
Lumibricks is fantastic, built in lighting (or rather you build it in as part of the model) and as someone who has always turned their nose up at off brand Lego, the parts are definitely 99% of the way there. Instructions the same quality, if not better, than Lego as well - all for about the third of the price.
Minifigs are terrible but I have hundreds of those spare anyway!
Lego is some kind of cultural icon now, and many people want to participate. That's why they have tons of sets aimed at adults over many themes, like plastic flowers, formula 1 helmets, old video game consoles.
Many of them are a really bad and expensive purchase if you only care about the theme itself, like the latest Death Star (or almost any Lego Star Wars set). You can usually buy a similar and cheaper non-lego model. Or the Titanic set too.
I've since bought her a 3-floor hospital, a firehouse, a pink villa with pool, and about 2 dozen doctor and engineer minifigs for the same ~$120 outlay. Only disappointment is the legs on the Chinese minifigs, they are difficult to seat properly on studs because the legs are at a slight angle (almost like manspreading).
I have to stop myself from going on a spending spree on AliExpress, I might order an entire Age of Sail LEGO navy.
I don’t know enough about plastics, and if it’s ABS it’s ABS, but how is it dyed? Point is I don’t know, so I buy from a company that has a reputation and would be held accountable, and would never buy kids toys from a fly by night business with no reason to care how carcinogenic their product ends up being
Lego sets aimed at children are still good! They work as standalone toys, and can also be reassembled, modified and combined. Very few toys are like this.
Adults collect them, true, but there are whole lines dedicated to them.
The "Creator" sets in particular I feel harken the most to the company's roots. They usually have a few different builds per set and include all sorts of unique pieces for making your own creations. They also usually have very fun designs.
I recently built the NES and Game Boy sets and thought both of those were really great. The NES is probably not priced for most people (we try to stay under 10¢ a brick), but the level of detail, whimsy, and mechanics are all really well done. There are hidden scenes and Easter eggs built into the system that are revealed as you build rather than highlighted as features on the box. I was genuinely surprised and had a lot of fun sharing that with my family as we realized what was coming together.
The Game Boy was much more affordable. Less whimsical, but brought back memories of taking apart electronics and marveling at what these circuit boards and components could possibly be doing.
The Game Boy is apparently one of the best sets of 2025, cleverly built and a nice display item. Still, it is for adults, kids have tons of other sets to choose from.
I often look at these and think they’d be fun for me to display, then think I’d prefer an actual Game Boy disassembled as a piece of wall art [0]. This sort of stuff is just so cool in my opinion.
Edit: now that I look on EBay building my own display like that would probably cost maybe $60 vs $189? Broken Game Boys are $40 on eBay, so maybe a project I could do for fun!
My kids got a Minecraft set and just use the Warden as a toy and build with all the other bricks and a mat to put the poor lego characters in bad situations where they’ve woken the Warden up (he’s a strong enemy in Minecraft)
The assertion was "if you really know how to prompt, give feedback, do small corrections and fix LLM errors, then everything works fine".
It is impossible to prove or disprove because if everything DOES NOT work fine you can always say that the prompts were bad, the agent was not configured correctly, the model was old, etc. And if it DOES work, then all of the previous was done correctly, but without any decent definition of what correct means.
>And if it DOES work, then all of the previous was done correctly, but without any decent definition of what correct means.
If a program works, it means it's correct. If we know it's correct, it means we have a definition of what correct means otherwise how can we classify anything as "correct" or "incorrect". Then we can look at the prompts and see what was done in those prompts and those would be a "correct" way of prompting the LLM.
You don’t know it works. That you so glibly speak about products working is proof that your engineering judgment is impaired. You can’t infer the exact contents of a black box merely by looking at outside behavior.
The fundamental fallacy you are exhibiting here is similar to saying that rolling a six sided die and getting a “6” means that you will always get a 6 any time you roll it. And that if you get a 6 and wanted a 6, you must have therefore rolled those dice “correctly” and had you not gotten a 6 that would have meant you rolled them “wrong.”
>You don’t know it works. That you so glibly speak about products working is proof that your engineering judgment is impaired. You can’t infer the exact contents of a black box merely by looking at outside behavior.
I don't know the exact internals of a car. But I can infer my car works by driving it.
>The fundamental fallacy you are exhibiting here is similar to saying that rolling a six sided die and getting a “6” means that you will always get a 6 any time you roll it. And that if you get a 6 and wanted a 6, you must have therefore rolled those dice “correctly” and had you not gotten a 6 that would have meant you rolled them “wrong.”
Bro we rolled that dice MULTIPLE times. It's not a one time thing. And the "rolling" of the die is done with a CHAIN of MULTIPLE qureries strung together. This is not one roll. It's multitudes of data points. Yes results can be inconsistent from a technical standpoint, but the general result converges on a singular trend.
We know that much is true: a statistic and that is at most all we can say about reality as we know it as science formalized can only give a statistic as an answer.
"I don't know the exact internals of a car. But I can infer my car works by driving it."
No, you can't infer that it "works." Only that it CAN work. The car may be poisoning you with carbon monoxide. Your rear brakes may have become disconnected (happened to me). The antilock braking system may have a faulty sensor that only fails at very low speed, leading to them engaging when making a normal stop, but also preventing the mechanic from seeing the problem, because he didn't listen to your bug report and instead tried to repro the effect with high speed panic stops (also happened to me).
If I use a product and have a good experience, I can conclude that SOMETHING must be going well, but not that EVERYTHING is going well.
>No, you can't infer that it "works." Only that it CAN work. The car may be poisoning you with carbon monoxide. Your rear brakes may have become disconnected (happened to me). The antilock braking system may have a faulty sensor that only fails at very low speed, leading to them engaging when making a normal stop, but also preventing the mechanic from seeing the problem, because he didn't listen to your bug report and instead tried to repro the effect with high speed panic stops (also happened to me).
This is called pedantitic reasoning. You look like a drowning person trying to stay afloat.
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